Proving Tree

Archivist's Excerpt from: Curious Landscapes & Their Quite Commonplace Explanations, Vol. III, CVI 42.4

The Proving Tree stands in Jalóheim within The Expanse, or at least it did. The cite of a rather ... harsh testing ritual on the part of those who follow Jalos Zealotry, it is where criminals and heretics undergo the Proving Rite.

It is called the Proving "Tree" because that is the best descriptive shape one can make of the object. Made of some gold-coloured metal (no, not actually gold), it rises straight out of a simple platform in the The Rift before branching into several other "tines" like a great three-dimensional cosmic fork. The tines are known to rotate around the "trunk" from time to time, especially at times of heavy iterations of the great Storms of the Expanse.

In terms of the Galó who settled in The Rift, it is the site of their judicial Proving Rite, so called because the guilty is effectively considered guilty, and must "prove" their innocence through the almost medieval ordeal of averting being slain by their god, Ilos, by the Heavenly Spear, being the first known culture to use weather to determine criminal sentencing.