The Eastern Colonnade

The colonnade’s eastern end: the position from which the Watching liturgy is conducted, where Silvicola or a designated senior priest stands at dawn and dusk and watches the forest. At dusk in the right atmospheric conditions, the anomalous light extends the liturgy beyond its standard forty minutes. The colonnade’s twelve columns are spaced to frame the treeline’s horizon in specific sections, a spacing that is not the standard College colonnade design. The spacing was determined by a third-century priest whose name is in the shrine archive’s founding records and who, according to those records, spent two years at the treeline’s edge before returning to the city to design the colonnade. The records do not specify what the two years at the treeline’s edge involved.