Stories
Reports, ledgers, sagas and journals. Five things that happened, or were written down as though they had.
Nothing here is neutral. Every account was written by someone with a stake in being believed.
They are filed together because they share a defect: each one was kept correctly, by a competent person, in the proper form, and none of the people who read them at the time thought anything was wrong.
The Third Tide
Set down for readers by Meriel Cobb, schoolmistress at Fairwater
Vuskar lost a hundred and forty one ships sailing west, and mourned every one of them. This is the story of the girl who had never seen snow, the keeper who counted the dead, and the night Krowth found out.
Harken's Landing
A debt, a bay, and a chart that has never once been corrected
Sir Ambrose Harken took the first Aethrassian charter to Meridia and named nothing. A clerk in Vaurmont named it for him, off the margin of a map he drew wrong on purpose, and two hundred years of captains have been sailing around a shoal that is not there.
The Record at Eerie Peak
An assessor's report, Durrenhold archive, filed and not acted upon
A hold went quiet. The dwarf sent to find out why discovered that nothing had gone wrong with the dwarves, and everything had gone wrong with the wall.
The Ninth Verse of the Hafnvar
A harbour tally from Fairwater, kept nineteen years, and the saga it kept failing to disagree with
A Vuskan longship has sailed the northern run for two hundred years and has never once come home short a man. A clerk who counted them for a living worked out why, and then he stopped counting.
The Worked Place
From the journal of Brother Anselm Vey, missionary of the Sacred Light, recovered from his effects
A missionary spent a season arguing theology with orcs who would not argue back. So they walked him six days into the back country and showed him the only surviving record of what was done to them.
The Garden at Vellisch
Ninety-one years of colonial dispatches, in which nothing whatsoever occurs
A Lyaudite river colony was never attacked, never besieged, never betrayed and never lost. It simply stopped being Lyaudite, and no clerk in Grismere has ever been able to say on what day.
The Yield at Bruchen Vale
A harvest ledger from an Aethrassian charter colony, complete, legible, and never once falsified
The Goetern asked one thing of the settlers who took the lower vale: leave the upper terrace unbroken. Nine years later the terrace was the most productive forty acres in the colonial system, and a clerk had worked out the exchange rate.
The Rule of Grenave
Seven articles, eleven months, sixty one burned, one hundred and fifty eight souls saved, and no cult
An Aethrassian colony was starving and its governor needed the town looking somewhere else for a year. A Confessor came, found a heresy nobody had reported, and destroyed it so thoroughly that no trace of it has ever been discovered. The Order promoted him and gave him the schools.