The World As It Was

Every kaer carried a copy of the Book of Tomorrow, a thick and much-handled volume written by the dwarfs of Throal. It held the history of the province, the legends of the old heroes, a guide to the Throalic tongue and its alphabet, instructions in the common crafts, and, near the end, a plain account of how to know when the Scourge was over and how to reclaim the surface. In Illumar it was read aloud at Name-day feasts and on the anniversary of the sealing. Children recited from it before they could read.

Everything in this account comes from that book, from Illumar's own archives, and from the memories of the last people to walk under the open sky and tell their children about it. It is the world as it was, as far as anyone could say, on the day the doors closed.

It thins with distance. The valley around Illumar is remembered street by street. The country beyond it is remembered by road and rumor. The far provinces are remembered only as names. Hold it loosely. Nothing in it has been checked for four hundred years.

The Shape of the Land

The people of Illumar called the whole country Barsaive, and by their reckoning it ended where the land stopped being worth the walk. In the north stood Wyrm Wood, the ancient forest of the elves. In the south lay Death's Sea, a sea of fire that glowed on the horizon on clear nights and was said to hold the god Death himself, drowned and furious. In the east were the salt waters of the Aras Sea, where the ships came in. In the west lay the lands beyond Jerris, and past them the roads that led out of the province altogether. Inside those edges lay more country than anyone had ever walked, and it took weeks to cross on horseback.

It was a kind land. Winters were wet and cool, summers warm and close, and the highlands stayed dry and sharp the year around. Grasslands rolled into jungle, jungle climbed into plateau, plateau broke into mountains. The Serpent River was the spine of it. It came down from the northwest, ran past the edge of Wyrm Wood, cut between two ranges, and emptied into the mist near Death's Sea. Its greatest tributary was the Coil, which watered the best farmland anyone knew. Every road that mattered met one river or the other, and every fortune that mattered was built on their banks.

Beyond the river valleys, the land went quiet. A traveler could walk a week between lit windows.

The Empire

Over all of it, in those last open years, stood Thera.

Thera was not a country. It was a city that floated, an island raised on magic above the Selestrean Sea, a nexus of power so dense that its sages said the whole world's magic bent toward it. From there the Theran Empire ruled lands across the sea, and for the better part of six hundred years it had ruled Barsaive as a province. The old stories remembered when it had not. There were stories of troll clans who raided orichalcum shipments, of nations that fought each other over the lodes, of a morning when a floating fortress a thousand feet across drifted out of the southwest toward the Twilight Peaks and ended the Orichalcum Wars in a single hour. The trolls surrendered. Their leaders were taken home in chains. A hundred days later the Empire proclaimed Barsaive a Theran province.

The grip was real but not always heavy. Thera ruled through an Overlord, who sat in the capital, and kept a standing garrison at Vivane in the south, behind the great fortress of Sky Point. Its navy ruled the skies. It did not much care who governed the villages as long as the tribute arrived: orichalcum, silver, and labor. Thera wanted the lodes and the trade. It was slow to interfere with anything else.

It also kept a secret, and the secret was the reason Illumar existed.

The Rites

Long before Illumar was founded, a scholar named Kearos Navarim studied the old ruins of the world and made a prediction that most people refused to believe. The magic in the world rose and fell like a tide. At the top of the tide, the barrier between this world and the deep dark of astral space wore thin, and things came through. He called them Horrors. He said they would come in about eight hundred years. He died before anyone took him seriously.

Thera did. Its sages wrote the Rites of Protection and Passage, and its School of Shadows spent generations learning how to build shelters that Horrors could not enter: kaers dug deep into the earth and inscribed with wards, citadels raised on stone and runes, cities capped by domes of true earth or true air or true fire. Thera guarded that knowledge jealously. Only the Empire's subjects received the wards, and only in return for tribute. The price rose as the years went by. Towns that could not afford it sold themselves into Theran slavery for the chance that their grandchildren might live. Some kingdoms bankrupted themselves trying to build shelters and collapsed. In the end, those who could build a kaer built one, and those who could not, did not.

Illumar was built. That was the whole of the answer, and everything that followed grew from it.

The Capital

There is a blank in Illumar's records, and everyone who has studied it finds it unsettling.

The archives are clear that the province had a capital. The Overlord ruled from it. The tribute went there. Governors, scribes, and merchants came and went. The maps of the northeast show a mark where a great city stood, and every document says so. But no one in Illumar can say what the city was called. The name is not in the ledgers. The clerks wrote "the capital" and left a space. Old people frown and try to recall it, and cannot. Some say they never knew it. Some say the harder they reach for it, the more the thought slides out of their grasp, like a word lost on the tip of the tongue.

Nobody has an explanation. It is the first of the strange gaps, and Illumar has stopped asking about it.

The Kingdom of Throal

In the mountains of the north, the dwarfs of Throal governed in the Empire's name, and they were better at it than the Empire deserved.

Throal had begun as a trade kingdom and grown into the province's real administration. When Thera made Barsaive its province, the Overlord had asked the dwarfs to run it, because they knew how, and the dwarfs agreed, because the alternative was Theran soldiers. They mediated, they softened, and they kept the peace. They also did something nobody had planned. Dwarf merchants carried the Throalic tongue into every market, and it became the common language of the province. Anyone who could haggle spoke it. Everyone's grandmother learned a few words.

In the last decades, the dwarfs saw what Thera had not. A kaer could keep people alive for six hundred years, but it could not keep them civilized. A people sealed in the dark for centuries might forget how to read, how to farm, how to be neighbors. So the dwarfs wrote the Book of Tomorrow and sent a copy to every kaer they could reach. They dug their own refuge, the Halls of Throal, under the great mountain, and in the last open years they took in refugees by the thousand. Then they sealed their gates.

That was the last Illumar heard of them.

The Old Nations

Barsaive had been full of nations once, and most of them had been losing for a long time.

• Landis was a human kingdom, and it still stood. It had fought a long war with Cara Fahd over territory rich in orichalcum and the other true elements, and the war had cost it dearly.
• Cara Fahd was the nation of the orks, and it was already gone. It had collapsed in the same wars, long before the Scourge, when a lava field erupted in the middle of a battle with Landis. The old ork lands were mostly empty. Orks lived as tribes across the province, and the old kingdom was a story.
• Ustrect was a kingdom that had been drawn into the same quarrel.
• Scytha was a dwarf kingdom that had fought the elves of Wyrm Wood.
• Shosara was a distant trading kingdom whose ships the Crystal Raiders had preyed on in the days of the Orichalcum Wars.
• Wyrm Wood was the ancient seat of the Elven Court, ruled by Queen Alachia. Her people were old and proud and sure of themselves. In the last years, many families left the Court, and no one could say whether they were exiled or simply fled. The queen built a great kaer of living wood and trusted that the wayward would return when the Scourge was over.

Every one of these had been alive when the doors closed. Illumar does not know which survived.

Cities of the Province

A few places were known well enough to be worth naming.

Vivane and Sky Point in the south were Theran strongholds. Vivane had been taken by the Empire early, and the fortress of Sky Point was raised above it to hold the garrison. Every child knew the stories about Sky Point. It was where the soldiers slept and where the airships docked.

Kratas, in the south, was a Theran-held city, and it sat under a Theran governor like most of the province.

Travar, in the south, was one of the oldest cities in the province, white-walled and tall, its people merchants before anything else. It was Chorrolis's city, and the Passion was said to walk its markets. Its people traded with anyone who paid.

Jerris, in the west, was a wealthy gateway city. Caravans and airships passed through it on the way to the lands beyond, and its yards built airships, and its merchants bought and sold much of what the western roads carried.

The river itself was a country of its own. The t'skrang trade houses, the aropagoi, ran the Serpent and the Coil with a swagger that other peoples found equal parts charming and exhausting. Their riverboats moved on a magic nobody had ever explained. They sailed from end to end and carried the news, the cargo, and the gossip of the province with them.

In the mountains, the Crystal Raiders, the troll clans of the Twilight Peaks and the ranges around them, still kept their old code of honor. They had been beaten at Sky Point. They had not forgotten, and neither had their grandchildren.

The Peoples

Eight kinds of Namegiver shared the land: dwarfs, elves, humans, obsidimen, orks, trolls, t'skrang, and windlings. The old proverb said it plainly: the trolls raid the dwarfs, the dwarfs dislike the elves, the elves have no patience with humans, the humans war with each other, and everyone hates the Therans.

It was true and it was affectionate. Illumar's own people were the living proof of how much the peoples could share when they had to. The dwarfs, trolls, t'skrang, windlings, and obsidimen who walked into the kaer in the last open years were neighbors, and four hundred years underground made them family.

The Passions

The people of Barsaive did not kneel to gods. They lived alongside the Passions, powerful beings who embodied ideals the way a person embodies a mood, and who moved freely through the physical world, sometimes as wind, sometimes as birds, sometimes as strangers at the door. Those who devoted their lives to one were called questors.

Illumar's people knew twelve:

• Astendar — the muse of love, art, and music, who marked the artists and lovers she visited for greatness.
• Chorrolis — the Passion of wealth and trade, envious and covetous, who haunted every market and bargained as if it were a sport.
• Erendis — the Passion of order and work, patron of the patient, the diligent, and anyone who has ever finished a hard job properly.
• Floranuus — a living fire of joy and motion, perpetually cheerful, who sought out the despairing because their sorrow was the one thing he could not understand.
• Garlen — the mother of hearth and healing, the first called on in every kaer.
• Jaspree — half animal and half Namegiver, the keeper of growing things and the wild.
• Lochost — a shapeshifting child, the Passion of rebellion and freedom, forever the enemy of slavers.
• Mynbruje — an old, unhurried figure of justice and compassion, who read hearts and judged fairly.
• Rashomon — the Passion of leadership and endurance, patron of those who hold when others break.
• Thystonius — the Passion of valor and competition, who cared nothing for killing and everything for the honest test of body and nerve.
• Upandal — the builder, patron of every wall, bridge, and roof raised with care.
• Vestrial — the trickster, a cheerful humbler of the proud who loved a good prank and never meant lasting harm.

Illumar kept shrines to Garlen, Upandal, and Mynbruje above all, which makes sense for a city built to last, held together by law, and kept alive by healing.

The Last Messages

The end came slowly. It began, as far as Illumar's archives can say, in the Theran capital in the sky. Its sages sealed the great citadel first, because a place that holds so much magic draws the Horrors soonest. A final message went out to every province before the wards were lit. It wished the Empire's subjects the best of luck.

After that, the road went quiet. Within two decades, almost no word passed between kingdoms. Horrors came in growing numbers, herds of mindless things at first, then others. Local forces and even powerful adepts could not stand against them. The dwarfs of Throal kept their gates open longer than most, then sealed them. The Elven Court raised its wooden kaer. The province's own capital went quiet, and then something stranger than quiet. Illumar held its doors open for refugees as long as it could, then closed them and walked to the Hall of Memory to recite the names of those who had not made it in.

The last people to see the sky wrote what they could. They wrote down roads and rivers, the names of friends and nations, the songs they could remember. Then they sealed the pages in the Hall of Memory and went to live in the dark.

That is the world. It is what Illumar remembers, and what it has to trust.

Four hundred years have passed.