From the fractured records of the Age of Dusk.
For some things, I believe, were never meant to be remembered.
Not because they were evil. Not because they were forgotten. But because memory, in its hunger to preserve, has a habit of bringing back what should have remained at rest.
I have spent thirty-seven years among the broken histories of the old world. I have read the confessions of kings, the prayers of murderers, and the last words of men who believed themselves immortal. I have gathered pages from burned libraries, inscriptions from graves that had no bodies, and testimonies from those who swore they had witnessed the impossible.
Yet of all the things I have found, none troubles me more than a sentence written on a piece of blackened parchment.
The world was not born in silence.
There was no name beneath it.
No date.
Only a mark, pressed so deeply into the parchment that the other side had split.
I have seen that mark before.
Once, in a child's drawing.
And once, on the door of a tomb that had been sealed from within.
I shall say no more of it.
Some doors are safer unopened.
In the beginning, there was a sound.
Or so the oldest surviving verses claim.
They do not call it a voice, for a voice must have a speaker. Nor do they call it music, for music belongs to those who have learned to listen.
They call it the Song.
What sang, the verses do not say.
What answered, they do not say.
But the mountains were young, the rivers had not yet learned their names, and the heavens bore no scars. The earth trembled beneath a rhythm no ear could hear, and where that rhythm passed, things came into being.
Perhaps the first tree grew from it.
Perhaps the first creature opened its eyes.
Perhaps, somewhere beneath the roots of the world, something woke and mistook its awakening for a dream.
I cannot tell you.
The oldest verses contradict one another, and the oldest of them have been scraped clean.
But there is one thing upon which they agree.
Everything had its place.
The waters knew where to gather. The winds knew where to wander. The stones endured, and the green things reached for a light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.
Even the smallest creature carried something of that ancient rhythm within it.
And when it ceased to live, the world did not mourn.
Not because it lacked sorrow, but because nothing had yet been lost.
The end of one life was not an ending.
It was a return.
The leaves fell, the roots drank, the streams carried their waters toward distant seas. What had been given was received again. Nothing was wasted. Nothing was held forever.
At least, that is what the songs tell us.
I have often wondered who first taught them to sing of perfection.
For those who have lived in a perfect world rarely know the word for it.
There was a time when night was not dark.
The earth itself gave light.
It rose softly from the soil, rested along the edges of stones, and gathered in the hollows of ancient trees. At dusk, the world turned silver. The flowers closed their luminous petals, and the rivers shone as though stars had fallen into their waters.
Far beyond the western plains, forests of crystal stood beneath a sky without clouds. Their branches were sharp and translucent, their roots buried in mineral beds older than memory. When the wind crossed them, the forests sang.
Some claimed the sound could heal a broken heart.
Others said it could make a liar confess.
In the east, luminous moss covered the hills, opening and closing with the unseen tides of the heavens. In places where the land rose toward the stars, rivers ran uphill, though no one could agree whether it was the water that defied the earth or the earth that had forgotten which way was down.
The world was full of such wonders.
Some were tended.
Others were left alone.
The great cities were not raised with hammer and stone, but coaxed from living things. Crystal towers grew toward the heavens. Bridges of braided roots crossed ravines. Entire districts rested upon floating monoliths, held aloft by forces the architects understood only in part.
In Frosthold, warmth was drawn from the hearts of living crystals. In the highlands of Artheris, stargazers watched the heavens from towers suspended above the mountains. Across the plains, water moved through channels of pale light, feeding fields that never knew the cruelty of drought.
The people of that age had learned to persuade the world.
They had not yet learned to distrust it.
The gifted called upon the unseen currents beneath the earth. They guided waters, calmed storms, coaxed seeds from sleeping soil, and bent the stubborn bones of mountains.
Some called this magic.
Others considered the word an insult.
For what was there to name about a river obeying its source?
What was there to marvel at in a flame that knew its master?
In those days, the impossible was simply another form of the ordinary.
And ordinary things, as I have learned, are often the most dangerous.
The kingdoms prospered.
Ten crowns shone beneath the ancient heavens, each claiming a portion of the world, each believing its own history to be the oldest.
In the west, Ashenvale forged its strength in iron and fire. Its warriors carried steel that could hold an edge against enchanted armor, and its lords measured a man's worth by the promises he kept and the enemies he buried.
Beyond its borders, Emberfall glowed red beneath its endless forges. Its noble houses fought over furnaces, mines, and the secrets of flame. Their halls were warm even in winter, though warmth was not always what one felt within them.
In the Heartlands, Valrathia cultivated beauty with the same care others devoted to war. Its gardens hid listening places. Its courts smiled while counting debts. Roses grew upon walls that had witnessed more betrayals than battles.
Eastward, Sylvarath rested beneath its endless green. Its druids spoke to trees whose memories stretched beyond the lives of men. Some trees remembered fires. Others remembered footsteps. A few, according to the oldest woodland tales, remembered things that had not yet happened.
Far south, Dreadmoor spread across black marshes and fevered waters. Its healers could draw poison from a dying man, though they sometimes charged more for the cure than another would ask for the death.
Beyond the marshes lay Hollowmere, where libraries descended beneath the earth. Its keepers preserved histories forbidden elsewhere, and its scholars had a saying:
What is buried is not necessarily dead.
In the north, Frosthold stood carved into mountains of ice, its people bound by oaths that outlived the kings who demanded them.
Along the eastern cliffs, Stormvale watched the sea. Its towers bore the marks of lightning, and its sailors read the storms as others read letters.
Obsidian Hold stood behind walls dark as midnight, its discipline severe and its laws unyielding. There, weakness was treated as a debt, and every debt was expected to be paid.
At the world's heart rose the Bastion of Artheris, crowned by silver mountains and observatories. Its prophets searched the celestial paths, though few agreed on what the stars were saying.
Ten kingdoms.
Ten histories.
Ten versions of the truth.
They traded. They feasted. They swore peace beneath banners of gold and fought over boundaries that no map could hold for long.
There were wars, though the songs of that age rarely speak of them. There were famines, though the histories call them blights. There were kings who drowned their enemies in wine and priests who blessed the hands that killed them.
Perfection, it seems, has always been a word spoken by those who stand far enough away.
Still, the world endured.
And beneath its splendour, something waited.
There were those who understood the world better than kings.
They were called Menancers.
The name was old, older than the kingdoms that feared them. Its earliest meaning has been disputed by scholars, though I once found it carved above a door in the ruins of a city that no longer appears on any map.
Those who threaten the order.
Whether this was a warning or a title, I cannot say.
Menancers did not merely command the elements. They reached into the unseen currents beneath the earth and compelled them to answer. Some could still the breath of a storm. Others could turn stone to dust, silence rivers, or make fire burn without consuming its fuel.
They were scholars, conquerors, healers, and tyrants.
Occasionally, they were all four in the same lifetime.
Their gifts brought prosperity to the kingdoms, but power has never been content with gratitude. The more the Menancers learned, the less they were willing to accept the boundaries of their knowledge.
There were questions they could not answer.
What lay beyond the stars?
What had existed before the first sound?
And why, among all the wonders of creation, was there one thing that refused to yield?
Death.
It was not feared as it would be in later ages.
The old people buried their dead beneath flowering trees. They placed no weapons beside the bodies, no coins upon the eyes. They left bowls of water and a little bread, not for the departed, but for those who remained.
When a child asked where the dead had gone, the elders answered differently.
Some said the sea.
Some said the Source.
Some simply kissed the child's forehead and told them to sleep.
Yet every kingdom possessed one custom that it never abandoned.
When the dying drew their final breath, the doors were opened.
No one knew why.
Perhaps it was an ancient courtesy.
Perhaps it was fear.
Or perhaps, as one forgotten witness claimed, the dying had once asked for the doors to be opened themselves.
I found that testimony in a book whose pages had been stitched together with human hair.
The witness wrote that he had seen a man standing outside his father's chamber.
The man had no face.
Only a hollow where a face should have been, and a long shadow stretching into a room lit by seven candles.
The witness said that his father, who had not spoken in three days, opened his eyes.
He did not call for his wife.
He did not call for his children.
He looked toward the door and whispered:
"Not yet."
The candles went out.
When the servants entered, the father was dead.
The stranger was gone.
The witness never wrote another word.
I have searched for the remainder of that account for half my life.
Perhaps it never existed.
Perhaps someone thought it best that it should not.
In the borderlands, where the earth grew thin and the ancient currents wandered, there lived a keeper named Elian.
I use the word lived because I have found no better one.
He did not eat, though he sometimes sat among those who did. He did not sleep, though he had been known to close his eyes when listening to rain. His presence was felt more often than seen, and those who had encountered him could rarely agree on his appearance.
A shepherd remembered a young man in a grey cloak.
A widow described a stranger with silver hands.
A blind child insisted that he had been a woman with a crown of thorns.
All three swore they had spoken to the same person.
Their accounts were separated by four hundred years.
I once believed these contradictions to be the result of poor memory.
I no longer do.
Of Elian's nature, little can be said with certainty. He belonged to an order that had no temples, accepted no offerings, and answered no prayers.
They came without invitation.
They left without farewell.
They were not seen at births, weddings, or coronations. Yet wherever life approached its end, something seemed to notice.
Elian was different from the others, if the scattered testimonies are to be believed.
He lingered.
He listened to the dying.
He remembered the names of creatures no king would have bothered to name. There is a tale of a wounded bird that fell at his feet in the winter of an unnamed year. Elian held it between his hands until its trembling ceased.
When he opened his palms, the bird was gone.
In its place lay a single feather, bright as a distant star.
A little girl who witnessed the event asked him where the bird had gone.
Elian looked at her for a long time.
"Somewhere I cannot follow," he answered.
The girl asked why.
He did not reply.
That night, she dreamed of a door beneath a black sea.
She spent the rest of her life drawing it.
There are places in the world where the boundary between what is and what might have been grows thin.
The borderlands were such places.
There, forgotten voices sometimes returned with the wind. Footsteps crossed empty roads. Travelers glimpsed houses that had burned centuries before, with lamps glowing in their windows and familiar faces waiting behind the glass.
The people of those regions had learned not to answer when the dead called their names.
Elian watched over such places.
Or so the surviving fragments suggest.
He carried a book.
No account agrees on its size. Some describe it as small enough to fit within a coat. Others claim that its spine was taller than a man and its pages longer than a kingdom's road.
Its cover was neither leather nor metal.
It resembled the space between stars.
Those who claimed to have seen it spoke of symbols that changed when observed, letters that crawled from page to page, and names written in a language no living tongue could pronounce.
One witness said the book contained every name that had ever been spoken.
Another said it contained the names of those who had never existed.
A third claimed it had no writing at all.
Elian never permitted anyone to touch it.
Once, a king offered him a palace in exchange for a single page.
Elian refused.
The king offered an army.
Elian refused again.
At last, the king asked what price would persuade him.
The keeper looked toward the open window.
"Price?" he said.
And the king, who had never been denied anything in his life, ordered the doors opened.
By morning, his throne stood empty.
No blood was found.
No footprints crossed the snow outside his chamber.
Only a small black feather lay upon the pillow.
The kingdom mourned its king for nine days.
On the tenth, another man took his place.
History remembers neither his name nor the reason for his coronation.
I suspect the feather mattered more.
The book, whatever it truly was, held a secret no kingdom could purchase.
There were pages Elian would not open.
There were names he would not speak.
And there was one passage that, according to an account recovered from the ruins of Artheris, had been bound shut with seven seals.
The account records no words from that passage.
Only a drawing.
A hand reaching through a door.
And beneath it, a sentence written in a language that had not yet been invented:
What has crossed must remain crossed.
Elian had never broken the seals.
Or so the records claim.
In all his years of keeping the borderlands, he had never attempted to turn a departing soul back toward the world.
He had never asked what lay beyond the Veil.
He had never sought to follow.
Yet there are nights when even the most faithful keeper must face a question that duty cannot answer.
What is mercy, when it becomes indistinguishable from cruelty?
And what is obedience, when the law itself demands suffering?
I have asked these questions of priests.
I have asked them of executioners.
I have asked them of men who have buried their children and women who have lived long enough to forget the sound of their own mothers' voices.
None has given me the same answer.
Perhaps Elian found his answer in the borderlands.
Perhaps he never found one.
But in the final testimony attributed to the blind seer Ophira, there is mention of a keeper standing beneath a sky without stars.
She describes a book lying open at his feet.
She describes a voice speaking from the empty air.
And she describes Elian doing something no account had ever accused him of doing.
He was afraid.
The testimony ends there.
I have wondered whether it was a vision of the past or a warning of what was to come.
The distinction may no longer matter.
The first sign was not a war.
It was not a plague, nor a comet falling from the heavens, nor a king found murdered in his sleep.
It was a death that did not end.
In a village at the foot of the silver mountains, a woman died while holding her newborn child.
Her husband was beside her.
The midwife was beside him.
Three lamps burned above the bed, their flames steady in the windless room.
The woman closed her eyes.
Her fingers loosened around the child's blanket.
And somewhere in the room, a sound ceased.
The midwife covered the woman's face.
Her husband knelt beside the bed and began to pray.
Then the child laughed.
It was a small sound.
A simple thing.
Yet every flame in the room turned toward the cradle.
The husband looked up.
The midwife stopped praying.
Beneath the cloth, the dead woman's hand tightened.
Not around the blanket.
Around nothing.
The husband tore the covering away.
His wife lay still.
But her shadow had risen from the bed.
It stood against the wall, tall and thin, with its head bent as though listening to something beneath the floor.
The midwife screamed.
The husband reached for his wife.
The shadow turned.
And for one brief moment, the three lamps burned with a light no living fire had ever given.
Then the shadow folded into itself.
The lamps went dark.
The child began to cry.
When the villagers entered the room, they found the mother dead, the father kneeling beside her, and the midwife hiding beneath the table.
No one spoke of what they had seen.
By sunrise, the story had already changed.
Some said the child was cursed.
Others said the mother had been a witch.
A priest declared that the lamps had been poorly made.
The village buried the woman beneath a flowering tree.
They left no bowl of water.
No bread.
Only a stone upon her grave, engraved with a name.
Three days later, the stone was blank.
The report reached Artheris before the week's end.
It arrived among ordinary petitions concerning trade routes, border disputes, and the restoration of a ruined observatory.
The messenger was a boy no older than fourteen.
He carried no royal seal.
No escort accompanied him.
The guards nearly turned him away, until he placed a small object upon the reception table.
A blackened feather.
The man receiving petitions had seen hundreds of strange things in his lifetime. He had witnessed spells that turned rivers backward and watched an entire fortress disappear beneath a curtain of mist.
Yet when he saw the feather, he rose from his chair.
He ordered the doors closed.
He sent the servants away.
And for the first time in twenty years, he rang the bell beneath the council chamber.
That bell had no tongue.
It had never made a sound.
Yet ten men and women, scattered across the kingdoms, would later claim to have heard it.
Some heard it while sleeping.
Some heard it in the middle of battle.
One heard it beneath the sea.
And the blind seer Ophira heard it in a dream in which she possessed eyes.
She stood upon a plain of white ash.
Above her, the heavens were empty.
Before her stood ten doors.
Nine were open.
One was not.
A voice spoke behind her.
"Which door leads home?"
Ophira turned.
There was no one there.
She looked again at the doors.
Behind the first, she heard children singing.
Behind the second, the sound of rain.
Behind the third, a man weeping.
Behind the fourth, nothing.
Behind the fifth, her own voice, calling from somewhere far away.
Behind the sixth, a hammer striking iron.
Behind the seventh, a river flowing uphill.
Behind the eighth, the rustle of leaves.
Behind the ninth, the sound of someone turning a page.
The tenth door remained silent.
Ophira approached it.
A thin line of light shone beneath its threshold.
She placed her hand against the wood.
And from the other side, someone placed a hand against hers.
She woke with blood running from her nose.
For a long time, she sat in darkness.
Then she whispered a name she had never heard before.
Elian.
I have read Ophira's testimony many times.
There are scholars who dismiss it as a fabrication, a later invention intended to give the catastrophe an appearance of prophecy.
They point out that the testimony was discovered long after the events it describes.
They point out that its language resembles no known dialect of Artheris.
They point out that Ophira's blindness has been exaggerated in later histories, and that the earliest accounts do not even agree on whether she was born blind.
They may be right.
History is a house built upon uncertain foundations.
Yet I find myself returning to one detail.
In the margin of the testimony, beside the description of the tenth door, there is a line written in a different hand.
It is almost illegible.
I have spent months trying to decipher it.
At last, I believe I understand.
It reads:
The dead were never the ones who knocked.
On the night the bell rang, ten figures gathered behind a waterfall in the mountains of Artheris.
The chamber had no windows.
Its walls were carved from living stone, and silver veins ran through them like frozen lightning. Water descended beyond a transparent crystal barrier, yet no sound entered the room.
A circular table stood at its centre.
Ten seats surrounded it.
One remained empty.
Archmage Valtherion arrived first.
The heat that followed him caused a thin film of mist to gather upon the table. His robes smelled of ash and iron. He glanced at the empty chair and frowned.
"Who is missing?"
No one answered.
Lady Sylvaris stood beside the far wall, her fingers resting upon a crack in the stone. A tiny green shoot had begun to grow from it.
She watched the shoot with an expression Valtherion could not read.
"Have you noticed?" she asked.
"Noticed what?"
"The roots."
Valtherion looked down.
The green shoot had withered.
He brushed it aside.
"Then grow another."
Sylvaris did not move.
"That is what troubles me."
A door opened.
Zyphara entered with a storm gathered around her shoulders. The sparks dancing between her fingers vanished as she crossed the threshold.
She looked at the table.
Then at the empty chair.
"Ah," she said. "So we are all pretending not to notice."
"Not here," said a voice from the shadows.
Seraphine emerged, her pale fingers moving as though she were counting invisible threads.
"Not yet."
At the chamber's entrance, Isolde paused.
Frost spread beneath her boots.
She looked down at it.
For the first time in her life, the ice did not obey her.
She stepped away.
The frost remained.
Behind her came Solrian, whose gentle light dimmed when he entered the chamber.
He noticed the ice.
He noticed the dead shoot.
He noticed the empty chair.
And unlike the others, he did not pretend these things were unrelated.
"Who sent the bell?" he asked.
No one answered him either.
Then came Zareth, his face hidden behind polished obsidian.
He said nothing.
He never removed his mask.
Last of all, Kaelen entered.
The conversation ceased.
He carried no weapon.
No scroll.
No staff.
Only a small, folded piece of parchment.
He placed it upon the table.
The parchment was blackened at the edges.
A single mark had been pressed into its centre.
The same mark I found upon the fragment in my keeping.
Kaelen looked around the chamber.
"Before we begin," he said, "there is something you must understand."
He unfolded the parchment.
Beneath the mark was a name.
The ink was still wet.
And though the council had not yet spoken of the dead, every one of them recognized it.
It was the name of the king of Frosthold.
The king who was still alive.
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