The Chromatic Chord

The Last Keeping

The span, c. 150,000-c. 120,000 BR, in which the archive-law world shut its rolls and sealed its last cities, while the keepers who would not let the record die carried its oath forms, scripts, and some of its records to the Floodkeeper Houses. See Sealed and Silent Places.

Overview

The elder Archive-Law Civilization ended behind closed gates. Its rolls were declared complete, its last cities were sealed with their records inside, and what its defiant keepers carried out passed into the keeping of the Reedfolk Floodkeeper Houses.

It follows The Rise of the Archive-Law Civilization and the first dated sign of its hardening, The Unlisting of the Warrens, and ends that civilization's story.

The Closing of the Registers

The archive world was not stormed. It shut itself.

As its rolls froze, the cities found more and more of the living world impossible to write down in the old forms. Peoples moved, changed, mingled, and spoke in ways the walls no longer allowed. One city after another, led in the end by the keeper later remembered as the Last Registrar, declared its rolls complete: no new entries, no new oaths, no new names, only what was already cut. Peoples who could no longer be entered drifted away from cities that could no longer enter them, and raiders picked over what they left. The wardens, no longer fed by the fields they guarded, dwindled until no spear was left behind the stone.

Custody to the Floodkeepers

Not everything was sealed. The Floodkeeper Houses had lived beside the archive world's river cities since their founding, and their own custom already rested on remembered truth and sworn keeping. Keepers who would not let the old craft die behind the gates came down to the river and taught it to the Houses, and some brought rolls, oath scripts, and the forms of marker-stones with them. The last keeper named them deserters and cut their names into the sealed rolls too.

When the blank of the Incursion came down to the river, those keepers stood with the Houses through the nights and recited aloud everything they carried, and the pallor stopped short of the water.

Historical Significance

With the closing, all three great elder worlds have ended; the smaller Sepulchre-Kin fall later in The Unburial War (c. 110,000-c. 80,000 BR). The age of written public memory ended with the gates, and the Unrecorded Age began.

The archive world's habits crossed that long dark through the Reedfolk. When Human river powers swallowed Floodkeeper authority in The Lower River Absorptions (c. 30,000-c. 8,000 BR), they took the archive forms along with Reedfolk river knowledge, usually without knowing it. The sworn-name customs the Serathic League and the Lower Serath are proud of are partly an unacknowledged Reedfolk inheritance. Some Floodkeeper houses know this and say so; Serathic lords rarely agree, and they are the stronger.

In the Writers’ Guide

See Also