The Mnemosyne Null Incursion

Overview

The second of the three Incursions on Caeldon. Mnemosyne Null came through in the river country below the uplands of the archive-law world, and its pallor spread over one of that world's river cities and the farms around it until the city forgot its name. It was turned back at the river, where the Floodkeeper Houses held their memory aloud, and left a pale country: the Paling.

It falls late in The Last Keeping (c. 150,000-c. 120,000 BR), while the archive-cities were already closing their registers. It neither caused the closing nor was caused by it.

The Pallor

The blank opened in a lane of the city and spread over its streets, fields, and the hamlets on the side river below. Colour went first, then detail, then meaning. The inscriptions faded off the city's own walls and witness stones; its people lost their names, then their speech, and walked out as Blank Hosts after anyone still remembering. Within a few years nobody could say what the city had been called. Floodkeeper scouts who went up to look for survivors came back unable to say where they had been, and one came back not at all and walked down to the river a year later as a Blank Host.

Turned Back at the River

The pallor came down to the river where the Floodkeeper houses kept their channels. The houses held their flood memory as a spoken thing, and recited their rolls and names aloud through the nights; archive keepers who had come down to them did the same with what they carried. There Memoria, Verba, Umbra, and Terra bore on the blank together, for the record, the name, the trace, and the history written into stone. The Keeper of the Imperishable Record and the Warden of Released Traces stood against it. The blank stopped short of the river and was pressed back out through the Boundary.

The Floodkeeper houses who held the river are heroes of the Reedfolk to this day, and their reciting nights are a living custom, not only a tale. What it had taken stayed taken. A record destroyed before it is kept is beyond Memoria, and the city's name had been kept nowhere but on its walls.

Historical Significance

The Incursion is the source of the tale of the city that forgot its name, and of the nightly naming kept by households round the Paling. It also accounts for one of the archive world's river cities, the one whose name will never be found written anywhere.

The pale country still lies there. Outlaws hide in it because few will follow, and treasure-seekers go in after whatever the nameless city left behind, though most come out unsure what they went in for. The tales say the city's vaults were never opened and its treasure was never carried out; the danger is that a night inside takes the morning's memories, and that a Blank Host still walks out now and then and falls on whoever it finds remembering (see The Paling).