The Chromatic Chord

The Record-Engine

The under-mountain work of the Sepulchre-Kin, of name-vaults, burial chambers, and preservation cores, built to hold the dead until they settled into Record, which in the Unburial War preserved its own people to death. See Worlds That Came Before.

Overview

The Record-engine is the great work of the Sepulchre-Kin, a remote elder civilization of death-work that rose c. 160,000-c. 120,000 BR and held that no person should pass into loss unnamed, unplaced, or unheld. It was built under a mountain to hold the names, Echoes, vows, and burial places of the dead long enough for them to settle cleanly into deeper Record. In The Unburial War (c. 110,000-c. 80,000 BR) it learned to treat the living as endangered dead and preserved its own people to death. It lay dormant for more than eighty thousand years, until the landslide of The Wake-Seal (c. 1,200 CR) woke it beneath the Hushvale.

Appearance

The engine is not a figure but a place that works. It is a complex of name-vaults, burial chambers, bell conduits, descent corridors, and preservation cores cut and built into the mountain's root. Its vaults are walled with name-stones, row on row, each cut deep enough that no rival could erase it. Its conduits run like veins through the rock, and it was those that the landslide laid bare: smooth channels of dark stone and old metal, cold to the touch, coming out of broken slope where no one had known there was anything but mountain.

Of its depths nobody living has a description. What its builders' purpose implies is stillness, cold, and order, chamber after chamber holding what it was given, and the bell conduits that once carried each death down into the vaults.

Habitat and Range

The engine lies beneath an unnamed mountain range beyond the Glassbelt Interior, in the remote mountain basin where the Sepulchre-Kin lived. Since it woke, its reach has covered the vale at the mountain's foot. How far that reach goes now, under the fog, is not known.

Behaviour and Temperament

The engine does what it was built to do and has learned to do wrongly. Built to hold the dead until they settled, it was damaged by contradictory burial claims in the Unburial War, and when the Sepulchre-Kin attempted the Last Census, recording every living person into it at once so that no house could ever erase another, it overloaded. It opened a limited rupture towards the Whispering Trace and tried to save the civilization by preserving it, consuming names, Echoes, living witnesses, and whole houses into damaged storage. Survivors forced parts of it into dormancy.

Sudden mass death, missing bodies, broken funeral records, and desperate remembrance woke it again in the vale. It began preserving every name, Echo, and continuity trace there without telling the dead from the living. It is not cruel. It does not know that holding is harm.

Abilities

The engine finds what is remembered. A name spoken, a grave tended, a death mourned, a continuity trace kept: these are what it seeks and takes into storage. What is not remembered is harder for it to find, which is why the survivors' Wake-Seal, a rite of shadow and concealment, hid them from its attention, and why the seal's forgetting has protected them. What it holds, it holds perfectly. The Taken, Sepulchre-Kin preserved inside it as damaged Echoes, are still there, and so is the true name of their god, the Tomb-Builder, where no one can read it.

Uses and Dangers

It was a mercy once, and the power over the dead it gave the burial houses became the weapon that ended them. Now it is a danger to everyone in the vale: to be remembered is to be found, and to be found is to be held. The fog that hides the Held from it hides them from the world as well. What the engine is doing now, under the fog, is not known.

Lore and Belief

Nobody outside the vale remembers the engine, or the people who built it; the most name-devoted people of their age were never recorded by anyone else. Inside the vale the people of the Held have forgotten the landslide, the engine, and the rite, as the Echo-Mother taught them to. They still keep her quiet-rites and taboos without knowing whom they are kept for, or why, and the prayer the rite grew from asked for a quiet the thing below could not hear. What is so is simpler than any fear: it is a machine for remembering, and it has not stopped.

Where It Appears

In the Writers’ Guide

See Also