The Returning Concord

Overview

The Returning Concord is the first major named civilization of the Thaluren: a people bound not by borders but by a journey. Every generation, its runs leave the sea settlements of The Tidebound Reaches, cross current roads hunted by blackfins and sharks, and climb the rivers to the spawning sanctuaries where their lines began; and every generation the young who survive come back down to a sea that is waiting for them. Thaluren made that journey long before the Concord; the Concord is the oath that keeps it rightful.

Its offices are also the sacred offices of The Way of Return, the Thaluren faith of rightful return.

How It Holds Together

What the Concord holds is the return itself: the remembered run-lines, the spawning duties, the clutches accepted as kin, and the guarded beds where eggs and hatchlings lie. Its creed says a line proves itself by care, not strength. In practice the larger sea settlements and the keepers of the holiest sanctuaries decide whose care counts, and a community belongs to the Concord because they accept it.

There is no throne. Some waters are holier and some keepers weightier, but the whole is held by kinship and old oaths across great distances, and by sworn offices:

• Run-Watchers remember which lines climbed first and where, vouch for a line, and speak when quarrels break out over who climbs and when; one from a great settlement is heard over one from a small.
• Sanctuary Custodians keep the spawning grounds, guard them against blight, defilement, and egg-raiders, and have the last word when the beds are in danger.
• Clutch-Watch Circles say who is kin: which clutch a young one hatched from, and who has taken up the care of another's young.
• Sea-Settlement Speakers speak for the ocean settlements where most Thaluren live, and bargain with the upriver sanctuaries.
• Redirection Assemblies began as rare gatherings, called when a run is blocked, blighted, or no longer survivable, to decide whether a line may climb other waters without losing its right.

Daily Life

How the sea settlements live, how a return season runs from gathering to spawning, and how the Kavari bank villages see it come are told in the Tidebound Reaches, under Ordinary Life. What the Concord adds is the moment a settlement meets its offices.

• Placing a stranger. Any Thaluren met on the current roads is asked which run they came up with and which water they hatched in.
• Before the run. The settlement's Clutch-Watch Circle confirms who is going and in what place in the line, and the Sea-Settlement Speaker sends notice ahead to the mouths and upriver.
• Coming down. When the young who survived reach the sea, the circle accepts each before any household takes them in.
• Adoption into duty. An adult who takes up care of another clutch's young declares it before the circle, and is then counted in that clutch's obligations as though born to them.
• A quarrel over sequence, such as which line ascends first in a narrow year, goes to the Run-Watchers, who answer from the memory of past seasons, a memory that tends to favour the larger lines.

A Thaluren settlement's fears are told in the Reaches' dangers: egg-blight above all, run-followers off the mouths when the young come down, egg-takers raiding the spawning pools, and on the far roads the cold company of the Unreturned. Beyond the outermost roads lie the devourers, and no run goes there.

Medieval Role

The Concord's custom decides who may climb the rivers of the Reaches, and every people on those rivers has to deal with it.

• A sea settlement may give up a season's ascent rather than climb without its line being accepted, even with raiders in the pools and sharks at the mouth.
• A Redirection Assembly may let a blocked run pass into an alternate channel, and be accused by Blightward custodians of convenience.
• A Kavari bank council may close active nursery-water to any run, and the Concord has no strength on the banks to override it.
• A Gnome gauge house may measure an estuary's depth and timing and still have no say in whether a run is rightful.
• A run that presses into Kavari nursery-water unannounced may be met with barbed Kavari points in the gravel, and start a blood-debt both peoples carry for generations.
• An Outer-Route line may lay its dead with shell-work in the outer reef-halls, and find Gnome divers going down for the shell; its young escorts then hunt the divers, as the Reaches' Tensions tell.
• A few young Outer-Route swimmers leave the road each generation to look for the runs that never came home, and their settlements sing them out with the songs for the dead.
• A sea settlement may carry a feud with a Kavari bank for generations over one run speared in the gravel, and send its escorts past that bank only in force, spears bared.
• An escort may leave the run to hunt the egg-takers out of a sanctuary pool by night, and be honoured or rebuked depending on whether the run reached the beds without her.

Return songs are sung in the water, in the slack before a run sets out. Their heroes are the escorts who turned to face a blackfin pod so the run could reach the kelp, whom the young in the shallows play at being, with the blackfin losing every time; the custodian who stood in the spawning bed through a whole night of egg-takers and gave her blood to the gravel, whose name is the last word spoken before a run climbs; and the line that climbed a blighted river anyway and was never seen again, which some call faithful and some call mad, and over which more than one settlement has come to blows.

History

The Concord's great crisis is The Closure of the First Nesting Confluence (c. 178,000-c. 162,000 BR), when egg blight turns the holiest spawning water deadly, clutch after clutch dies in the gravel, and the question of climbing other rivers strikes the old return at its root. The faith took its godless form in the same span. The divergence that follows, between The Blightward Keepers and The Open-Run Concords, is bitter because both claim to be the faithful heir of the same older custom.

Their first lasting clash, fought in the river mouths as well as in the assemblies, is The Second-Channel Feud (c. 160,000-c. 156,000 BR). The Gravel Oath Accord (c. 153,000-c. 148,000 BR) then forces return custom to give way to Kavari dwelling-water.

Tensions

• Guarded or open run. Blightward custodians accuse the sea settlements of convenience; Open-Run families accuse Blightward keepers of a reverence that kills.
• Kavari closure. Open-Run families resent how much a Kavari closure can decide about Thaluren lives, and Bankright councils fear that every burdened return accepted this season becomes an expectation the next.
• Measured water. Gnome gauge-keepers at the mouths record depth and timing, and some run-watchers suspect that a recorded window is slowly becoming a granted one.
• A pod on the road. Blackfins have followed the last two runs on the outer road and taken more each time.
• The one who came back. Three young Outer-Route escorts left the Far Set last season to find a run that never came home.
• An unplaced young one. A young Thaluren comes down to a settlement whose circle cannot place its clutch, because its water was a redirected channel the circle's own wing has never accepted.