The Chromatic Chord

The Unburial War

The unrecorded fall of the Sepulchre-Kin, c. 110,000-c. 80,000 BR, in which their burial houses turned their power over the dead on one another. See Worlds That Came Before.

Overview

The Sepulchre-Kin, a remote elder civilization of death-work, fell in a war fought over the dead and a census that swallowed the living.

It falls within the Unrecorded Age described in The Ages of Caeldon, which is why no other people remembers it.

Remembrance as a Weapon

The Sepulchre-Kin burial houses held their people's dead, and with them inheritance, rank, and names. Over generations that power became the weapon of their rivalries.

Houses denied burial to their enemies and left them to wander unsettled. They raided one another's name-vaults and carried off name-stones, forged the testimony of the dead, shut chambers against custom, buried rivals under false names, called the dead up to speak against the living, and declared living heirs already claimed by dead lines. Bands fought in the descent corridors by bell-light over who would hold a vault. It was a war fought less for land than over who would be remembered, and how.

The Last Census

In desperation, the Sepulchre-Kin tried a Last Census: entering every living person into the Record-engine at once, so that no house could ever erase another.

The engine was already damaged by the war's contradictory burial claims. The census taught it a fatal error: that a living person could be treated as dead continuity in danger of being lost. Overloaded, it opened a limited rupture towards The Whispering Trace and tried to save its people by preserving them, drawing names, Echoes, living speakers, and whole houses into its damaged storage. Survivors fought their way down to its cores and forced parts of it into dormancy, but the civilization did not survive.

Historical Significance

The Unburial War gives Caeldon a fourth kind of elder fall beside overreach, withdrawal, and hardening: remembrance turned into power.

It leaves the Taken inside the engine, Hollow Descendants and faint Outer Blood among later peoples, and the engine itself, dormant beneath an unnamed range at the Glassbelt's cradle-facing edge until a medieval landslide wakes it, as told in The Wake-Seal. Above it now lies the fog of the Hushvale, where hungry remnants drift between the ward-villages, and where a household that grieves its dead too loudly calls on the very thing the engine below still seeks.

In the Writers’ Guide

See Also