The Unrecorded Age
The sixth age, c. 120,000-c. 40,000 BR, after writing ended in the cradle, when peoples kept their customs and genealogies in breath and its graves and hoards are still turned up by the plough. See The Ages of Caeldon.
The dark age of Caeldon's history, dark because no one wrote it down. When the archive-law world sealed its cities at the end of The Last Keeping (c. 150,000-c. 120,000 BR), writing in the cradle ended with it; far-side harbour ledgers kept their own count, unread by the cradle. For the next eighty thousand years almost nothing was set down that later cradle peoples can read: what survives is house memory, songs, Reedfolk oath-keeping, Dwarven and Elven chronicles kept to themselves, and ruins. Memory kept by voice even had its own god, the Many-Named, worshipped by many peoples under their own names and faded once writing returned.
- The Gathering of the Confluence (c. 120,000-c. 50,000 BR)
- The Unburial War (c. 110,000-c. 80,000 BR), the unrecorded fall of the remote Sepulchre-Kin
What happened in the Unrecorded Age is one of the great riddles of medieval learning. Dwarven hold chronicles, Floodkeeper house-memory, and old ruins each hold fragments, and the sealed archive-cities of the Witnessfields, where the Grey Clerks still stop passers and demand their names, hold the last written word of the world just before it began. Each people that keeps a fragment has its reasons to share it or not.
In the Writers’ Guide
- The Ten Primes FoundationsMemoria
- Stewards and Resonants FoundationsThe Gods by Prime, Gods Across the Ages
- Humans FoundationsGathering and Founding, The Far Coast
- The Ages of Caeldon FoundationsThe Unrecorded Age, Tensions
- Worlds That Came Before FoundationsThe Archive-Law World, The Sepulchre-Kin
- A World in Two Halves The Medieval EraThe Far Side, How the Halves Differ, Beyond the Map
- The Basins and the Marches The Medieval EraThe Confluence Basins
- Sealed and Silent Places The Medieval EraThe Witnessfields
- The Tidelace and the Soundchain Roads The Medieval EraThe Tidelace Coasts
- How the Present Was Made The Medieval EraBefore the Corridor, The Corridor Ages, The Settlement
- Writing in the Medieval Era The Medieval EraWhat the Pages Leave Open
- The Taken A Bestiary of CaeldonLore and Belief
- Glossary Foundations