The Chromatic Chord

The Walking of the Unkept Roads

The span, c. 175,000-c. 140,000 BR, in which survivor lines began walking the abandoned roads in seasonal circuits and became the Salvage Peoples. See The Threads of History.

Overview

Survivor lines living along the abandoned roads of the elder worlds became, over a long span, the Salvage Peoples, and in that span their first civilization, The Edgeway Kindreds, took shape.

It begins during The Withdrawal of the Upland Colossal World and runs well past it, overlapping the last years of The Fall of the Ash-Furnace Civilization.

Roads Without Keepers

As the colossal world drew back, its ridge roads, causeways, terraces, and cisterns did not vanish. They simply stopped being kept by the people who built them.

Smaller survivor lines from the wider balanced adaptive field already lived along these works, trading at their edges and sheltering in their lee. As the colossal upkeep failed, the roads forced a choice on them: let the routes fall, or take on the work themselves. Some groups settled at single points and in time merged into later regional peoples. Others did something new and began walking the roads in seasonal circuits, clearing a culvert in spring, bracing a causeway before the floods, and returning the next year to find what the storms had taken.

Marks and Keeping

Two habits turned scattered circuit groups into one people.

The first was the mark. Circuits passing near the spreading ruin belts of the dying ash-furnace world learned that some ground killed, transformed, or poisoned those who disturbed it, and that some ruins were still guarded by things that had not stopped working. Warnings cut into stone at those edges became the first danger-marks: never touch, never dig, turn back. Keep-marks followed as circuits began to cross and needed to know whose cache or repair was whose, and what a thief who took from it could expect. By the end of the span, the marks were a shared script readable across many circuits.

Historical Significance

The walking gives the Salvage Peoples a beginning and a first way of holding together in one long stride. It is why the Kindreds are oldest in the Headwater uplands and the outer Ironspine, why the oldest never-touch marks descend from ash-furnace warnings, and why keepright is older than the lords who refuse it.

The Salvage Peoples are not the colossal world's heirs, nor the furnace world's. They are the people who learned to live and travel among both ruins. Their oldest marks still stand, worn almost smooth, at the edges of glassed ground where slag-tenders rake cold furnaces and the Fused Dead whisper after anyone who carries ash away. A Kindred child still learns those marks before learning to read a lord's seal.

In the Writers’ Guide

See Also