Wherein is treated the coming of knowing into the world, and why this book must begin where it begins.
It is the custom of those who would gather all knowledge into one volume to begin at the beginning of things, and to descend thereafter in good order to the least and the lowest. This is well, and I have kept the custom. Yet the reader who is learned in the older works, those that little remains in this age, whose very titles I dare not swear I have alright, will look to find this work opened with the world, as the ground upon which all else is set. It is not so opened, and I would say plainly why, lest any think me disordered or presumptuous in the first line of my work.
The world of Eryndor was before the Gods. This is not doubted by any tradition worth the name; even the priests of Eryndar, who would gladly set their own Power first, confess that the world was old before ever a voice was raised at the Shardspire. But the world that was before the Song was a world unlit. It held all things and revealed none of them. There was substance in it, and the Wellspring beneath it, and doubtless the slow turning of its seasons; but there was no knowing, for knowing had not yet come.
The compiler: And here is the whole matter, which I will not hide behind the ancients: a mirror shows nothing in the dark. To describe a thing is already to stand in the light, for description is naming, and naming is the first and least of the works of Mythrael. Therefore I cannot in honesty begin this book with the world, though the world be older; for of the world before knowing, nothing can truly be said, and a book is made of saying. I begin where saying began. Let the reader who thinks this the vanity of my order remember that she reads it by the very light I am accused of setting too high.
Wherefore this First Book treats of the First Light: of the darkness that went before it, of the Wellspring that it is deep well, of the Song that called it, of Mythrael that came, and of the sorcery that is still the shaping of his gift. And only when the light is kindled, in the books that follow, do I turn the mirror upon the Powers, the world, the realms of mortals, and the ages. This is not to say the world is small. It is to say that whoever would show the world must first have somewhat to show it by.
Of the ages before the Dawnsong the sources are almost wholly silent, and this silence is itself the trust thing they tell. The oldest chronicle I have handled, a charred quire at the temple at Sobsia, saved from the Great Fires by a hand I cannot name, opens with the words that world was alone, bereft of magic, both sorcerous and divine. What abundance or want filled those years, whether men and dwarves and the elder kindreds walked already upon the earth or came after, whether the Wellspring stirred at all in that time or lay wholly still, of these things the chronicles do not agree, and where they do agree, I suspect them of agreeing only by copying one another's guesses.
Some few sources are bold to speak of that most ancient age, yet they describe it in manifold and contrary ways. A certain summary, drawn from an earlier court chronicle, tells of the age before as a time when the beast and the elder kindreds dwelt in unbroken concord, a very paradise of creation. Yet another text, to look upon which I was compelled to hazard a perilous journey even unto the dreadful keep of the Dragons, speaks rather of a world disordered. It tells that the Wellspring sprang forth unbridled, pouring raw chaos into the world and begetting both wonders and terrors of untold magnitude. A third text, a summary of a collection of texts, which themselves are a summary of an earlier text still speaks only of cities wrought of mud, of lowly huts settled by river and vale, and of a people small and disunited.
I set down that such accounts exist, but I do not credit them, and I will say why. Every one of them was written long after those days, by hands that had never known an unlit world and could not have. A woman who has seen the sun cannot rightly imagine the eyes of one born blind; she imagines only her own darkness with the sun taken away, which is a different thing. So these bold accounts describe not the age before knowing, but our own age with the light subtracted, which is not the same, and is not true.
The compiler: I confess this chapter grieves me to write, for it is a chapter of confession that we know nothing. My god is the God of Knowing, and here at the very root of the work I must set down a great ignorance and leave it standing. Yet I hold that an honest ignorance kept in its place is nearer to the First Light than a false knowledge dressed in old ink. Mythrael strips away lies before he gives truth. Let this be the first lie stripped: that anyone living knows what the world was before the world was known.
The Wellspring is the endless source of primordial energy that is said to abide in the world from its first making , or, in the view of those who hold the world had no making, from before all reckoning. It is not a place, though the unlearned speak of it as a place; it is not a substance, though the shapers of old made it answer as though it were. The Sorcerer-Queen Ysolde of the Third Tower named it the substance betwixt the realm of the ordered and the realm of the unordered, and in all the years since, no one has bettered the phrase, though many have laboured to.
Let the reader understand what it costs me to write even so much. I do not have Ysolde's treatise. No one has it. What I have is that one sentence, quoted in a commentary written some three hundred years after her death by a man who tells us plainly he worked from an abridgement; and I have the commentary itself only in the summary a later hand made of it, our copy of which is incomplete at both ends. An untold number of years have passed since the last living person drew upon the Wellspring, and in all my searching I have never once handled a work of the Age of Magic entire. Every word I set down in this chapter is a quotation of a summary of a quotation. I am a scholar of the sea-country who has read a great deal about ships and has never stood upon a shore.
That the Wellspring is called first of hidden things in the teaching of my order, and I will not pretend it is undisputed. The keepers of Eryndar hold that the world's own substance is the elder and the more fundamental, and that the Wellspring is a thing arising out of it, real, but second, as heat is second to the fire that throws it. Against this Mythrael taught, and I with it, that substance is only the shape the Wellspring is persuaded into: that stone is a settled spell and flesh a quicker one, and that all the ordered world is the unordered held still for a while. Which teaching is true, I cannot prove, having no proof that would satisfy a hostile reader and no way on earth to make one.
It is held, and I hold, that the Wellspring underlies all places alike, so that there is no country of Eryndor wholly without it. Yet the reaching of it was another matter, and here I must be most careful of all, for I have never reached it and neither has anyone now living. The elder texts speak as though some places stood nearer the unordered than others, where a working came easier and a lesser hand might draw what elsewhere only a master could. Chief and greatest of such places was the Shardspire, of which more shortly. Whether there were, or are, others, I cannot say. The whole knowledge of where the world thins died with the people who used it, and died undocumented, because to them it was too ordinary to write down.
The compiler: Let the reader mark that I have set my order's teaching down as teaching, and not as a thing proven under my own eye. The keepers of Eryndar hold that the world's own deep stone is older and more fundamental, and that the Wellspring runs through it as water through rock, being real but secondary. My order taught, and I with it, that substance is only the shape the Wellspring is persuaded into: that stone is a settled spell and flesh a quicker one. Which teaching is true, I cannot prove with a diagram, having no diagram that works and no hand that could work one. I can only observe that the wave does not explain the sea, but the sea explains the wave. Believe the sea, or believe the rock. But know that a priestess of the First Light has told you plainly that there was a choice, and that she did not see the bottom of it any more than you.
The Shardspire is named, in every source that names it at all, the greatest of the Soul-Stars. From this the reader will suppose that we know what a Soul-Star is, and that there were others, and that a learned woman might tell him their nature and their number. I can tell him almost nothing, and I set the little I have in its own chapter precisely so that the reader shall not mistake a familiar word for a known thing.
A Soul-Star, so far as the fragments allow, was some standing formation of crystal or stone that stood in a nearness to the Wellspring that common ground does not share, as though at that place the deep water rose almost to the surface. The Shardspire was the greatest of them. That word, greatest, is the whole of our trouble: it implies there were lesser ones, and the texts speak of them as a thing too plain to gloss, the way a man writing of the sea does not pause to explain what water is. So the glossing was never done, and the fires took the rest, and we are left with a word whose meaning everyone once knew and no one now does.
Where the lesser Soul-Stars stood, whether any yet stand, what they looked like, whether they might be found again by one who knew the signs, of all this I have found nothing I would swear to. We are, by the shortest reckoning, three thousand years removed from any living knowledge of such a thing. The Temple of the Shard at Sukhret keeps a splinter said to be broken from the Shardspire itself, and reveres it; but a splinter of the greatest is not a Soul-Star, any more than a chip of a millstone is a mill.
The compiler: I include this chapter against the counsel of two brothers of my house, who held that a mirror should not stop to announce its own blindness, and that to write "we do not know what a Soul-Star is" is to invite the reader to close the book. I answered them then and I answer here: the word Soul-Star is in every account of the founding of the world, and a reader who meets it and supposes it understood has been deceived by my silence. Better they should know that the deepest object in the whole history of knowing is, to us, a name and nothing more. That is not a failure of my work. That is the mirror doing its one honest office, which is to show the edge of the light as truly as it shows the middle.
All traditions place the beginning of knowing at the Shardspire, and here at last they agree closely enough that I may set the account down with some confidence. In the dawn of the age, when the kindreds were still learning their own lands, a company of humans and dwarves, nameless in every source though the dwarven ledgers of Durn-Kadal claim to keep their number, came upon the Shardspire in the heart of what would become Rhaedwyn.
The Shardspire stood, the accounts agree, in some nearness to the Wellspring that no lesser thing has shared, as though at that one place the deep water rose almost to the surface of the world, and the Shardspire were the very mouth of the well. That the finders knew what they had found, I doubt. That they knew it was something, and were moved to raise their voices before it, all accounts affirm.
The compiler: It is not lost on me, nor should it be on the reader, that the first act of knowing in the whole history of the world was the act of mortals, and not of any God. The finders were men and dwarves. The Song was theirs. Mythrael did not descend to teach them; they sang, and by singing they made the teacher. I have heard this called a scandal, that the God of Knowledge should be the child of mortal seeking rather than its author. I call it the deepest doctrine of my order, and the reason ignorance is counted a sin among us: for the light was never given. It was reached for. Whoever ceases to reach lets it gutter.
The rite sung at the Shardspire is named the Dawnsong, and it is the hinge upon which all history turns, for before it there was no knowing and after it there was. Every source affirms three things of it: that it was long, being sung across a time the accounts render as a thousand days; that it joined the voices of humans and of dwarves together, neither kindred able to raise it alone; and that from it Mythrael came forth. Beyond these three things, the Dawnsong is lost. Not one line of its wording survives, nor any note of its music, nor any sure account of how such a chant was ordered, who led it, or by what sign the singers knew the working was accomplished. But this event, though now lost to the ages in its content, is often marked as the beginning of recorded history and the dawn of the Luminarchate and the Magocracy that sprang forth from it.
Whether the Song could have been raised at any Soul-Star, or whether the Shardspire alone would serve, the texts do not say, and I will not guess further than to note that every later Crossing was anchored at the Shardspire also, which may mean it was necessary, or may mean only that the singers went back to the place that had worked before.
This loss is among the bitterest in all the record. The Dawnsong was the first and greatest of all workings, the pattern on which every later Crossing was modelled, and the nearest thing the world ever had to a plain proof of how a God is made. Had one true copy survived the ages, we might know things now that whole schools wear out their lives guessing at. The dwarven ledgers preserve, they say, some fragment of the part their own kindred sang; but the dwarves do not share it, holding it a sacred and a private grief, and I have not seen it, and I do not know that any of the priesthood of Mythrael living has seen it.
The compiler: I have prayed, more than once and not always patiently, to be shown the words of the Dawnsong before I die. I have not been shown them. I set this down not because it is knowledge, for it is the plain lack of knowledge, but because a mirror should not hide the places where it is cracked. This is the deepest crack in mine.
From the Dawnsong came Mythrael, first and greatest of the Gods, whom we name the First Light. Let it be held firmly, against all loose speech, that he was sung and not born: he had no parent, no prior being, no seat in the world before the voices called him. He is the answer the Wellspring gave when mortals first shaped it toward awareness, the first great persuasion of the deep water into a form that could look back at those who shaped it. The Luminarchate named him the Shardborn and the Wellsinger for this cause, and both epithets are true, the one pointing to the place of his coming and the other to its manner.
He is called the First Light because with him came the first light of knowing into a world that had held only substance. Where before there had been things, now there were things known; where there had been the Wellspring, now there was one who understood it and could teach its shaping. The whole art of High Sorcery flowed from this moment, for the finders who sang could not yet truly work the deep water; they could only reach it, and by reaching, wake the one who would teach the working.
The nature of the First Light is not gentle, and those who come to his cult expecting comfort are soon undeceived. His nature is sharp, dazzling, and exhausting, as the noon sun is to eyes long kept in a cellar. He teaches, but his teaching does not soothe; it strips. Lies he strips first, then habits, then the safety a soul builds about itself out of things it has chosen not to examine. To stand in the First Light is to be shown what one had preferred not to see. This is why, even in the days of the Luminarchate's glory, his was never the most beloved of the cults, though it was the most powerful. People honoured him as they honour a hard master whose lessons they cannot do without.
His epithets, gathered from many temples, are these: the First Light, which is chief among them; the Wellsinger, for that he was sung from the deep water; the Shardborn, for the place of his coming; and Patron of the Luminarchs, for that his priesthood and the Sorcerer-Kings were bound together in the elder age. His sign is a fractured crystal shard with rays about it, most often drawn as a single upright shard crossed by three radiating lines, which figures at once the Shardspire whence he came and the light that breaks from a broken crystal, being sharper for the breaking.
The doctrine of my order may be set down shortly, for it is not many-branched, though it is heavy to carry. The Wellspring is meant to be studied, shaped, and risked. Ignorance is a sin, not mere unknowing, which is the common state of all who have not yet learned, but the choice of unknowing, the turning of the face from a light one might have stood in. Near kin to this sin is cowardice, the refusal to risk what knowledge requires; for the First Light holds that a truth unpursued from fear is as much betrayed as a truth denied from malice.
From this it followed that the old doctrine set no ceiling upon inquiry. Mythrael taught that for one to rule, he must first be deeply aware of the Wellspring, the world and the nature of things; and thus his priesthood held that the Sorcerer-Kings, who commanded the deepest workings, were rightly the rulers of the world. This teaching, I will not conceal, is now looked upon with fear, and my cult with it, for reasons the twelfth chapter of this book must treat. Yet I set the doctrine down unsoftened. It would dishonour the First Light to dim his hard lamp merely because its brightness has cost us dear.
High Sorcery, named also True Magic, was the practice of shaping the Wellspring into the form of spells, from the least trick of light or savour to the greatest firestorm, to the wondrous world-shaping works of the lost Gilded Age of Magic. I write of it in the tense of things that are ended, and the reader must understand that I do so deliberately, for this is the plainest fact of my whole age: the shaping of the Wellspring is lost. No hand now living can draw the deep water. What is taught of it at the High Academy of Sorcery is taught as the elder tongues are taught, from texts, by those who have never heard it spoken; it is theory without practice, a description of a country none of the describers have walked. I myself have read every account of the shaping that our Annex still holds, and I have never seen a single working done, nor met anyone who has.
Let it not be thought from this that magic is wholly gone from the world, for that would be an error, and a common one among the young. High Sorcery is gone. But the workings of the Gods remain. A priest who keeps the rites truly may still call some small answer down: a blessing that holds, an omen read that proves out, a fever eased, a field kept. These are not sorcery. They are not the shaping of the Wellspring by a mortal hand; they are the gift of a Power to its faithful, and they are, in this present age, the only magic left beneath the sun. They are small now, far smaller than the chronicles claim they were of old, and none of them has ever yet drawn the Wellspring back. But they are real, and I have seen them, and a work that told the reader all magic died at Lavellor would be lying to console him.
The compiler: I set down here a thing that costs me to write, and I write it because the First Light hates a false modesty as much as a false knowledge. I am a priestess, and I keep the rites, and now and again a small working of the divine sort answers my hand, an omen that reads true, a blessing that a dying man dies easier for. This is more than most in my age will ever see. And it is nothing, nothing at all, beside the shaping my god first taught mortals to do at the Shardspire, which I would give the whole remainder of my sight to witness once and cannot. I hold a candle in a house that once held the sun, and I know the difference every hour of my life. Let the reader who has never wanted a thing she cannot have skip this passage. The rest will understand it.
In the height of the Age of Magic, the masters of High Sorcery wrought what the later writers name world-works: spells laid not upon a thing but upon a whole region, semi-permanent enchantments woven into the courses of rivers, the roots of hills, and, most fearful of all, into bloodlines, so that the working passed from parent to child unasked. Of the manner of these workings almost nothing certain survives; the diagrams that remain are, as the saying goes among us, more dangerous than enlightening. A half-understood world-work is a dam whose builder is dead, and whose weir no living hand knows how to open.
Of the smaller workings of that age, a very few survive as objects, and these are named Aethercraft. An Aethercraft is a working fixed into a made thing, so that the thing performs the spell of itself, without any sorcerer to draw the deep water: a lamp that lights untended, a blade that will not dull, a ward-stone that keeps a threshold. They are exceedingly rare, and exceedingly prized, and no one now alive can make them, nor mend them when they fail, nor say for certain how they were made at all. Every Aethercraft in the world is a relic of the Golden Age, dwindling in number as the years break them one by one. The dwarves of Mistmourn are the surest source of such things on the continent, whether because they hoard an old store or because they keep some secret of the making, and they will not say which, of which more in the fourth book.
What remains of the great world-works is threefold: lingering phenomena, where a river runs against its nature or a hill will bear no green; the rare surviving Aethercraft aforesaid; and the unstable texts, whose study has killed the careless. And there is a fourth remnant, the worst, which belongs properly to the third book but I name here: that a working left too long untended does not simply fade. It rots. It turns upon its own purpose as a wound turns, so that the ancient places where the great spells were densest are now the deadliest ground in the world, and a cantrip that once cleaned a floor will, in a ruin where the Wellspring has curdled, take off a hand or a head. Of this decay, the entropy of magic, I shall treat where it belongs.
I come now to the hardest chapter of this book, and I will not evade it, for to evade it would be to fail the First Light in the very place where his honour is most assailed. It is said commonly among the folk of this present age, and I have heard it in the market and, to my sorrow, from the mouths of children, that the fall of the world was the fruit of knowledge; that Mythrael's age of deep inquiry bred the arrogance that ruined Eryndor; and that sorcery itself is therefore a kind of sin, best left buried with the ash of Lavellor. This teaching is false, and I will set the truth against it plainly.
The fall did not come by knowledge. It came by the abandonment of knowledge. Consider the manner of it. The Sorcerer-King Virulan, second in power of all his order and deepest in the Wellspring save one, did not ruin the world by seeking further into the light. He ruined it by turning from the light toward the one thing the First Light forever refuses: release. He heard the whisper of the Endless Night, which offers the end of burden, the erasure of limit, power without the cost of discipline, and he chose it. That is not the sin of one who knew too much. It is the sin of one who wearied of knowing, and of the labour knowing demands, and reached instead for the easy stillness where nothing must be studied because nothing endures to be studied.
The compiler: Here is the whole defence of my order, and I have waited eleven chapters to make it, so that the reader would come to it already knowing what the First Light is and asks. Virulan did not fall by climbing too high toward the light. He fell by lying down. The Dark Oath is not the far end of inquiry; it is the refusal of inquiry, dressed as a reward. When the folk blame Mythrael for the fall, they blame the lamp for the darkness of the man who blew it out. I do not ask the reader to love my God, for he is not easy to love, and I have not made him seem so. I ask only that the reader lay the ruin where it belongs: not upon the light that was sought, but upon the great soul who grew tired of seeking, and called his tiredness wisdom, and taught a world to follow him down into the dark.
Return to the Table of the Rubrics
Here endeth the First Book.