Wherein is treated the history of the world, so far as it may be known; which is set last, because it is known least.
It is the custom of the ancient Lavellori tradition to set history near the beginning, as the frame in which all else is hung; for a chronicle that runs from the world's first day to the writer's own is a proud and steadying thing, and the hand that can write it feels itself the heir of all it records. I have set history last. I have set it last because, of all the matters this mirror treats, it is the one we know least, and it would be a lie against the First Light to dress our deepest uncertainty in the robes of our surest knowledge. Of the Powers, the traditions at least agree on their domains. Of the world's substance, a stone may be held in the hand and questioned. But of the ages, of what truly happened, and when, and in what order, we have almost nothing but ash and the quarrels of those who sifted it. So history comes last, as the dimmest room comes last to the lamp-bearer, and I ask the reader to carry into this book a doubled measure of the caution I have counselled throughout.
I begin with a confession that shames my whole order, and me the more because I am its priestess: we do not know how old the world's knowing is. We, the servants of the God of Knowing, cannot say with any certainty how many years have passed since the Dawnsong first called the light into the world. The reckonings that survive do not agree, and they do not agree by no small margin of a generation or two, but by thousands of years.
The dispute may be gathered under three heads, and I will not choose among them, for there is no ground firm enough to choose from. One tradition, kept in certain western temples, allows barely three thousand years since the Dawnsong, holding the longer counts to be swollen by pious exaggeration and doubled regnal lists. Another, which the old Luminarchate reckoning favoured and many schools keep still, places it near four thousand. And a third, kept chiefly among the dwarves and in a few of the eastern cults, stretches the age of the world back eight thousand years or more, insisting that whole centuries were lost in the Age of Shadows and never counted at all. I have set the three side by side, as my method demands, and I decline to name a winner, having no honest means to.
The root of the quarrel is plain enough. Almost every chronicle that might have settled it was burned. What we reckon by now are broken things: regnal lists of the Twelve Sorcerer-Kings that do not align from one copy to the next; counts of the generations of temple-keepers, which assume each keeper served a like span, though we know they did not; and the dwarven ledgers of Durn-Kadal, which count by a measure of their own that I have never fully understood and suspect no living human does.
One anchor alone is firm enough to build on, and it is a grave one. All the reckonings, however they differ on the beginning, agree closely on the end: the Fall of Lavellor, the shattering of the Shardspire, which the academic style places two thousand and two years before this present writing, and from which the whole scholarly calendar counts. It is a strange and bitter thing that the one date we can trust is the date of the catastrophe. We are sure of when the light went out. We are still arguing over when it was kindled.
The compiler: I have spent more nights on this chapter than on any other, and I have won nothing for them but a firmer knowledge of my ignorance. Let me at least make that knowledge honest. I hold to no number. I have read the case for three thousand years and the case for eight and the case for four, and each is built upon sources the others reject, and I can no more weigh them than weigh three coins in the dark. If the reader of some later and better-lit age has found the chronicle that settles this, and reads my refusal to guess with pity, I say to him only: pity me if you must, but know that I set my ignorance down plainly rather than hide it under a false and comfortable number. That much, at least, the First Light will count to me.
The first great era of ordered history is named the Age of Magic, and it was, above all others, the age of my own God; for in it Mythrael was overseer of Eryndor, and his cult and the Sorcerer-Kings ruled together from Lavellor, and the shaping of the Wellspring stood at the very centre of the world's life. I will not pretend to write of this age coldly. It was the noon of the light, and every priestess of Mythrael who has come after lives, in a manner, in its long evening. But the First Light despises the flatterer above almost all people, and I will not flatter even the age I love.
To some who wrote of it, the Age of Magic was a time of impossible abundance: of cities joined by stable gates, of weather steered by the great choir-sorceries, of whole regions cleansed of plague by a single working. To others it was an age of quiet and constant fear, in which a handful of Sorcerer-Kings adjusted the world as one adjusts the pieces upon a board, and ordinary lives bent and broke beneath their experiments. I have weighed both accounts, and I judge that both hold a sliver of truth, and that the sliver is the same sliver seen from two sides. The abundance was real. So was the fear. A power great enough to lift a plague from a province is great enough to sink one, and the same hand does both.
Herein lay the overreach that the later chapters must account for. As the age went on, the Luminarchate leaned ever more upon a smaller and smaller circle of the deepest masters; the world-works grew vaster and the hands that understood them fewer; and there arose, among the wiser and the humbler both, a growing unease that the world had been bent too far from its own nature. I will say clearly, against those who would use this to indict my God: the overreach was not the doing of the light. It was the drift of the light, the slow forgetting of the First Light's own hard doctrine, that knowledge is to be shared, risked, and answered for, and not hoarded in a few unassailable towers. The Age of Magic did not fall because it knew too much. It began to fall when it stopped teaching what it knew.
The rulers of the Age of Magic, under Mythrael and the Luminarchate, were the Sorcerer-Kings, twelve in number, chosen at the very dawn of the age and holding their thrones by the depth of their command of the Wellspring. They were not as other rulers. They were made all but deathless by their own art, so that the same twelve reigned across the whole length of the Age of Magic, however long that age truly ran; and whatever became of them at its end, none is known to have died a natural death, for they had, in a manner, unmade death in themselves.
The lists that survive give twelve, but no two lists agree on all twelve names, still less on their order, and I set down only those on which the sources are firm and note the rest for rumour. First and strongest of them was Walkyrion, called the Undimmed, of whom more will be said when I come to the Last Battle, for his end is one of the great disputes of the record. Second in power was Virulan, whose name the reader already knows and will know better before this chapter is done. Tenth was Aurozan, who alone came living through the Age of Shadows and sits yet upon the throne of Sukhret with a mind long broken, of whom I have written in the fourth book. And one alone of the twelve was not a man of Rhaedwyn but a dwarf, Aktal Xylir, whose flight into the Wetlands founded the clan of Mistmourn. The other eight are variously given, as Sorvane the Pale, and Ysolde of the Three Towers, and Melquath, and Threnvalor, and Caldreth, and Valdrune, and Osriven, and the unnamed King who is said to have founded Suderaval; but which of these truly sat among the Twelve and which are the inventions of later flattery, I cannot say, and I would not have the reader trust the roster past the four I have vouched.
In the climate of overreach and unease, the ruin found its door. Virulan, second in power of all the Twelve and deepest in the Wellspring save Walkyrion alone, heard the whisper of the Endless Night and took the first of the Dark Oaths. Of the manner of that whisper, and why the second-strongest of the deathless proved the one least able to refuse it, I have written in the first and second books of this mirror, and I will not repeat the whole of the argument here. Let it suffice to recall its heart: that Virulan did not fall by seeking further into the light, but by wearying of the seeking, and reaching instead for the release the Endless Night forever offers, the end of burden, the erasure of limit, the power that asks no discipline.
I would add only this, which belongs properly to the chronicle. The Dark Oath was not a public act, and it was not known for what it was until long after it was sworn. This is the pattern of the Endless Night in all things: it does not arrive as an army at the gate, but as a change of heart in the one already inside the wall. For a time the sources cannot measure, Virulan sat among the Sorcerer-Kings as one of them, oathbound to the Endless Night, drawing already upon the Black Current, and no one knew. The war did not begin when Virulan turned. It began when the others at last discovered that he had.
The Age of Magic ends, and the Age of Shadows begins, at the Last Battle before Lavellor; and here at least the sources speak with more agreement than usual, for a catastrophe of that size leaves marks that even a ruined record keeps. Virulan, having turned his power against his former peers, led into the heart of Lavellor an army of mortal forces and the creatures called Ulthrak, and breached the wards that the age had thought unassailable. The chroniclers speak of a sky blackened at noon, of spells that tore the streets open, and, the phrase recurs in every account and I cannot pass it by, of Gods that refused to answer.
Upon that last phrase the folk of this present age hang no small part of their distrust: for if the four Powers would not answer at the fall of the world, what are they worth? I will give the answer my order holds, though it comforts no one, for it is the answer our reading of the Endless Night requires; and I remind the reader that it is a reading, not a proven thing. The Endless Night, in that reading, is not a thing the Powers govern. It is the un-differentiation, the recoil of the Wellspring from all pattern, and the sung Gods are persuasions into pattern, and have no more authority over the unmaking than a song has authority over silence. On this account the Gods did not refuse to answer at Lavellor. They could not. The thing loosed there was precisely the thing outside their reach.
And then came the act whose full weight I am not sure any living soul has reckoned. Virulan reached the inner defences and performed rites now lost to every tradition, and the Shardspire, the greatest of the Soul-Stars, the mouth of the Wellspring, the anchor of the Dawnsong and of every Crossing that followed it, exploded. Lavellor was destroyed. Most of the Twelve died in the blast or the chaos after it. But mark what else died, though no chronicle mourns it as I do: with the Shardspire gone, the instrument of all Crossings is gone. No God has been sung since. No God can be sung, holds the consensus of every school, for the place of the singing is a poisoned waste. The four Powers we keep are not the first four of many. They are all there will ever be. The shattering of the Shardspire did not only end an age and a city. It closed the pantheon, and shut the mouth of the well through which the light first came.
What follows the fall is not one war but a patchwork of them, gathered by later scholars under the name the War in the Dark; and the name is apt, for little of it was fought in open field. The Darksworn did not trust to armies. They worked as their master works: from within. They infiltrated the courts, the guilds, the temples, and the surviving colleges of magic, and turned each institution against itself. Trusted advisors were unmasked as Darksworn, or were never unmasked at all. Laws were altered by small degrees until they served the Endless Night. Realms that had survived the fall of Lavellor fractured from within, some collapsing into civil war between Darksworn and loyalist, others submitting almost gladly, worn down by fear and seduced by the offer of easy power.
I must now write of the wound this mirror has been circling since its first page, and I find my hand slow upon it. The common tale names a single Great Fire of Sobsia, in which the Annex of the Grand Library burned with the greater part of the practical manuals of the shaping. The truth is worse than the tale, for it was not one fire. It was many, across long years: a wing lost here to a Darksworn torch, a vault there to a convenient accident, a collection sold and scattered, a roof left unmended until the rains took what the flames had spared. The dramatic name gathers into one night what was in truth a slow strangling, the patient murder of a library across generations, and the slow version is the crueller, for a single fire is a catastrophe and a slow one is a choice, made again and again by people who could have chosen otherwise and did not. To a servant of the Endless Night, a library is not a building but an enemy: it is knowing made durable, oaths made to the future, the exact thing the Night exists to undo. They did not burn Sobsia to win a battle. They burned it, and let it burn, because it remembered.
And the loss was sealed by a sorrow within our own house, which the fourth book has told and which belongs here also. Aurozan, tenth of the Twelve and the only one to come living through the Shadows, held in his own mind the deepest of the practical arts, the shaping done by a hand that had truly done it. He might have taught it. He did not, and the reason is the bitterest in the whole record: his mind broke. Whether from the weight of his centuries or some hurt we cannot name, the last living master of True Magic lost the power to tell the real from the remembered from the dreaded, and a mind that cannot tell which of its treasures is true cannot pass any of them on. So the shaping did not merely burn in the Annex. It also guttered out, slowly, behind the eyes of one deathless old man in Sukhret who can no longer find it himself. Between the fires the Darksworn set and the ruin that took Aurozan's mind, the practice of True Magic failed utterly, until it survived only as the curiosity of scholars and the rare, half-understood Aethercraft scattered across Rhaedwyn.
And so the Age of Shadows became not a single dramatic collapse but a long, grinding dusk, some eighteen centuries of it. The Luminarchate fell as a political thing. High Sorcery was broken, hoarded, or reduced to half-remembered tradition. The cults of the Gods survived in altered and diminished forms, stripped of their old Luminarchate theology, though the workings of the Gods themselves never wholly ceased, and divine magic remained, as it remains today, the last magic in the world. The Darksworn lost their most visible thrones but did not vanish; they lingered in bloodlines, in secret societies, in isolated strongholds, waiting. It is the nature of a dusk that no one can say the hour it becomes night, nor, later, the hour it began to be dawn.
Amid so much murk, it is almost a relief to the historian to come upon an event with a clear external shape; and the Orcish Invasion of Rhaedwyn is such an event, though even it has rotted at the edges. It fell hard upon the shattering of the Shardspire, in the first years of the Age of Shadows, so nearly at once that the two are reckoned coincident: as though the breaking of Lavellor and the breaking of the Taurus line were two faces of a single collapse. The three Kuhans of the Great Western Steppe, Alostor, Kiraven and Venocht, three names that still carry weight in the songs of the western kingdoms, took the Dark Oath and turned their roaming hosts east toward the Taurus Mountains. Whether they rode for plunder, for a new homeland, or for some reward the Endless Night had promised them, no record says.
At that time the mountain passes were held only by the simple lairs of the Dragon-Kings themselves, for the Dragonborn did not yet exist. The Kuhans, strengthened by the Endless Night and guided by Darksworn counsellors, broke the Taurus defences in a campaign the songs remember more for its terror than for any strategy. It is told that one Dragon-King fell and another was very nearly taken in his own mountain-temple, and it was in that panic that the surviving Dragon-Kings poured their own blood into the Ritual of Solelichesis and made the first Dragonborn, to hold the passes their own kind could no longer hold alone.
The invasion was turned back at last, once the fortress-temples filled with Dragonborn and the human realms rallied behind that unlooked-for wall. But it left marks that endure into this present age: the fortified passes of the Taurus, a whole Dragonborn people built around the keeping of an eternal watch, and a lasting dread, of the Steppe, and of any alliance between a nomad host and the Endless Night. It is a curious thing, and I set it down as one, that among the clearest-remembered events of the whole Age of Shadows is a barbarian invasion at the world's edge, while the fate of Lavellor at its heart is wrapped in myth. The record does not preserve what mattered most. It preserves what was written down by someone who survived to write it, which is not the same thing, and the confusion of the two is the historian's oldest error.
Of the end of Virulan himself, the record is at its most silent, for no source from within his inner circle survives, and the external accounts offer three possibilities and no means of choosing among them. The first: that he was destroyed in the Shardspire's explosion at Lavellor, and that every later report of him is an imposture or a misread omen. The second: that he withdrew beyond ordinary reach, into the Endless Night itself or some liminal state between life and unlife, becoming less a man than a conduit, a door the Night had propped open. The third: that he was overthrown at the last by his own Darksworn followers, in some internal struggle of which we hold no record at all.
None can be proven, and I will not pretend to prove one. But I will observe the shape of what came after, for the shape argues something. After a certain point, the Darksworn cease to act under a single guiding figure and act instead through fractured regional cabals, each to its own end. Whether this is because Virulan was destroyed, or because he withdrew so far that he could no longer direct them, or because they cast him down and could agree on no successor, the effect is one and the same: the War in the Dark loses its single focus and becomes the scattered, exhausting thing that ground on for centuries. The great villain of the age exits the record as quietly as he entered his oath, unmarked, undated, unresolved. It is a bitter irony, which I think would please him, that the man who sought release from all binding left not even a firm account of his own ending for the world to bind him by.
I come at last to my own age, in which I write, and which, unlike the two before it, has a clear and widely honoured beginning. Its first year is dated from the Blooming: the season, one hundred and ninety-eight years before this present writing, when the golden flower Cyrathis opened again across the whole face of Rhaedwyn, in fields and roadsides and cracked walls from the western heartlands to the edge of the Wetlands, all at once and without any planting. The wonder of it was not the flower, which is common enough, but that it had not been seen to bloom in some five and twenty centuries, not within any record we hold, so that its blossoming had passed out of memory and into the language of the Age of Magic alone. And then, in a single spring, it returned everywhere. A scholar of Sukhret first named the new age for it, arguing that so plain a sign of life returning to a world long in the dusk deserved a reckoning of its own; and the name was taken up across the continent within a few years, which for anything the schools propose is very nearly the speed of lightning.
The symbolism is not subtle, and I will not feign that it is. After the long attrition of the Shadows, the Age of Cyrathis is widely felt as a kind of spring. The Darksworn remain a danger in rumour and in isolated cells, but their open power is weaker than at any time since the fall of the Luminarchate. The human kingdoms of western and central Rhaedwyn have steadied, rebuilt their cities, and begun to look outward rather than merely to survive. Trade revives along the old river-roads. Children grow up hearing of the Age of Magic and the Age of Shadows as tales of a time before, and not as the conditions of their own lives. This is no small thing. I do not scorn it. A field planted in the honest expectation of harvest is a truer sign of healing than any prophecy.
Yet I must set down two hard truths, for the First Light would forgive me neither omission. The first is that it would be a lie to call this a golden age. Whole regions still bear the mark of wild magic; the Black Current has not vanished; the Endless Night has not been disproved, only pushed back. And, this concerns my own order most nearly, the light itself has not returned. The shaping of the Wellspring remains lost. The workings of the Gods continue, and divine magic is real, and I have seen its small mercies with my own failing eyes; but that is the candle, not the forge, and the forge is cold. The High Academy of Sorcery keeps the study as one keeps a dead tongue, and no hand in Rhaedwyn has drawn the deep water in two thousand years. I live in the spring of the world's peace and the winter of my god's gift, both at once. That is the plain truth of my age, and I will not gild it.
The second hard truth is the one my pride would most like to hide, so I set it down first and plainest: this age of hope is named for my rival's flower, and not for the return of the light. Its emblem is a bloom in a wasteland, Cyraeth's own sign, the Wheel turning, life accepted out of death, and not the rekindled lamp. The world, healing, has framed its healing in the Lady's terms and not in Mythrael's. I have sat with this longer than I have sat with any grief in this book, and I have come, I think, to peace with it, and I will tell the reader how, for it is the last thing I have to teach and the reason I made this mirror at all.
The compiler: I am old, and my sight is nearly gone, and I will not see the noon of the light returned. Of that I am now certain. The art my god gave the world is not coming back in my lifetime, and the age that will one day recover it, if any age does, is not mine. So be it. A priestess of the First Light does not measure her life by whether she saw the sun, but by whether she kept some spark against the dark and passed it on undimmed. That is why I have made this book. Not to be remembered, for I have written my own name small on purpose, but to be read, by whatever better-lit hand comes after, in whatever age at last relearns the shaping of the Wellspring. To that reader, across the years I cannot count, I say: everything in these five books I gathered from ash, and every uncertainty I marked as uncertain, because the sin of my god is the false light that pretends to a knowing it has not earned. I would rather have handed you a small true flame than a great false one. Take it. Read the world by it. And when you have kindled a better, forget this poor lamp that carried the ember through the dark, but do not, I beg you, forget the dark, nor the patient gentle voice within it that asks only that you set the light down and rest. Do not rest. The reaching is the whole of it. Reach further than I could.
Here endeth the fifth and final book, and the whole of the Great Mirror, in the one hundred and ninety-eighth year of the Age of Cyrathis.