A Compilation of all Things Known Beneath and Before the First Light: of the Powers That Were Sung, of the World That Was, of the Realms of Mortals and the Turning of the Ages.
Gathered and collected by Priestess Sulavia Aulayr of the Monastery of the Keepers of the Light, in the one hundred and ninety eighth year of the Age of Cyrathis, in the city of Sobsia, under the seal of the monastery, in the lands of King Alphonse val'Tarvani.
This work is thusly named the Greater Mirror, and it is called so for two reasons. The first is that it is a mirror, in the manner of the ancient Lavellori tradition, whose office is to show the world entire to one who cannot walk out and see it; and I have kept to that most venerable of traditions, so far as the records permit it. The second is that a mirror in a dark room reveals nothing. Set your finest glass in a sealed vault at midnight and it will be no better than a slab of common stone, for it is not the glass that shows; it is the light, and the glass only obeys. Whosoever grasps this has already grasped the whole of the world.
My name is Sulavia Aulayr. I was born under the light of the Stars in the hundred and twenty eighth year of this gilded age. I am a priestess of the First Light, and my office is humble and of no worth committing to text.
The matter of this work is all things known: the First Light and the Wellspring beneath it; the Powers that were sung into the world after him, and the one that would not come; the world itself, its substance, its creatures and its accidents; the realms of mortals, their cities and their governance; and the turning of the ages from the Dawnsong to this present age.
What the reader will not find here is any matter that reaches us only in the thirdhand rumours of sailors driven mad by the Crosswaves, or by substances which pollute the mind; for I will not fill the mirror with fog and call it a people. Where I know nothing, I have written nothing, and where I know little, I have said how little.
Those great compilers before this age, such as Nizarus of Lacustria and Elsith the Old, were wont to boast, in this place, of the multitude of their authorities: so many hundreds of volumes consulted, so many libraries walked. I cannot make that boast, and the reason is the reason for everything in this book. My authorities are almost all dead, and most of them burned.
Of the Archives of the Luminarchate, which held the whole practical record of the Age of Magic, I have handled nothing whatsoever. They are gone, some by the cultish followers of the Endless Night, some, it is said, lost to the endless attrition of the time and disuse that followed that accursed age after the Fall of the Golden City. Of the Annex of the Grand Library at Sobsia, which held the manuals of the shaping, there remains what a man can carry out of the burning buildings in his arms, and no more. What I have worked from is therefore the third and fourth harvest of a field long since reaped: later temple chronicles, copied by hands that did not understand their contents; fragmentary Dwarven ledgers, kept in a reckoning I confess I do not truly follow; oral histories out of the western steppes, set down late and by hostile hands; theological commentaries written centuries after the events they expound, by men who had never seen a working done.
My method has been this: where the sources agree, I have set down the thing they agree upon, and named it received. Where they differ, I have set out the differing accounts side by side, in their own sense so far as I could preserve it, and left the reader to weigh them; and where I have judged between them, I have said that I judged, and on what ground, so that my judgment may be overturned by a better one. Where all sources fail, I have written that they fail. I hold this last to be the chief labour of an honest compiler and the one most commonly shirked, for it is no pleasure to set down a chapter whose whole burden is that we do not know.
Concerning my own voice, I follow the practice of the ancient Lavellori tradition, and I declare it here so that none may be deceived. Where the passage is headed thus:
The compiler: And here I speak in my own hand.
There I have left off gathering and speak for myself: to reconcile two authorities that cannot both be true, or to confess a doubt, or to defend my god where I judge him wronged, or to set down a grief that belongs to no source but me. Everywhere else, the words are of the elders and ancients, and only the ordering is mine. Let the reader hold these apart, and blame me for what is mine.
Of profit in the ordinary sense, of what a man gains for his purse or his advancement, this book offers little. It will not teach the shaping of the Wellspring; that art is lost to a Golden Age long gone, and had I known it I could not have written it down honestly, for I have never seen true sorcery done. It will not make its reader a sorcerer, nor a lord, nor even much respected, for my cult is not loved in this age and the marks of it are on every page.
What it offers is this: it sets in one place, in an order that can be argued with, what a single careful hand could recover of the world's knowing after the fires have been doused, with every uncertainty marked as uncertain. That is a smaller gift than the older work gave. It is the gift my age permits, and I would rather hand a reader a small true flame than a great false one.
As to whom I address it: I have dedicated this work to no living lord, and the reader may wonder at that, for the custom is otherwise. I have my reasons, as a patron wants a text that will flatter him, and I have not the years left to polish one. But I will not pretend the book is addressed to nobody, for one does not spend thirty years on a thing she thinks no one will open.
The compiler: So let me say plainly, at the outset, what moved me, since the custom of this little book is to end with the cause of writing, and mine is not a cause I can dress in modesty. I am old, my sight is going, and the art my God gave the world has not returned in my lifetime and will not now. I do not write for this age. This age has made its peace without the light, has named itself for a flower and not a lamp, and I do not blame it; a people long in the dark will love whatever grows. I write for whatever age comes after, when some hand better than mine takes up the shaping again, and it will be taken up, for the reaching is in us all, and it was mortals and not gods who sang first at the Shardspire and it is mortals who will sing again. To that reader, whom I shall not meet, this book is dedicated: not to a lord, not to my cult, not to my god, who needs no mirror, but to you, whoever you are, coming after. I gathered this out of ash and marked honestly where the ash was thickest. Take it. Correct it where I erred, and correct it charitably, as I have tried to correct my own sources. And when you have kindled a better light than mine, do not trouble to remember the poor lamp that carried the ember to you.
Return to the Table of the Rubrics
Here endeth the little book of apology, and the mirror itself begins.