Royal Taxonomy of Peoples, Houses, and Lineages of the Realm

— in a second hand, on the flyleaf —

This book was written by a man I held dear inspite of insistence at keeping the order.

Corwin Thelian, Archon of the realm. His name is in the Crown's own gold, and every careful, certain, terrible sentence is his. He never dared wonder, and I am ashamed to say it is because he was a coward when it was easiest to be one. There is not a single shred of doubt anywhere in this book, and the most prominent feature of a colonial regime is that it speaks most assuredly of its missions. I have taken to calling what this book dresses up as order by its true name: Fae Supremacy, the belief, never written plainly but felt in every line, that Fae blood is gold and all else is dross to be weighed, sorted, and spent.

I bear Corwin's name and his house and not much else of his. I have never sat in any dark room deciding the worth of others, nor chosen a path where my pen was forced to write anything but the truth. Instead I stood at the edges of the world, in the cold, in the divisions, beside the very people these pages rank, file, and in every sense of the word shackle with their "distinctions." Beside one of them I learned so much more than I ever thought I would. This dead tree the Fae worship has roots so decayed and so deep that I find it hard to imagine any arc of redemption for it.

He told me the truths once, when he was certain of death at his door and no longer an archon, and I write them here now as a testament that culling the branches of this tree is a necessary act. History is written by the victor, and his story will always be one of triumph and success.

M.T.

Aathe Crown's printed text — Archon Corwin Thelian

Aathe margins — M.T

Preface

On the Right Ordering of Peoples

This primer is set before the novice reader as a first instruction in the ordering of the world, that the untutored mind might be furnished at the outset with correct understanding, and spared the vulgar errors into which the unlettered so readily fall.

It is the first work of any settled realm to know the peoples within it and about it, for a kingdom that cannot name its neighbours cannot keep its borders, and a Crown that cannot order its subjects cannot keep its peace. The present volume states what is: the peoples of the known world, their natures, and their features; the Houses and lineages of Faerel; and the clans and confederations of its marches. It does not speculate, and it does not equivocate. Where a people is placed among the Crown's own, history and bond have made them so. Where a people is set apart, their own institutions, practices, and conduct toward the Throne have placed them.

Some object that to classify a people is to confine them. The Academy holds otherwise. To be known is to be granted a place; and a place, once granted, is the beginning of all peace. Under the Morning Star, all things are ordered, and in their ordering, made one.

✒

"To be known is to be granted a place; and a place, once granted, is the beginning of all peace." A gift, he calls it, and the horror of it is that he meant every word! This is how Fae Supremacy works: underneath every gracious sentence in this volume sits the belief that the peoples the Crown conquers are barbaric, unlettered, unfit to govern themselves, and that a place inside the Fae kingdom is not a theft but an honor, a mercy handed down to people who could never have built anything worth the name on their own. The Crown conquers a people on land that was never its own, and declares that land sovereign simply by saying so, and then it holds out its hand, small and gracious, a place at the table, a name in the ledger, peace in exchange for their sovereignty, for the right to govern themselves and answer to no rule but their own. It never asks for this outright. It never has to. And if the people refuse, as any people would, the Crown does not withdraw the hand. It levels them instead, burns what will not bend, and when the fires are out it holds out that same hand a second time, smiling, patient, as though nothing at all has happened between the first offer and this one, except that now there is no army left standing to say no. This is not peace. It is the last insult, dressed as the first courtesy — being asked to thank the hand that razed their homes. A leash can run long enough to feel like the open road, and the Crown has had a thousand years to make the leather soft. You only find the end of it the once, when there is nothing left of you to walk any further.

Part the First

Of the Peoples of the World

Herein the peoples of the continent are set down according to their kind.

The Elves

Among the eldest peoples of the world are the Elves. They are a reclusive folk, hermits by long custom, who keep to the deep northern forests and cannot be found there but by their own consent. The realm's one link to elvenkind is House Myrienn, the royal line of the elves, which alone among their people holds relation with the Crown.

The Elves are long-lived beyond the measure of the Fae, and command a magic older and deeper than any other in the world. The point of the ear belongs to the pure-blooded elf alone; where the elder blood is mingled, it bears no outward sign. Beyond House Myrienn, elvenkind keeps to its own forests, its own tribes, and its own governance, and holds no commerce with the realm.

✒

"Cannot be found unless they consent." So not lost, then. Just done with us, and I cannot honestly say I blame them! The heralds go quiet about the blood, and that silence is not an accident. Both elven and lycan blood can travel a long way down a family before anyone notices, sitting quiet for generations and then surfacing in a child whose parents never saw it coming. In a mixed line the elven blood shows nothing on the outside, so no one thinks to look twice at a quiet House with good eyesight and a long memory. Wolf blood is not so lucky. House Seradain holds that a lycan is lower than any Fae and lower even than an elf, a beast wearing a person's face, and I have heard what their line does when a child begins to show it: strength no infant should have, a grip that breaks what it holds, ears and eyes too sharp for the room, a body that goes days without food or rest and does not weaken for it. They call it a sickness taken young, and bury the truth in the same grave as the child. A House that kills its own children for what they might become is not casting out a beast. It is the beast, through and through, and it has simply never had to look at itself in anything that shows a reflection. I cannot prove this. I can only tell you that I have heard it said too many times, by too many people who had no reason to agree with one another, for it to be nothing. It is not common knowledge and this House sits now on the throne: that House Velyrin, wolf and pine and silver, proud rangers of the border, has elven blood somewhere in its own line and has for generations, and prays every day that no one asks too closely why its wardens see so well in the dark. Half the Houses turning up their noses at tainted blood have almost certainly got some. I find that more entertaining than I probably should, until I remember what House Seradain does to the ones who cannot hide it at all.

The Fae

The Fae are the most numerous people of the realm and the builders of the Kingdom of Faerel, from whom the greater part of its citizens descend. They bear neither the pointed ears nor the long lives of the elder folk; their distinction is the breadth and adaptability of their magic, and the great variety of their regional peoples. The Academy recognises two branches: the Eastern Fae of the old provinces, from whom the Noble Houses and the institutions of governance arise; and the Mountain Folk of the Thunder Mountains and the Western Passes, a hardy people of regional Houses and village councils, reckoned among the Crown's own.

The Akwasisi

West of the Thunder Mountains dwell the Akwasisi, a people of clans and kinship rather than Houses, who have held the western territories since before the Crown's writ reached them. They are masters of wilderness travel and navigation, and many serve the realm within the Scout Corps. They possess a great affinity for magic, and are bonded, each in their fashion, to aspects of the natural world — to wind and water, stone, beast, and growing thing — though their gifts are not confined to such bonds alone. They are properly understood as a western branch of the broader Fae, however their clans may protest the classification.

Relations between the Crown and the Akwasisi improved following the Opening of the Western Passes, after which trade between the realm and the western clans greatly increased. By the standing accord that followed, the western clans furnish three-fifths of their able-bodied population of age to the realm's divisions in every generation, rendering their levy in service of arms; and their territories beyond the Passes remain closed to outside passage, not to be entered without the clans' leave. The Academy accounts this a bond of shared service, and a mark of the loyalty the western clans bear the Throne.

✒

"Opened" is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. The Passes were not opened. They were taken by force, and what happened in the taking is more than twenty years gone now but not, I think, forgotten by anyone who was standing in it. I have heard enough from soldiers who were there, old men now, some of them still waking from it, to know what the horror of conquering a people is. Villages burned to the ground in a single night, granaries and winter stores put to the torch on purpose so that whoever survived the fire would not survive the season after it. Elders killed in front of children to make the point stick faster than words could have made it. Whole clans marched down out of the high country at spear-point, roped together, and told this was mercy. As I write this number my hand shakes: Oll-l, one hundred and twenty-one people. People with lives and dreams, and who were loved, dead in a single winter that the book above me will not even admit happened at all. Then we called the taking an accord, and it makes me sick to my stomach. Here is what the levy is: it is paid in their own people, three-fifths of them, sent across the mountains by the year to serve our divisions. Our soldiers have a name for what's left of the two-fifths who stay behind, and a name for the ones who go, and I have heard both said with a laugh in the mess hall. I do not laugh. The scouts go in first, into the ground no one else will walk, on the missions the planners already count as lost before they begin. When one of them does not come back, and the next is sent the same week. That is the bond of shared service the book is so proud of. I have stood beside those soldiers in the cold and learned their names, and I have watched how cheaply those names are spent. They are no branch of the Fae, whatever the page insists, and they have said so for years. I think sometimes of the Shade, further south, past every border the Crown has ever managed to move. No accord was ever struck with them. No levy was ever collected. I used to think that meant the Crown simply had not reached them yet. I no longer think that. I think the Shade looked at exactly what was offered to the Akwasisi and understood, faster than the Akwasisi were given the chance to, that death was the better of the two doors, and I think, whatever else is true about that place, they were not wrong.

The Desert Dwellers (of the Shade)

Beyond the southern reaches of the realm lies the region the Crown names the Shade, and within it dwell the desert dwellers. They are an ancient and self-governing folk of city-states, noble lineages, and tribal alliances, who reject the names the realm has given them — both the Shade and the desert dwellers — and hold instead to a name of their own, which this primer does not record.

Their magic falls outside the natural order. They move matter by will alone; they work upon the inner faculties of others — upon memory, emotion, perception, and the will itself; and, foremost among their arts and the source of the realm's name for them, they bend and command shade, which is to say shadow and the darkness it carries. Because such workings violate both the mind and the natural order alike, they are prohibited throughout Faerel without exception.

✒

I will write their name one time: the Daemeni. The book refuses to, and after what I have heard I am no longer certain the book is only being rude. There is something underneath this entry, under the whole prohibition, that I have heard said aloud twice and seen written down never. One of the men who went to find out did come back, eventually, though I am not certain "back" is the right word for what returned. He had a single word etched into every inch of skin the Crown's surgeons could find on him: reagent. Not written. Etched, deep, as though carved rather than marked, and none of them could say by what hand or what blade. He died not long after, and it was not a quiet death. He begged for it toward the end, begged anyone near him to finish what the wound would not, and no healer's magic in this kingdom could touch whatever had been done to him. I do not know enough to know what the truth is, only that the men who went to find out stopped writing letters home, and the one who came back would have been better off doing the same. I will stop here on what I know, and say only this on what I suspect. I have started to wonder if the name we are all so carefully taught to fear, the Shade, is not the true one at all, but a name chosen precisely because a people who cannot be found make a very convenient thing to hunt. Chase the Shade forever and you will never catch it, and you will never have to ask what it is you are actually afraid of. The Crown hides only what it fears, and it has never once tried to hide the Shade. It hides the Daemeni. It hides the word reagent. I fear those are the true names of whatever is coming, and that the Shade is only the shadow we have all been handed so we would stop looking for what casts it. Word has reached even a room as small as mine that there is a war brewing, and that it is the Shade's ghosts who are coming to claim Faerel. I no longer believe that is the whole of it, and I no longer trust the book, or the Crown, to tell me the rest. I want to be plain about where I stand in that war before it arrives. I have no sympathy for the Fae kingdom. I have a great deal for its citizens, who are fed a lifetime of propaganda and go on believing, in perfect good faith, that they belong to a peaceful people.

The Beastkin

Under the name Beastkin the Academy gathers the peoples who bear the inherited traits of beasts: among them the Wolfkin, the Hawkkin, the Stagkin, and the Bearkin. They are found in scattered communities across the continent and form no unified polity, holding instead to local custom and kin. Several Noble Houses bear beasts upon their arms — the wolf, the stag, the falcon, the ram, the hawk — and the novice is cautioned that these devices are heraldic and symbolic only, signifying the virtues of a House and nothing of beastkin descent. The two must never be confused.

The Giants

The Giants, or Giant-kin, are a people of the high and isolated mountain country, known for their great stature and their strong communal traditions. They keep apart from the institutions of the realm and are seldom seen in its courts or councils.

The Dragonkin

The dragons from whom the Dragonkin descended are extinct, lost out of the world in the elder age, and the Dragonkin have passed with them. What remains is legend, the relics of a vanished line, and the false genealogies of those who covet so storied a descent. The novice is cautioned against every living claim of draconic blood, of which there are far more than the elder records can support.

The Spirits

The Spirits are not numbered among the mortal peoples, and are not classified as such. Their dealings with the inhabitants of the realm are nonetheless frequent and well attested, and are recorded by the religious authorities as matters of doctrine and of law. For their fuller treatment the reader is directed to the works of House Seradain.

One people alone stands outside every order set down above; the reader is directed to the Addendum at the close of this volume.

Part the Second

Of the Ordering of Peoples Beneath the Crown

Set down not by kind, but by the relation in which each is held to the Crown of Faerel. Four orders are recognised.

Classification the First — Crown Peoples

Peoples foundational to the realm and recognised as its own: the Eastern Fae, seated in the old provinces beneath their Noble Houses, and the Mountain Folk of the Thunder Mountains and the Western Passes. To these the full protection and the full obligation of the Crown extend alike.

Classification the Second — Allied Peoples

Peoples of long relation to the Crown who keep their own governance and custom. Foremost are the Akwasisi, whose clans are recognised and whose kinship is honoured. They are bound to the Crown by accord rather than by subjection; and by that accord — the agreement of levy and trade — their territories remain closed to outside passage, and may not be entered without their leave.

Classification the Third — Frontier Peoples

Peoples dwelling within territories claimed by the Crown while holding to strong regional identity and local rule. Chief among them are the peoples of the Badlands and the Eastern Ridge, organised in tribal confederations and village councils. The region has, throughout its history, produced numerous movements of resistance; most communities maintain peaceful relation with the Crown; and tensions arise, from time to time, regarding matters of governance and the administration of territory.

✒

"Claimed." He means taken, and will not write taken. The word he dances around, disgracefully, is occupation, a word every child on the Ridge already knows by heart, because they have lived under it since before they could walk. Numerous movements of resistance, the book calls it, as though resistance were a weather pattern that simply occurs over the Badlands from time to time, with no cause and no author. When people push back against tyranny, this book records it as a flaw in their character, a defect bred into the blood of the Ridge, as if resistance were something they were born with rather than a fight for freedom. That is not a history of the Ridge. It is a man scolding the bruise and excusing the fist. I have stood on that ground. I have heard what "administration of territory" means to the people standing under it, and it does not mean what this page wants a novice reader to believe. ASH BEFORE GOLD.

Classification the Fourth — Foreign Civilisations

Political entities lying beyond the authority and jurisdiction of the Crown. Foremost among these are the desert dwellers of the region the Crown names the Shade — a civilisation of city-states and noble lineages whose magic is prohibited within the realm for the reasons set down above.

✒

"Beyond the authority and jurisdiction of the Crown." For now. I have seen maps that already assume otherwise, maps that were never meant for eyes like mine. I slipped into Mirabel Levant's chambers under cover of night, and I will not pretend the door simply opened for me. I used a kind of magic a man my rank is meant to leave well alone, and I do not know what frightens me more, that I did it, or how easily it came to me once I decided to. What I found inside was worse than the risk. Maps already showed the Shade carved up and claimed on paper, borders drawn in a hand far steadier than any honest uncertainty should allow. And to the east, across the desert of the Shade itself, amidst more desert, marked in red where nothing else on the map was marked at all: a single letter, R. I can only assume that letter to mean one thing, and I have already told you what it cost the last man who went looking for it.

Part the Third

Of the Houses and Lineages of Faerel

Their devices, their colours, and the matters for which each is known.

House Sylvaranththe Royal House — the Morning Star above the Great Tree, beneath the Three Moons; burgundy, deep green, and silver.

Known for royal authority, governance, and diplomacy.

The High Houses

House Velyrina silver wolf beneath pine branches; forest green and silver.

Rangers, scouts, and the wardenship of the borders.

House Myriennan open eye surrounded by stars; white, gold, and midnight blue.

Scholarship, magic, and the keeping of the archives; the Academy itself is reckoned among its works. Alone among the High Houses the Myrienn are not of Fae blood but of elven — the royal line of the elves, and the realm's one link to that reclusive people. The Crown counts them among its own, and they have wed into the Royal House itself.

✒

An elven royal house, tucked into a list of Faerel's "High Houses" as though it were one more noble family with a nice library. I have come to suspect the Crown boasts a link it does not truly have, and does so only to save face. Elven kind is known for an ancient magic and old whispers of immortality, and I think the Crown would rather claim kinship with that immortality than admit the truth, which is that the elves want nothing to do with us and never have. What the book will not say is the price of that immortality: it costs a Fae his soul entire, and asks nothing of the same weight from anyone of pure elven blood. It is not a gift passed down. It is a transformation, and what a Fae becomes on the other side of it is a predator in every sense the word allows, whatever pleasant name the Houses give it in company.

The Everwood spans some three thousand square leagues, further than any survey the Crown has ever managed to complete. House Velyrin keeps only a small corner of it, some fifty square leagues known as the Whispering Grove, and the Crown keeps its own forest, the Sylvethorne, three times as large. Beyond Velyrin's lands lies the Greywood, rumored, never confirmed, to shelter what remains of the elves still living in this part of the world. Men have been found dead at the Greywood's edge on occasion for as long as anyone can remember, killed by elven arrows, and such deaths were rare enough once to pass almost unremarked. They have not been rare since the rifts began to appear. Even now the dead turn up in the Sylvethorne, in the Crown's own forest, elven arrows still in them, far from any place an elf has any reason to be. I do not know what that rise means. I only know it is a rise, and that no one above me seems willing to say the word rifts aloud in the same breath as the word elves, which tells me they already suspect a connection they have not yet dared to write down either. It is no wonder, given how close Velyrin's own lands sit to the Greywood, that the whisper about their blood has never quite died.

There is older business between Myrienn and Velyrin that no herald ever wrote down. If the blood crossed once, it is crossing still, and it keeps very quiet; a man could bear it his whole life and never feel more than a little out of place in his own skin. I will say no more about it. That secret is not mine to tell, and it has no place in this book.

House Vaelortwin falcons circling a tower; slate blue and bronze.

Military command and the eastern fortifications.

House Aureliana crowned stag; gold and crimson.

Diplomacy, trade, and agriculture.

House Seradaina white flame within a ring; white and ash-grey.

The religious institutions of the realm and the keeping of magical law. The flame is held sacred as the emblem of pure and lawful magic, set within the ring that signifies its right and proper containment.

✒

"Pure and lawful magic." The same authority that calls this flame holy calls another fire a crime, and I have stopped believing the difference is the fire. The difference is whether Seradain can keep it inside a ring. Seradain is the only House in the realm that culls its own children. It kills them for showing a power the Fae cannot control, or for bearing features that trace back to their ancestors, a proud and honorable people this House would rather forget it ever came from. And here it sits on the page as the guardian of purity. I have come to see Seradain as the heart of Fae Supremacy. The Crown depends on this House far more than the book will admit. Seradain is richer than the throne, and its blessing is what makes the throne look holy to the people kneeling before it. Strip that blessing away and the Crown is a man in a gold hat.

And look at who wears that hat now. The King is not of royal blood at all. He married into the throne. The Queen has all the blood of a noble line in her, and they have chained her to that throne with no real power to speak of. She is the only good thing to come from her grandfather and her father, both brutal colonizers who met everything they did not understand with fear, and then with the sword.

And for fear of being called a coward, I will tell you why I wield this pen instead of the blade. Most of Seradain is good. Every one of us knows a Seradain priest who sat with someone we loved at the end, and meant every kind word. The faithful at the bottom feed the hungry and bury the dead with real tenderness, and they have no idea what is decided above them. A blade cannot tell them apart from the men who use them. Swing it at this House and it falls first on the kind priest and the child he feeds, while the ones at the top go on untouched. The higher you climb in that House, the darker it gets, and at the very top sits Jaxim Seradain. I will write his name plainly. He is the root of all the evil this House does, and the good people at the bottom are the very reason no one will ever believe it. The truth, written down where they can read it, is the only thing that reaches them. So I write.

Do not mistake that goodness for softness. This House is insidious in a way no army could ever be. There is nothing in all of Faerel that Seradain does not hear. There is not a field mouse that eats a breadcrumb they do not know of. Their priests sit at every sickbed and every naming, and people tell a priest what they would never tell a soldier. Even now, far from them and well out of their reach, I catch myself peering into the shadows of this room, half certain one of theirs is standing there. Of every House in this book, this is the one to truly fear.

Seradain teaches that the White Flame will never manifest in Faerel, and they teach it with such confidence that the faithful never think to ask why. I know why. I have seen the full prophecy, the part they keep from the pulpit, and it reads:

When the white flame wakes upon Faerel's ground,
no force shall bind it and no rite shall bank it.
It comes as harbinger, and death walks in its light,
and the Morning Star shall set upon the last of the Fae.
But should the Fae bow low and yield before it,
a new dawn shall rise upon the Fae,
and in glory and in harmony they shall stand,
for those of the flame will be the victors.

Jaxim has read those last lines the only way a man like him could. To him, bowing means worship, and worship means ownership: capture the flame, make a god of it, kneel to it in public and keep it on a chain in private, and the Fae stand victorious with the end of their world locked safely away. So he means to take it when it comes, twist it into something Seradain can use, and seal it inside a ring. That ring on the sigil is no symbol. It is a real thing, and I have learned where it came from: it is a relic of a sorcerer of the Shade, one powerful enough to have touched the White Flame, and the ring he left behind is said to be strong enough to contain it. The House that forbids every art of the desert keeps a desert relic at the very center of its faith.

I see Jaxim for exactly what he is. He has built this faith the way a jailer builds a cell. Its doctrine exists to keep the believers faithful and to make every evil the House commits feel holy. Culling a child, burying a truth, chaining a flame: each one turns into mercy the moment a man believes he is saving Faerel, and that is precisely what they believe. There is no one more dangerous than a man certain he is saving the world, because there is nothing he will not do on his holy crusade.

I have sat with this prophecy for a long while, half feeling mad for treating it as any true telling of the future, and half trying to see what it could truly mean. I think the death it brings is the death of this, of everything this book was written to defend, and that to bow before it means to let it burn through us and follow where it leads. I think the dawn waits on the far side of that fire, and I think Seradain will fight it with everything it has, because those who believe will not be able to confront the atrocities they committed. Even a good man will fight to the bitter end to avoid confronting himself, and die believing he was right sooner than live one day knowing what he has done. That is how good men come to do the worst of it. I pray I am never so afraid of the truth that I would kill to keep from seeing it.

The Regional Mountain Houses

Respected families of the mountain country, reckoned regional rather than High. House Breckin bears a black ram; House Thorne, a pine split by lightning; House Alderwyn, a white hawk; and House Marrick, a lantern beneath a mountain arch.

Royal Naming Protocol

Among the nobility, an individual bears a single House name, inherited through the recognised lineage. Members of the Royal House may bear two family names when descended from both the Crown and a recognised High House. The accepted order places the High House first and the Royal House last.

[ High House Name ] + [ Royal House Name ]

Kalien Velyrin Sylvaranth
Alina Myrienn Sylvaranth
Rowan Vaelor Sylvaranth

Part the Fourth

Of Clans, Confederations, and the Marks They Bear

The Akwasisi Clans

The Akwasisi reckon themselves not by Houses but by clans, bound by blood and by kinship. Of these clans the realm holds no full account, for the western people keep their own counsel and have set neither their names nor their number before the Crown. The accord of levy and trade, struck after the Opening of the Western Passes, opened the markets and fixed the tribute owed; it secured no knowledge of their inner governance, which remains, by the clans' own design, closed to the realm. One clan alone is known to the Crown with certainty: the Clan of Helaku, reckoned foremost among the western leadership and the realm's surest point of contact among them. Of the rest, the Academy records only that they are, and forbears to invent what it has not been given to know.

Academy NoteAkwasisi clan-marks are not to be confused with noble heraldry. They signify ancestry and kinship, and not the holding of territory nor any rank within the Houses; the novice is directed to keep the distinction plainly in mind.

✒

The realm is anxious you might mistake a clan-mark for a House sigil. I doubt mistaking them is the real worry. If a mark can stand for family and belonging without ever once standing for conquest, it asks a rude question of every sigil that did. Far easier to forbid the comparison.

Now look at the one clan the Crown claims to know with certainty. The Clan of Helaku, "the realm's surest point of contact." The Crown knows the Helaku because the Helaku walked into its army and climbed. Their chief gave up his seat to answer the levy, and he rose until there was no rank left for a levied man to reach. Animikii Helaku is the Second Sword now, the general's own right hand, and his son followed him in and has risen nearly as fast. Make no mistake, the two of them are a force to be reckoned with.

They say Animikii climbed so high to win a better lot for his people, to lobby from within for their freedom until the Akwasisi stood beside the Crown as partners instead of beneath it as a levy. Anyone who knows the Crown knows it will never accept as a partner what it has already won by conquest. So why did Animikii Helaku become the Second Sword?

I have been asking. The Second Sword keeps an assassin, and that assassin does not discriminate. I have followed the list of the dead as best a man in my position can, and it makes no sense at all. A quartermaster. A Seradain deacon. A Vaelor captain. A merchant who sold rope. The people taken vary so widely that it feels like madness, and I think that is exactly how it is meant to feel. Madness is the one thing no one bothers to investigate. I have been picking at the threads one by one, and I am close now to seeing the true aim. Something is in motion. I cannot yet say what it is or who else has a hand in it. I only know that the Helaku did not come across those mountains to serve the Crown, and that whatever they came to do, they have been doing it for a very long time.

The Tribes of the Eastern Ridge

Kharrowthe Red Handprint

Velkainethe Broken Spear

Ossikarthe Black Hawk

Draeventhree claw marks

Academy NoteThese confederations are counted among the Frontier Peoples. The marks they bear are, by the tribes' own account, signs of standing and of remembrance; and the Black Hawk of Ossikar is not to be confused with the White Hawk of House Alderwyn, with which it shares neither bearing nor meaning.

✒

The book calls these "signs of standing." Ask anyone of the Velkaine and you will get something far more exact: a year, a place, what was done to them, and the name of who did it. They raise markers because the symbols were the one thing the Crown never managed to take. The book would rather call all of that decoration. I do understand the wish. It is hard to keep ruling people who have kept such careful records of their oppressors' transgressions.

Now look at the last mark on this page. Three claw marks, the Draeven. The Crown files them among the Frontier Peoples, the troublesome ones, the tribes it must forever keep in line. What the book will not tell you, and what I cannot yet prove, is that two of the realm's own High Houses may have come out of those same eastern lands shortly before Faerel was ever founded. House Velyrin wears the wolf openly on its crest. House Seradain buried it inside a priesthood. I have been trying to trace the ancestry of both Houses far enough back to match it to the Draeven, and every line I follow ends in the same dead end: records lost and pages missing. For days after I began asking, I was followed. Were I not myself of House Thelian, of the Archons, I fear I would not have lived.

So the book asks the novice to look down on a people whose blood may well run through the King's own House and through the holiest House in the realm. If I am right, the Crown came from the very people it conquered, and it has been trying to cut that truth out of itself ever since.

Addendum

Of the Sidhe'calaen, the Starborn Archivists

The Sidhe'calaen, called the Starborn Archivists, stand outside every order set down in this volume — not for want of standing, but for want of any fixed place among the peoples of the world.

They hold no kingdom, raise no army, and claim no territory. They keep to archives, repositories, observatories, and the keeping-places of old records. They are long-lived beyond reckoning, hold a memory of history beyond all ordinary measure, and take no part in faction or creed. They observe; they record; they preserve. What they do is bound to what has already come to pass, and never to what might yet be.

✒

The Sidhe'calaen keep their libraries open to any who come in good faith, and every other realm lets its people go as they please. Faerel alone decides for its people. The Crown keeps a list of who among its people may enter the Libraries, and the names on it are chosen with great care. Ask yourself why a Crown so certain of its own history would fear its people reading anyone else's.

I have been trying for some time now to get into the Omnium, the great library where the Sidhe'calaen work and learn. If the records I need exist anywhere, the records that would settle where the Draeven went and which Houses came from them, they are there. The Sidhe'calaen forget nothing. That is exactly why my name has never once appeared on the Crown's list.

I could become the next Archon, and my name would be on that list without a question asked. But I live by the pen and I seek to die by it. I will not let myself be censored, and I will not bear a legacy of carefully curated lies. I will not be a Thelian legacy, even if I must turn my back on my family.

Status: Independent Species
Political Alignment: None
Known Settlements: Unknown
Population: Unknown
Origin: Unknown

As a historian of the Academy has written:
“They concern themselves with what has happened, never with what ought to happen.”

Here ends the Royal Taxonomy of Peoples, Houses, and Lineages of the Realm. Set down at the Royal Academy of Faerel by the hand of Archon Corwin Thelian, under the Seal of House Seradain, in the present reign of House Sylvaranth. Under the Morning Star, all things ordered.

✒ "All things ordered." I have reached the last page, and I do not know how to end this. My grandfather closed his book in certainty. I cannot. Everything I have written in these margins is half a map, a row of doors I found and could not open. The people of the desert. The reagent. The ring. The Draeven. Whatever the Helaku are building in the dark. I know these things are connected, and I do not yet know how, and some nights I think the not knowing will kill me before anyone else gets the chance.

If you are reading this, the book has left my hands, and I cannot say whether that means I gave it to you or it was taken from me. Either way, read it twice. Question everything in it, mine included.

I will find the truth, if I am alive to find it.

M.T.