Year 214 After the Fall
The world is a thing remembered. To be remembered is to be real. To be forgotten is the only true death — and nothing stays hidden forever, because attention uncovers all, eventually.
Two hundred and fourteen years ago the demon Archaic rose. The wizard Vogthan crossed the sea with his force and felled him, and paid his own life to do it. Where he died a miasma settled over that continent, and it has not lifted since. It does not blow ashore. It does not thin. It does not move. No bird will cross the waterline toward it — ravens least of all.
The charts name it Vogthan's Fall and give no reason to go. The peace was counted from that day and the calendar still counts from it; every candle in Resonance is lit to him.
That peace is the Lantern Age: candle-rings and coach-roads, wax seals and standing registries, censer-smoke and cellar-damp. Power here is the Impress — not fire from nothing, but pressure on the world's memory. Wizardry authors. Priestcraft recalls. Pactcraft borrows, on registered terms.
Two kinds of people live under that law. The Lit hold the lantern-lit districts and are tried by their own Court of Lumens. The Graven are called instruments, kept to the Shade, barred from lantern streets after last bell without a chit — and conscriptable by right. The polite word for what sits between them is disdain. The honest word is contempt.
You are nobody in particular. You have a trade, a few marks, people you have buried and people you have not.
Lately there is talk. Pacts signed that the Registry has no record of. Familiars found where no wizard lives. A hanged cattle-thief in the Emberdown who kept talking on the rope. Nobody official says anything, and the talk does not stop.
Three days up the Verdance Track there is a fort that has gone nine days silent. Nobody in Wide Rest is talking about that yet.
Your name is already on a Conscription Writ. You have three days before the road takes you. That is the one thing in this story you do not choose.
Everything else is yours. Where you go. Who you speak to, help, rob, love, or walk past. Who you take with you, and whether they are who they say they are. The dice are rolled in the open, and the world does not forget what you did.
No one lives the same in Munin.
No one lives the same in Munin.
The Graven — unrefined, the registries say, no magic in them, only hands. Shunned to the Shade, conscripted to the wild roads to die, worked until their palms close shut.
The Lit — descendants of the great wizard, they say, rewarded for simply existing. Powerful energies reside within them. So does something else: the polite word is disdain, the honest one is contempt — and beneath both, if you hear the Shade tell it, a rot.
You choose which side of the canal you were born on. Nothing else. No one hands you a title — you wake with two points and three arts open to you, and the first point you spend is what makes you someone: it shapes your body, your attributes and the tools that end up in your hands. Spend four in that art and your caste's other two open as well. The canal never does.
Nothing you pick is locked while the world has not tested you. Until you have swung at something, or the Writ has taken you out of your ordinary life, you can set any choice back down and pick again — for nothing. After that a clerk at the Conservatory Annex will still unmake it, for coin.