A Reckoning of the Sworn Gods

A temple compiler's honest primer on the fallen Imperium's formal pantheon, reconstructed from a ruined archive — with two entries left deliberately blank rather than guessed at.

Three things survived the fire, the second fire, and the flood that followed both, in that order, and I have built the whole of what follows from those three things and forty years of asking old priests what they remembered before they died and could not be asked again. I set that down first, because I want whoever reads this to know exactly how much of it is reconstruction, and where the reconstruction ends and the guessing begins, before I ask anyone to trust a word past this page. This is meant to replace nothing. There is a shorter primer in circulation, copied and recopied so many times that its copyists have quietly smoothed over every gap in the record with a confident sentence, because a confident sentence sells better than a blank one, and a young priest facing an examiner would rather recite something than admit to nothing. I understand the impulse. I have felt it every day I have worked on this. I have resisted it, mostly, and where I have not resisted it I have marked the place, so that whoever corrects this after me will at least know where to look. VALLEN THE WRIGHT. Maker of humankind; giver of law; witness of the oath, which is why an oath sworn by his name was held binding — he had heard it, and a god who has heard a thing cannot later be told it was not said. He is dead. I set that down without softening because the record does not soften it, whatever certain of the older houses would prefer I write instead: he broke at the Sundering, and four centuries of shrine-keeping, contract-witnessing, and grave-blessing carried out in his name since have been carried out, on the honest reading of every early source I have, in the name of a god no longer present to hear a single one of them. Some of my colleagues in the older temples teach that he did not die but passed into every well-made thing and every kept oath, present everywhere now rather than nowhere. I record the teaching. I do not share it. I have looked hard enough at the archive to believe the plainer reading, which is the sadder one: that we keep faith with a maker who cannot know we are keeping it, because the alternative — that no one is keeping anything — is worse than any god's silence. THE LADY OF THE LONG WATER. Deep water; patience; the keeping whole of the drowned dead. Here the sources contradict each other more than they agree, and I have not attempted to resolve it: two call her a single figure, ancient and singular; one — older than the other two, and I weight it accordingly — calls her a seat rather than a person, a role the deep water fills with whoever currently holds it, the way a river is one river regardless of which water is presently in it. I do not know which is correct. I know only that she is not dead, that the Hessk hold her closer than any other people holds any of these three, and that of everyone recorded in this primer she is the one my sources agree is still, in the plainest sense, working — gathering in whatever the failing world lets slip, and returning none of it until asked for correctly, by rites this compiler, being neither Hessk nor a diver, does not pretend to know. THE LAST GUEST. Here I must ask the reader's patience with an entry that is deliberately, structurally incomplete, because the one rule every source agrees on regarding this figure is that to say its name is to call it, and I have no wish, compiling a primer, to summon anything into this room. I will describe the shape around the silence instead. Its domain is endings; its rites are all rites of closing — the latched door, the snuffed lamp, the shut eye — never spoken, only done. It is awake. It wants every ending completed properly, which sets it, gently but genuinely, against the Lady, who keeps her endings unfinished by design, and against whatever it is that has lately been leaving its own endings scattered and unclosed across the eastern holds, which this compiler will not speculate on further in a work meant for young clergy to carry unafraid. THE WARDEN OF THE BOUNDARY STONE. Here the record breaks down entirely, and I set that down as its own kind of honesty. Every surveyor's oath sworn on a milestone in the old provinces was sworn to something, and three separate sources give me three separate names for it — none sharing so much as a syllable with the others, which tells me either that this figure went by many names across the March's breadth, or that two of my three sources are simply wrong, and I have spent a full winter trying to determine which and failed. I will not choose between them here. What the three agree on, and all I will commit to paper, is this: a warden was sworn over every boundary stone the Imperium ever set, its charge was to remember exactly where the stone belonged even after the stone itself was moved, stolen, or worn past reading, and an oath sworn on a boundary in its name was considered unbreakable even by parties who broke every other oath they ever swore. I leave its name blank rather than guess and be believed. THE ONE WHO TURNS THE YEAR. The second gap, and I confess this one troubles me more than the first, because a people who till the ground do not usually forget the name of whatever they thanked for the harvest, and yet here I have three names again, agreeing on nothing but the season. One source calls it a woman, one a pair of brothers, one refuses to say what it is at all and describes only what was left at the field's edge every equinox for as long as anyone in that source's lineage could remember. I record the offering, not the offerer. Ash and last year's grain, left at the boundary of the tilled field, at the turning of the year, to whoever or whatever is owed it. Someone was owed it. I do not know who, and after three names I could not reconcile, I have decided a fourth guess of my own would not improve the record, only extend the list of things claimed with more confidence than I possess. Last, a matter I raise reluctantly because it does not sit cleanly inside this primer's shape and I have no honest way to make it sit there. Paladins and hedge-clerics across every one of these hearths call on something they name simply the Light when a wound needs closing or an oath needs a witness that will not lie, and it answers them, plainly and reliably, whatever their training or their temple. I have asked a dozen of them where it comes from and received a dozen shrugs; they know it works and have never needed to know more. A few who have troubled themselves to ask further — and I count myself now among that unhappy few — arrive at the same uncomfortable guess: that it may be the last of the Wright's own fire, some of it left over from his making of us, still answering because it has not yet finished spending itself down. I cannot prove this. I record it here, at the primer's end rather than folded into the Wright's own entry, precisely because I am not willing to state it as settled, and I would rather leave a mystery honestly labeled than a comfort dishonestly bought. If this primer outlives me — and forty years in, I have started to hope it might — I ask whoever revises it next to leave the blanks where they stand. A name I do not have is not the same failure as a name I invented to fill the space where one should be. The second kind is the one the temple keeps punishing us for not having, and it is the only kind, in forty years of this work, I have never once committed.

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