The Old Reckonings, Set Down Plain

A demoted scholar's patient primer on the Old Reckonings — the five elements, the Duality, the Primal Discord, the twin cycles — written by a man no longer permitted to call any of it settled.

You picked this up either because someone told you it was nonsense or because someone told you it was the truth, and either way you deserve better than what they gave you. I taught this doctrine to first-years for eleven years before I was invited, with great courtesy, to teach something else instead. I set it down here as plainly as I know how, without the flourishes that used to fill a lecture hall, because plain is what is left to me. Begin at the top. The doctrine holds that everything — every stone, every god, every grudge — is one of five elements, and that the five sit in a ladder, not a row. Highest is Aether, the stuff the gods are made of before they take on weight; you cannot see or touch it, only its leavings — the warmth in an old relic, the dead who will not lie down. Below that, twinned, are Air and Fire: Air is passage and the in-between, the wind that carries and does not stay; Fire is the hinge, the one element that makes and unmakes in the same motion, forge and pyre both. Below those, twinned again, are Water and Earth: Water is patience and dissolution, the thing that erodes rather than breaks; Earth is what has finished settling, the ground everything else eventually becomes. The ladder is not decoration. The doctrine holds that every people alive is a settling of it — that when the wheel of the world was young, a people crystallized wherever the descent paused long enough to take shape, and that is why the Vyr speak of Aether and do not explain it, why the Asheni keep the forge and the grudge in the same house, why the Stoneborn build things meant to outlast the builder. I taught this part with real pride for a long time. I still believe most of it. I no longer have the standing to say so in a lecture hall, which is a different thing from being wrong, though I understand why the two get confused by people in a hurry. The two cycles are what make the ladder move. The Cycle of Rebirth runs downward and then back up: Aether becomes Fire, Fire becomes Earth, Earth becomes Water, Water becomes Air, Air rises and becomes Aether again, and the wheel has come home. The Cycle of Ruin is its twin, the same stages read as loss instead of gift: Aether destroyed disperses into Air, Air wounded bleeds into Water, Water dying settles into Earth, and Earth — this is the part that matters to anyone standing in the Vale today — waits for Fire to cleanse it and complete the return. Without Fire, Earth waits forever. I am not fond of this part. It is the doctrine's plain claim, and the world we live in gives it uncomfortable support: the god who was Fire is four centuries dead, and the barrows are full, and nothing in them is going anywhere. Above both cycles sits the Duality, which the doctrine treats as the frame the wheel turns inside: the Heavens above, home of Aether and the gods before they take on weight; the Underworld below, where the dead finish their unmaking and are returned to the substrate they came from; and the living world suspended between the two, held in place, the doctrine says, by the tension of the poles pulling even. I found this the most beautiful part of the system when I was young, and I confess I still do. A world that only makes accumulates without releasing. A world that only unmakes empties without replenishing. Somewhere under all of it is the reason anything holds together at all, and the doctrine at least offers a reason, which is more than most of what has replaced it does. Under the Duality — older, cruder, and the part the doctrine's critics enjoy least — sits the Primal Discord: the claim that the world was not made in peace but fought into being, that the gods swore their oaths in the aftermath of a violence large enough to contest existence itself, and that a deep unrest was left in the ground of things when the fighting stopped. The doctrine holds this unrest recurs — a god-war becomes an empire, an empire becomes a house, a house becomes a feud, a feud becomes a knife in an alley, each smaller and faster than the last. I will note, because I owe you honesty and not merely loyalty, that the doctrine's critics call this a mood dressed up as a law, unfalsifiable by design: of course every ruin looks like it belongs to a pattern, if the pattern is allowed to be any size at all. I have not found a clean answer to that objection in eleven years of trying. I record it here because a fair account records the objections it cannot answer, and because I am no longer permitted to pretend otherwise. Here is what the doctrine cannot explain, and I taught around it for longer than I am proud of. The Hessk never held to any of this — Water is their whole life and they have no use for a ladder above it. The Korl have no name for Aether and are not troubled by the absence. The Vyr, who by the doctrine's own reckoning should have refined this scheme past every other people's grasp, put it down generations ago for a different account entirely, and will not say why to anyone below Aelvyrenn. A doctrine that the people closest to its top rung have quietly abandoned is not, whatever else it is, a settled account of the world. I have used that word twice above, from old habit, and I am required to tell you I no longer have the authority to leave it standing. Consider both instances withdrawn, and replaced with: as I was taught to believe, once, by men who were certain, in a hall that no longer teaches this. I am not certain any longer. I find, some evenings, that I miss it.

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