What Broke at Caer Vallen

The standard, respectable, and ubiquitous history of the Sundering — a careful antiquarian survey that weighs every creed's account, finds physical evidence at the ruin itself, and settles on 'a working that failed.' It is wrong.

Of all the ruins in the Vale, Caer Vallen alone still draws a scholar back a second time, and I have gone back more than once. This is an attempt to set down, without embellishment and without the comfortable certainty either the temples or the tribes bring to the subject, what is actually known about what happened there some four centuries ago, and what is merely believed. Begin with what is not in dispute. The Vallen Imperium was no local kingdom; its roads and bronze law ran west of the Rampart and past the inland sea, and the Vale was its easternmost frontier — garrisoned, taxed, and held for one reason above all others, which is that the god the empire swore by, Vallen the Wright, was said to walk here, and Caer Vallen was raised as his seat: a great hall of columns meant to hold his presence at the center of the march the way a keep holds a lord. For some three centuries this arrangement worked exactly as intended. Silver came east, law came with it, and the Wright — maker, lawgiver, the god who fashioned humankind itself and witnessed the oaths sworn upon him — held his seat undisturbed. Then, in the span the old imperial reckoning gives as a single terrible season, he did not. What is known of the event itself is regrettably little, and what little there is comes to us secondhand, through tribal memory rather than imperial record — the Houses that would later settle the Vale kept no account of their own, and the Imperium's own archives, if Correth still holds them, have sent nothing east in four hundred years. The tribes say only that the empire came to bind its god closer, and instead unmade him. I have found no version of this account, in eleven years of collecting them, that goes further than that single sentence with any confidence. Everything past it is reconstruction, and a responsible scholar owes the reader an honest account of how thin that reconstruction is. The Temple's position, which you will hear from any priest still tending the old shrines, is that the Wright was taken from the world by a contest among powers we cannot see and were never meant to — that his breaking was an act done TO him by something beyond the Vale's understanding, and that the proper response is reverence, not inquiry. I set this down fairly, because it deserves to be set down fairly, and I will note only that it explains nothing a farmer could use, which does not make it false, but does make it, for the purposes of this survey, incomplete. The Bonesung account — carried by the wandering Asheni clans rather than the settled Houses — holds the breaking as a wound rather than an act: something the world itself suffered, the way a body suffers an illness, with no particular villain and no particular cause beyond the world's own frailty. I confess I find this account the most humane of the three, and the least useful. A wound with no cause cannot be guarded against, and the Bonesung, to their credit, do not pretend it can be. The third account, and the one this survey ultimately favors, comes from antiquarian speculation rather than any living creed, and holds that the breaking was the result of a working — some deliberate act of imperial craft, mounted at Caer Vallen itself, that reached for more than it could safely hold and failed catastrophically at the god's own seat. This is not a comfortable conclusion. It is, however, the only one consistent with the physical evidence still standing at the site, and a responsible scholar goes where the evidence leads even when a tidier answer is available elsewhere. The evidence is this. The throne-hall at Caer Vallen is not merely ruined; it is ruined in a specific and peculiar way. Beneath what would have been the god's own dais, the floor has been driven through — not collapsed, driven, in a great graduated shaft whose bronze fittings, where they survive at all, are bent outward and downward as though something had been forced through them under tremendous strain. I proposed, in an earlier and less careful paper than this one, that the shaft was a drainage or foundation work begun before the breaking and simply abandoned after; I no longer hold that view. A drainage shaft does not bend its own bronze rings. Something happened at that floor, deliberately, and it went wrong. More curious still, and I confess I have no settled explanation for it: the standing columns nearest the shaft do not lean outward, as toppled stonework almost always does, whether from quake, subsidence, or age. They lean inward, toward the hole, uniformly, as though drawn. I have measured this myself, twice, eleven years apart, in case some slow further settling might account for it, and found no material change between the two surveys — whatever pulled them out of true did so once, at the time of the breaking, and has not continued since. I record the observation because a fair survey records what it cannot explain as readily as what it can, and I leave the reader to draw whatever conclusion the reader finds most comfortable. My own conclusion, for what it is worth, is that a working was attempted at that floor, that it failed, and that the god broke in the failing of it. Beyond that I will not speculate, because beyond that I do not know, and a historian who tells you he knows more than this about Caer Vallen is selling you something other than history. One further matter belongs in this survey, though I set it apart because I am genuinely uncertain what to make of it. In preparing this account I wrote, as a matter of ordinary diligence, to the college at Aelvyrenn — the Vyr keep the longest memories of any people in the Vale and the best-kept archives, and it seemed plain good sense to ask whether their records held anything closer to the event than four centuries of tribal telling. I received, after a wait of some months, a reply of great courtesy and no content: the matter, I was told, predated any record the college was prepared to share with a scholar outside its walls, and the college wished me well in my researches. I do not think this refusal is significant. Institutions guard their archives for reasons that rarely have anything to do with the particular question a petitioner has asked, and a college as old and as insular as Aelvyrenn's has had four centuries to develop habits of secrecy that need no sinister explanation to account for them. I record the exchange here only because a survey that omitted it would not be complete, not because I believe it changes the conclusion above. The largest surviving piece of the Wright's shattered weapon, by every account that touches the subject at all, was carried east from the throne-hall in the hours or days after the breaking — the tribes disagree on which, and on whether it was carried by design or simply fell that way — and came to rest in what is now Vallen's Barrow, where it remains. The ruin and the relic are, in this sense, two halves of a single event a long walk apart, and a pilgrim who visits one without the other has seen only half the wound. House Vandahl claims the throne-hall by right of blood and posts no watch there worth the name; the Temple claims it by faith and holds no rite within its walls; the tribes, who claim it by neither, are the only ones who still come back with any regularity, and I have never had a satisfactory answer, from any of them, as to why. What broke at Caer Vallen, in the end, is this: a working, attempted by hands the record does not name, at a floor that still bears the marks of what was forced through it, that failed, and took a god down with it. I offer this as the most responsible account the evidence permits, not as the whole truth. The whole truth, if it survives anywhere, is four centuries and a great deal of silence away from any scholar's reach, mine included.

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