THE LIBRARY

What the Writ Records — On the Settling of the Vale

The Hollow Writ's official account of the Sundering, which it calls 'the Settling' — a controlled imperial rite that succeeded, with the ground's unease dismissed as tribal superstition. The opposite of the folk myth, stamped and filed and contradicting itself in the footnotes.

FILED UNDER IMPERIAL RECORD, CAER VALLEN MARCH. To be read at the posting of every new officer. Let no man of the march repeat the tribes' tale. There was no breaking. In the last good year of the Imperium the College of that age performed the Settling — a rite, lawful and intended, to seat the god Vallen firmly in the stone of his own seat that his peace might hold the march forever. It succeeded. The god was settled. That the capital's letters ceased the same season is a matter of roads and weather and is not connected. That the ground hereabouts has never sat right since is a matter of poor drainage and of grief-addled tribesfolk who hear their grandmothers in a bad wind. The dead do not walk. Talk of haunted vaults and cursed Old Work is the trade-talk of relic-thieves inflating their wares, and an officer who repeats it as fact will be corrected. [A later hand, in the margin:] Then why do we hang the relic-thieves instead of laughing at them? — and who countersigned the order to seal the lower galleries, if there is nothing below to seal? [A third hand, fainter:] Read the footnote on the eleventh page. The clerk who first copied this rite died of it. We file the lie because the order to stand down never came, and a march needs an order more than it needs the truth.

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