The Age of Ash

Of all the elves who came ashore from the DrowningDrowningThe night the Lullaby stopped and Vaelmere sank, about 3,200 years before the Crown., none took it harder than a boy of nine named Vel'ThuranVel'ThuranThe greatest magister of his age, who raised the Wyrmspire to bind Ignaroth, and was bound to him instead., whose father had been a Listener, and whose father had gone down to the SanctumAbyssal SanctumThe Order of the Hush’s cathedral over the trench, sunk in the Drowning. It opens when the Wyrm falls. on the night of the Unsung Verse and not come back.

Vel'Thuran grew up to be the greatest magister of his age, and perhaps of any age, and he never once in three thousand years forgave the sea. He reasoned thus: that the world rested on sleepers, and sleepers might be woken by any fool with a grievance, as his father had proved; that the world therefore needed a power greater than the sleepers, awake and answerable to the wise; and that the only power in AetheriaAetheriaThe Ember of the Aether: the world. greater than a sleeping KindlerKindlersThe singers who made Aetheria, then went down into it and sleep there, holding it together. was the fire that had fallen from one.

He went north, to FrostspireFrostspireThe northern peaks over Hammerdeep, with the Wyrmspire on the highest crag.. There, above the deepest halls of HammerdeepHammerdeepThe dwarves’ kingdom of nine halls under Frostspire, burned in a night., he raised the WyrmspireWyrmspireVel’Thuran’s tower of black stone above Frostspire, with a dragon on top.: a tower of black stone drawn up whole out of the mountain’s heart by an art nobody has been able to repeat, and built like a chimney, or a lens, to draw the Wyrm up out of the root-fire and hold him at the top in a cage of binding-words.

For the binding he needed two minds working as one, and so he took two apprentices, twin sisters of uncommon gift: SolaraSolaraVel’Thuran’s apprentices, who gave half a soul each to the binding and share one still., who was all daylight, and Nocturne, who was all dusk. On the night of the rite each gave up half her soul to make the knot, and Vel'Thuran tied the halves together. It held. It holds still. The sisters share one soul to this day, and two very strong opinions, and neither can die while the other lives, which has tested the patience of a great many raiding guilds.

To keep the gate of his tower Vel'Thuran hired an ogre of the high passes named GrukkGrukkThe ogre who keeps the Wyrmspire’s gate. Paid a year in advance, twelve hundred years ago., a very large ogre with a very large club and a very small patience, and paid him a year in advance. Grukk has kept the gate with perfect fidelity ever since, though nobody has paid him in twelve hundred years, and he would like to discuss it.

Then, at midwinter, Vel'Thuran called the dragon up.

The dragon came up.

Take heat. Never take flame. We did not take it. It was given to us, by an elf, from above, through the roof.

Between the root-fire and the foot of the black tower lay nine halls of Hammerdeep, and IgnarothIgnarothEldest of dragons, born of a drop of Orun’s fire. Bound atop the Wyrmspire, and back every week. did not go round them.

He came up through the kingdom as a spark comes up a flue. The lamps that never smoked went out. The oath-stones cracked from top to bottom, and the dwarves say that every oath ever cut on them was broken in that hour, by no fault of the ones who swore them, and that this is the greatest grief of their people: not the dead, though there were tens of thousands, but the oaths. The survivors fled up the old stairs into the snow, carrying their children and their hammers and very little else.

King ThrainThrainLast king of Hammerdeep, turned to ash at his anvil in the Burning. He is still working. the Fourth did not flee. He was at the EmberforgeEmberforgeHammerdeep’s great forge, heated by the root-fire. Its fires still burn, without fuel. when the Wyrm went by, and the fire of the Wyrm’s passing came down the shaft and filled the forge, and when it cleared the King was still standing at the anvil. He is standing there still, a figure of grey ash in the shape of a king, with a hammer of ash in his hand, and he is working. Forgewife Hilde stayed with him, and the Bellows-Master Kragg, and the two apprentices the dwarves now call the Slag Twins, and all of them are ash, and all of them are working. The fires of the Emberforge have burned without fuel for twelve hundred years, which is concerning. The dwarves call him the Ashen King, and they do not say what he is making.

As for Vel'ThuranVel'ThuranThe greatest magister of his age, who raised the Wyrmspire to bind Ignaroth, and was bound to him instead.’s binding: it worked. The Wyrm came up the tower and could not get out of the top of it. But a cage holds both ways, and the binding-words were tied with the soul of the binder’s apprentices, and the archmage stood at the cage door when it closed. When it was done the dragon was bound to the WyrmspireWyrmspireVel’Thuran’s tower of black stone above Frostspire, with a dragon on top. and the Wyrmspire was bound to the dragon, and Vel'Thuran was bound to both, as a keeper is bound to the beast he feeds. Archmage Vel'Thuran is its keeper now. The sisters are the Twin SeersSolaraVel’Thuran’s apprentices, who gave half a soul each to the binding and share one still. of the tower. GrukkGrukkThe ogre who keeps the Wyrmspire’s gate. Paid a year in advance, twelve hundred years ago. keeps the gate. And a great spider of the high crevasses, Mother Venomweave, came for the warmth and stayed for the visitors.

He wrote the definitive treatise on the arcane arts in those years, for he had a great deal of time. The AthenaeumAthenaeumHighcrest’s house of scholars and magisters, where the Annals are kept. holds the first volume. He wrote a sequel, too, which is mostly about exploding people; the Athenaeum holds that as well, in the Restricted Stacks, in a lead box, at the bottom of a well.

The upper halls of HammerdeepHammerdeepThe dwarves’ kingdom of nine halls under Frostspire, burned in a night. are the dwarven ruins of FrostspireFrostspireThe northern peaks over Hammerdeep, with the Wyrmspire on the highest crag. now, where the yeti have moved into the throne rooms and see no reason to move out. The lower halls are the EmberforgeEmberforgeHammerdeep’s great forge, heated by the root-fire. Its fires still burn, without fuel. Depths. Below that, nobody goes.

The dwarves who climbed out into the snow had no king and no kingdom and, which was worse to them, no oaths that still held. They scattered. Some went into the mountains and became the clans of the high passes. Some went down to the coasts. Hammerdeep’s seer climbed up into the ice above the Frostfang caverns to keep watch on the black tower, in case the Wyrm came down from it, and she froze there at her watch and did not notice, and she is watching still. The rest came at last to the city that men were building on the crest above GreenmeadowGreenmeadowRolling hills, farms, and an alarming number of boars. Every guild starts here., and asked for a gate to live by, and were given one, and StonegateStonegateThe dwarven quarter of Highcrest, given to the kingless dwarves after the Burning. is the dwarven quarter of HighcrestHighcrestThe city on the crest above Greenmeadow, seat of the Crown and of a thousand guild halls. to this day.

They have one oath left that nothing has broken, because they swore it in the snow after the burning, on no stone at all: that one day a dwarf will relight the hearth of Hammerdeep with clean fire. This is why there is a dwarf in every guild in AetheriaAetheriaThe Ember of the Aether: the world.. Ask one why he joined and he will say for the gold. Then watch where he looks.

On the highest peak of the StormreachStormreachThe highlands under a veil of storms that has not lifted in nine hundred years., above the clouds, the gnomes built the Starfall ObservatoryStarfall ObservatoryThe gnomes’ observatory on the highest peak, where something fell out of the sky and stayed.: a dome of brass and crystal with a lens forty feet across, to count the stars and measure them, and improve them if they could. They kept the tally for eleven generations, as was told in the first book. They had a seer too, though they did not call her that, being gnomes. They called her the Senior Observer. Her name was YsmeraYsmeraSenior Observer of Starfall, who foresaw the Missing Moon, was disbelieved, and went into the crater..

Ysmera noticed that the stars were going out. Everyone had always known it; she was the first to plot it, and to find that the dark patches were not random but a line, and that the line had a direction, and that the direction was here. Then, in the eleventh year of her watch, through the great lens, she saw between the dead stars the shape of what was eating them. It was a hunger shaped like an eye. And it was looking back at her.

She wrote to the AthenaeumAthenaeumHighcrest’s house of scholars and magisters, where the Annals are kept., and to the Crown, and to the druids and the dwarves and the elves. She told them the day, to the hour. Nobody believed her except the elves, who believed her and did nothing, which elves are very good at.

On the night she had named, NhalNhalThe hunger in the Hollow, "the mouth that is never full". It eats the stars, and it ate a moon. reached in through the gap in SerenSerenThe Watcher. She set the stars as watchfires on the walls of the world, and alone stayed in the sky.’s wards, and took MorrowMorrowThe dark moon, whose moonshadow grew hidden things. Nhal took it on the Night of the Missing Moon., the Shadow Moon.

It took the whole night. Those who watched said the dark moon did not fall or burn, but went in, as a coin goes into a purse, until there was nothing left in the sky but IlunIlunThe silver moon, Seren’s daughter, who draws the tides. The only moon left., alone, very bright and very small. And towards dawn a piece of the thing that had done it came loose, as crumbs fall from a mouth, and fell burning out of the sky onto the highest peak of the Stormreach, square on the Starfall Observatory. And stayed.

Two of the Observatory’s guardians, Kel and VorKel and VorTwo guardians of Starfall sworn to one oath and one life, holding the fallen thing in its crater., went down into the crater with their blades drawn and found that they could not kill what lay there, but that it could not get past them while they stood. So they swore to stand. They bound their two lives into one oath, and the oath into one life between them, that the thing should not leave that place while either breathed. Kel does the hitting. Vor does the staring, which is worse.

The Orrery EngineOrrery EngineStarfall’s great clockwork model of the heavens, wound too tight., the Observatory’s great clockwork model of the heavens, was set to calculate the wards and where they might be mended. Its keepers wound it tighter, and tighter, for nine hundred years. Somebody wound it too tight. The balcony railings went long ago.

And Ysmera, who had seen the thing coming, and been disbelieved, and watched it come, went down into the crater herself in the last year of her life and did not come back up. She is still there. She is called the Twilight Seer now. She has gone over to the thing, or it has gone into her, and she sees everything that is coming, all of it, a year in advance, and she has stopped writing letters. She sets puzzles instead, for whoever will come; she is very proud of them.

All that grew by moonshadow withered when the Shadow MoonMorrowThe dark moon, whose moonshadow grew hidden things. Nhal took it on the Night of the Missing Moon. was gone.

In the AshfenAshfenOnce the orcs’ grassland, now marsh, since the moonwell soured., which was still grassland then, the druids had a sanctuary about a moonwell, where Morrow’s dark light came down in a pillar and made the land richer than any in the east. Its keeper was the Archdruid VellumVellumThe Archdruid who stayed when the moonwell soured, and has become mostly swamp., the oldest and wisest of the Grovetenders. The night the moon went in, the moonwell soured. The grass rotted, the rivers backed up and spread, and in a generation the plains of the orcs had become the Ashfen Marshes: bog gas, lizardfolk, and the mosquitoes, of which nothing more needs to be said to anyone who has quested there. The druids fled. Vellum did not. The swamp took back the sanctuary, and it took him with it; he is part of the BlightmireBlightmireThe druid sanctuary the swamp took back when the Shadow Moon was lost. now, and the Blightmire is part of him, and the moonwell still works. Almost nothing else does.

Not far off stood the temple of Morrow’s priests, who wore black and kept their faces covered in honour of the moon’s dark face. When the moon was taken they refused to believe it. They still refuse. The Shadowmoon TempleShadowmoon TempleThe temple of Morrow’s priests, who refuse to believe their moon is gone. keeps its rites to this day, under a moon nobody can see, led by the Priestess NyxNyxPriestess of the Shadowmoon Temple, keeping faith with a moon nobody can see. and served by those of her order who have worn the veil so long that there is nothing under it but the Faceless. Once a year, on the night the moon went in, they hold a false eclipse, and the faith of the Temple takes a shape in the dark that they call the Eclipse Avatar: what Morrow would look like, if Morrow had been listening. The cultists insist that Morrow is still there.

And in fairness to the cultists, it is, in a manner of speaking. It is inside something.

It was the minotaurs who understood first what the eye in the sky was doing, being the people who live nearest it, under it, on the high heaths of the StormreachStormreachThe highlands under a veil of storms that has not lifted in nine hundred years.. Their shamans said it plainly: it is looking for us. It has eaten a moon and it is looking for the next thing.

So the greatest of the storm-callers gathered at the StormspireStormspireThe citadel on the Stormreach cliffs where the callers hold the endless storm., a citadel of the minotaur clans on the edge of the Stormreach cliffs, under the High Stormcaller VeyraVeyraHigh Stormcaller of the Stormspire, who raised the veil of storms over the Stormreach., who was human, and the Thunderlord Garrak, who was not. Together they called up a storm. Not a storm to break on an enemy, but a veil: a roof of cloud and lightning stretched over the whole of the Stormreach, so thick that nothing above could see anything below.

It worked. That is the trouble with it. No one has seen a clear sky over the Stormreach in nine hundred years, and the High Stormcaller and her callers have held the storm all that while, generation after generation, in the Stormspire Citadel, where it is always raining, mostly lightning. To call a storm for nine hundred years without stopping does something to a mind. The callers of the Citadel no longer let anyone in, for fear that whoever comes means to stop the storm; and since this is in fact what most visitors want, by the third day, they are not wholly wrong.

The farmers of the Stormreach complain. The astronomers of the Starfall ObservatoryStarfall ObservatoryThe gnomes’ observatory on the highest peak, where something fell out of the sky and stayed., who live above the clouds and must look at the thing every night, complain differently.