History
Four hundred years of record, as the archive keeps it.
The reckoning of years
Years in the Banner-lands are counted in A.U. — after the Unification. The present is 396 A.U. The 400-year jubilee of the founding stands four years off, and every house is already preparing what it will say about the last four centuries.
The War of the Unification
Before the war there were no Ten Houses — only fractured principalities, cities, and clans fighting over the same exhausted land. The war swept the entire known world, and what one calls it tells you which record one trusts. The Chronicle of Victory calls it the War of the Unification — solemnly, the Great Unification — and "unification" makes a war sound like a merger. The Ash Fragments, which few cite aloud, call it the Divided Fire, and describe not a defense against an outside enemy but a civil war. The sources disagree about who won. That is the record's oldest wound.
What is beyond dispute is how it ended: on the cooling ground of the Ash Fields, in the year that was then set to nought, the lords of the war swore the Tenfold Compact and divided the land, the duty, and the grief among them. The peace it sealed has held — by one measure or another — for four hundred years, save four.
The four centuries
| Year (A.U.) | Event | What the record holds |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | The war ends; the Tenfold Compact | The victors seal a pact dividing land, titles, and responsibility among the Great Houses. |
| 3–4 | The Silent Year | An unnaturally empty window in the chronicles. An absence of permitted events, not of events themselves. |
| ~40–70 | The Sundering of the Ten Philosophies | The founders dead; the children inherit houses without a soul. The ten philosophies crystallize through concrete crises — they are won, not given. |
| ~120–150 | The First Betrayal | The first time one house turns against another after the Unification. The pact proves fragile. |
| ~200–250 | The Age of Chronicles | The writing of history becomes institutionalized; the conflicting official versions are produced. House Blackcrest decisive. |
| 396 | The threshold of the present | The order appears stable, but every crack is an open wound. The 400-year jubilee looms, four years off. |
The four records
Everything above rests on four kinds of source, and they do not agree.
- The Chronicle of Victory — the official record, kept at Crown-watch by House Blackcrest. Complete, consistent, and written by the side that kept the pen.
- The Ash Fragments — burned, partial pages that survive from before and during the war. They contradict the Chronicle where they overlap with it, which is why so few of them overlap with it.
- The Songs — what the people remember in verse. Songs cannot be recalled and corrected; they are sung wrong, in the same wrong way, in every tavern in the Banner-lands.
- The Marginal Notes — small anonymous hands in the margins of official copies, written by readers who noticed something. The archive does not cite them. The archive has not erased them either.
The archive records the disagreement; it does not decide it.