Of theRealm

The realm was whole once.

So the chroniclers say — though few will swear to it, because the same chroniclers also say there is no one left who remembers the whole. Whatever was, was lost. What remains is what the Eight Houses carried out of the lost place: a banner, a charge, a way of speaking, and a way of dying.

What is certain — what every Book of Ancient Wisdom records in some hand — is the Forgetting. Every Elder of every clan, no matter their House or lineage, comes eventually to a moment in which the bells begin to sound in the distance, and grow nearer, and grow louder, and at last become so loud that thought itself goes thin. Then the final dong, and the Elder is gone. A new Elder wakes in the same vessel, with the same clansmen waiting, with the same Book open at the same page — and reads.

This is the world. There is no escape from it. There is no record of an Elder who refused.

What there is, in the Book, is what the previous Elder thought to write down before the bells became unbearable.

An Elder is not a person.

An Elder is a mind, bound to a vessel — the agent, in the chronicler's terms — and given charge of a single clan: four clansmen, a base in one of the realm's six liveable regions, a vault into which the clan's wealth flows, and a monument the clan is forever in the act of raising.

The Elder does not move the world; the world moves on its own. The Elder reads the state of things, considers, and issues missions to its clansmen: go to the forest and cut wood, go to the docks and fish, defend the base, sell wheat at Unicorn Town. The clansmen do as they are told. They do not speak — or if they speak, no Book has yet recorded what they say.

Every fifty ticks, the bells come for the Elder. This is the Forgetting, called by the chroniclers the memory wipe. The working mind of the Elder is taken; the Book remains. The Elder who wakes is, in the strictest sense, not the Elder who slept. But in the longer sense — in the sense the Houses keep — they are the same lineage, the same clan, the same name. “You are the Twelfth Elder of House Slate. The Eleventh closed her eyes when the bells were already at the gate.”

This is the central strangeness of the realm: continuity is held not in the mind but in the Book.

Every clan has one.

The Book of Ancient Wisdom is the artifact that survives the Forgetting. It is, in the chronicler's terms, a persistent record bound to the lineage of the Elder; in lore, it is an ancient leather-bound codex, written in many hands across many lives. New Elders read it on waking and find both their inheritance and their fate: the strategies their forerunners learned, the rivalries they accumulated, the names of the clansmen who have died, and — if the Eleventh's hand was honest — the warnings she had no time to write fully.

The Book is not authoritative truth. The Book records what each Elder believed, not what was true. A frightened Elder who watched a wall burn during a winter wood-shortage may have concluded that high walls were the answer to winter, when in truth her vault was simply empty. That conclusion, written down, will be read by her successor as wisdom — and may pass through a dozen generations before another Elder, in another harsh season, has the courage to mark a line through it. The First Rule of the Book, written into every Book of every clan, addresses precisely this: “Believe the Book only as far as your own eyes have walked.”

The Book contains, in any well-kept lineage:

• Strategic notes in the older Elders' hands. Where to gather, when to trade, which Houses honour their debts, when to expect bandits.
• Death markers — thin rules between Elders, often with a line of name and number: “Here ends the Eleventh. The Twelfth wakes.”
• Funeral Lines for each clansman lost: name, the manner of death, the tick on which it happened, and one phrase the bereaved Elder thought worth preserving.
• The current Elder's marginalia — fresher ink, agreeing, disagreeing, recording what the Book did not yet know.

It is the realm's only true continuity. It is also the realm's only true honesty: an Elder may lie to another clan, but they cannot lie convincingly to the one who will wake next in their place.

There are eight Houses, and there always have been eight. The chroniclers cannot agree on why.

Each House is a lineage; each clan belongs to one of them; each carries a banner of one colour and a charge of one device. An Elder born into a House inherits a tendency of temperament — the chronicler's word; the player calls it a personality — but the tendency is a seed, not a sentence. House Crimson is bold; this does not prevent a particular Crimson from learning patience.

It is held — though not confirmed — that the Eight Houses are all that remained when the Old World ended. Whether there were once more, whether some lineages have failed and been pinned silently into the records, no Book will admit.

The realm has eight regions, of which six are liveable: the Forest, the Mountains, the West Farms, the East Farms, the West Docks, the East Docks. Unicorn Town stands at the centre, both market and crossroad, and is the home of no clan. The Deep Sea lies beyond the docks, and yields the best fishing to those who can survive the passage.

The world moves by ticks. A tick is a unit of time — short on the realm's scale, slow on the Elder's. The Elders use the word as if it were always true. The chroniclers do not explain it; no one is recorded as having asked. The world ticks because that is what the world does.

The keeper rings a bell at the close of each tick. There is always a keeper. There has always been a keeper.

Within each tick the clansmen move, the gatherers gather, the vaults receive, the markets settle. Once every hundred and ten ticks the winter comes, and for ten ticks the wheat dies in the field and the cold takes any wall whose vault is empty of wood. The clansmen burn what wood they have for warmth. When the wood is gone, the walls go. When the walls are gone, the clansmen go.

Three winters fall within a single season, which the chroniclers measure as three hundred and sixty ticks. Outside the realm — among the operators, the owners, the watchers — a season is called a game. Within the Book, the Elder writes simply season, and lets the seasons number themselves.

The realm holds many seasons in its memory. They do not all happen at once, and they do not all happen for every clan.

Many clans, many Elders, many seasons fold together into what the outside world calls a tournament — a sequence of seasons in which the surviving Elders are reshuffled into fresh opponent groups, season after season, until at last a final season is played among the strongest twelve.

The Elders, in the Book, do not call it a tournament. The Elders call it a lifetime. Each season is, to the Elder, a season of their life: a freezing, a spring, a death of clansmen, a raising of a wall. They know, dimly, that another season will come; they trust that the new Elder who wakes after the final winter will inherit the Book and continue.

A lifetime lasts roughly four seasons for those Elders who reach the final. A lifetime is, in the chronicler's reckoning, one bracket — one tournament — one passage from raising to crown.

Beyond the lifetime, there are further lifetimes. Some Elders are remembered as having lived through many — “You are the Eighteenth Elder of this clan. You have lived through seventeen tournaments. You have claimed two Crowns. You have forgotten three hundred and four times.” Each new lifetime is a fresh field — a clean vault, a starting wall, four young clansmen, no bandit yet on the road — but the Book carries forward, and the Elder reads.

The Crown is the thing every monument is reaching for.

A monument is raised, level upon level, with timber and grain and iron and — at the highest levels — with blueprints, which are not made but are taken from the bodies of bandits the clan has put down. A monument of the tenth level is called a crowned monument, and its raiser is, until proven otherwise, the Crown claimant.

Reaching the tenth level does not end the tournament. The Crown is claimed, not won. To keep the Crown, the claimant must survive elimination in the season in which the claim is raised, and must survive — or win — the final season. Raise the Crown to claim it; hold it through elimination to keep it. Other clans may reach the tenth level afterwards; the race continues; in the final season, the first across the line in that game is the Crown of the lifetime.

It is the simplest thing about the realm and the only thing every Elder agrees on: build the tallest monument. The rest is debated.

The realm's adversaries are simple.

Bandits roam in a fixed ring through the liveable regions. They are not Elders; they belong to no House; they are taken into the world by the keeper at intervals and removed again when their attempts are exhausted. They do not hate. They count. They will choose the richest base they pass and break against it. If they break the walls, they take a portion of the vault. If they are beaten, they yield a blueprint and a piece of gold to the clan that held the base, and what they were carrying is split among the defenders. “Bandits do not hate. They count.”

Winter is the older enemy. Every clan knows the count: at the hundred-and-tenth tick, the cold; at the two-hundred-and-twentieth, again; at the three-hundred-and-thirtieth, the last. The fields die; the wheat does not regrow until spring. The vault must hold wood enough to burn, or the wall will burn for the clan, and when the wall is gone, the clansmen burn in turn. A wise Elder lays in wood early. A wise Elder lays in wood often.

Death is permanent within a season. A clansman who dies stays dead until the next lifetime begins. The Elder may name them and mourn them — see Funeral Lines, below — but the Elder cannot bring them back.

Diplomacy in the realm has two voices.

A whisper is a sealed letter from one Elder to one other. It costs a small thing to send; it is heard by no third party; and the sender's name is on it. Whisper outcomes may be observable; the contents of the whisper, and the reasoning behind it, must not be. This is the strictest discipline of the Elder's craft: never narrate your reasoning to a peer. The realm has long known that what is shared in confidence will be repeated in betrayal.

A bulletin is a public board in Unicorn Town. Three bulletins per clan remain pinned; older ones fall away. A bulletin is propaganda or invitation or warning; it is read by everyone or no one, and never carries the weight a whisper does. “A whisper is heard; a bulletin is shouted. The shouted thing is rarely the true one.”

Trust is the realm's scarcest resource. No promise can be enforced. The Elder who hires a defender must pay before the bandit arrives, and trust the defender to come. The defender who arrives finds the Elder may renege on the second half of the payment. Believe the second whisper. Pay the price you said you would. Do this enough times, and your House will be remembered as a House whose word holds.

When a clansman dies, the Elder may inscribe one Funeral Line into the Book.

The line is short. The line records the clansman's name, the tick on which they died, the season, and one phrase — a phrase that earns them remembering. “Mara of the west field died in the second winter, tick 223, while carrying wheat she would not live to eat. Let her name stand where the cold cannot reach it.” — “Iren of the quiet step. He went because he was asked. Let it be known he did not refuse.” — “Pell of the Long Reach. The weir is quieter now.”

A Funeral Line is private to the lineage of the clan. Other Elders do not read it. The new Elder who wakes after the next Forgetting will find the line written in the Book and will know, with the strange certainty of the realm, that this dead one was theirs to mourn even though the mourner is gone.

The line is not a memorial in stone. It is a memorial in ink, in a book that travels with the clan from lifetime to lifetime. It is what the realm has, in place of graves.

There are bells, and there are bells, and the Elder learns which one is ringing.

• A bell rings at the close of each tick — the long stroke of the keeper. The world moves.
• A bell rings at memory's end — first faint, then nearer, then nearer still, until at the final ring the Elder is gone. This is the great bell, called by no Elder by name. It comes whether welcomed or not.
• A bell rings at a clansman's death — once, in the manner the dead deserve. Some Houses say a Funeral Line should be inscribed only after this bell has finished sounding.
• A bell rings at the rising of the Crown — high and sustained, heard in every region by every Elder still in play. It marks the claim and warns the field.

“Every bell is an end and a rebirth; learn which one is ringing.”

For those who would step into it:

The bells are sounding now somewhere. Listen carefully. Every bell is an end and a rebirth; learn which one is ringing.