--- title: "History" summary: "Two histories that never meet, heaven's and the world's, and the five ages of Velmarch as the Hearthfolk tell them around the Last Hearth." status: concept # A proposal: the story, world and art direction, invented for Alex to keep, change or cut section: "The World" html: history.html source: www/content/world/history.md --- # History *Two histories that never meet, heaven's and the world's, and the five ages of Velmarch as the Hearthfolk tell them around the Last Hearth.* > The old songs name eleven kings, and no two singers in Hearthold put the middle five in the same order. The world has two histories, and nobody holds both. Heaven's is short and never changes: it built a board, and it plays. The world's is long and full of kings, and it is told by pieces who don't know there is a board. The fallen are the only ones who live in both, and on the climb they remember neither. ## Heaven's history What is decided of it is on the [overview](../world/overview.md), and none of it is told to the world. - Heaven is a castle-city, and at its centre stands the House, where God is supposed to live. Nobody is allowed in, and whether anyone is inside is never answered. Heaven carries on by habit. - Its factions fell into an eternal war, born of hubris and the ambition to sit on God's throne. Angels may not fight in heaven, so heaven made the world as its battleground, and its creatures as the pieces. Each region of the world is bound to a place in heaven, and whoever holds the region holds its twin above. - The Apostates found a way to kill an angel, and what they kill does not end: it falls to the bottom of the world with no memory. Both great factions buy fallen from them in secret. - Heaven holds a narrower set of angels now, and they never stake their own existence: they play. > **Proposal** (concept, not decided): > > Fallen grace has been coming down into the world for as long as there have been Apostates, and the world has been digging it up for as long as it has had kings. > > Heaven counts no years. The Wardens count shut wings, the Heirs count the Prophet's sayings, and the Apostates count nothing. A fallen who asks how long the war has gone on is told *an age*, which in heaven means as long as anyone has been looking. ## The world's history Nobody in Hearthold saw Velmarch burn or drown. What follows is what the Hearthfolk say, as Maudra the Hearthwarden tells it to the fallen who come up the road. They date things by reign, and count the years since the drowning in notches on the Last Hearth's cradle. Where the proposals on the [overview](../world/overview.md) say what really happened, the notes below each age say it; the Hearthfolk never do. ### I. The Age of Hearths The kingdom of Velmarch ruled the coast from Saltreach, its capital on the sea, and the green [Vale](../journey/the-vale.md) behind it. The Hearthfolk say its first king, Aldric, found the Ember when a spring on the moors began to steam in winter. His miners followed the warmth down. Its coals burned without fuel, its shards became [coin](../wiki/items/currency/index.md), and crops grew under glass in midwinter. In the third reign the Tidewall was raised across the harbour of Saltreach, a sea-gate of black stone that kept the storms out. At every coronation the royal mint struck one Sovereign Spark from the Heartfire for the new king. Velmarch was the brightest place in the world for three hundred years. > **Proposal** (concept, not decided): > > What Aldric's miners followed down was the bottom of the world, where the fallen land. The [Heartfire](../journey/heartfire.md) is the great heap of fallen grace there: every angel heaven ever cut loose and never got back, burning. Velmarch was the brightest place in the world because it was spending heaven's dead. ### II. The Hunger The more they took, the hotter it burned. In the reign of the ninth king, Hadrec, people came up from the deep shafts with embers in their chests. The Hearthfolk called them the first [fallen](../fallen/who-you-are.md), and thought them miners the fire had taken in. They lived long, burned bright, and remembered nothing of where they came from. Then the fires began to spread on their own. Whole districts burned from the inside out. The Hearthfolk say the Tallow Quarter of Saltreach burned for a month, and its people walked out of it unharmed, and that this was worse than if they had died. Nobody says why. > **Proposal** (concept, not decided): > > They were not miners. They were the first fallen anyone in Velmarch saw climb, because the deep shafts had at last reached where the fallen wake. Some went on up the Salt Road toward the moors and never came back down. The Hunger's fires were the white catching: a faction had come down to claim the kingdom's coast, and its pieces burned what they did not take. ### III. The Night of the Tide Orrin was the eleventh and last king of Velmarch. In the third year of his reign he went down to the sea alone and made a bargain with the Tide. Nobody knows what he offered. To drown a fire that deep, the Tide needed a whole sea. It drew the southern sea out of its bed, and that seabed is now the [Drawn Sea](../journey/drawn-sea.md). It poured the water through the Tidewall into Saltreach and down the mines. The capital and the coast drowned in a single night. The royal flagship, the *Crowned Gull*, was torn from its moorings and carried forty miles inland on the flood. When the water drew back, the ship lay keel-up on a hilltop in the Vale. > **Proposal** (concept, not decided): > > Orrin did not pray to the sea. He stood on the Tidewall and asked the sky to put the fire out, and someone in heaven answered with the Tide, which comes from above: a cold that falls like the fallen do, and takes memory with it. Nobody below knows which side answered him, or what it was paid. The Tide has been coming down ever since. ### IV. The Long Grey The fire did not go out. It went deeper, and the sea followed it down. On the surface the grey keeps coming in, a few fields a year. The survivors of the coast found the *Crowned Gull* on its hill and built [Hearthold](../journey/hearthold.md) in it and around it, around one coal they had carried up from the drowned city in an iron pot. That coal became the Last Hearth. It grew for a generation. Then it began to burn lower. The drowned began to walk out of the fog at dusk. Every year the Last Hearth burned a little lower and the fog came a little closer. Maudra says there are one hundred and ninety-one notches on the cradle. ### V. Now The war has come to Velmarch's roads, and the Hearthfolk don't know it is a war. White chains on the moors, white banners in the passes, masked things at the town gates: they call it *the white*, and bar the door. Fallen come up out of the deep, through the drowned coast and the Vale, and go on up toward the sky. The [Coalwrights](../world/the-world-between.md) want what the fallen carry, to save the Vale. The Stilled say the fire should be let go out, as Orrin meant. Ilse of the Stilled asks each fallen one question as it passes: *"Why would you want to remember?"* > **Proposal** (concept, not decided): > > ### A hundred years on > > On the [second climb](../game/second-climb.md) the cradle has a hundred more notches, if anyone kept cutting them. A century of war has passed over Velmarch, tipped by your choice. Maudra is dead. Someone else keeps the Last Hearth, or nobody does. The people who were children on your first climb are old, or raised, and the Hearthfolk sing a song about the fallen who went up the Salt Road and did not come back. They sing it wrong. ## Dated by reign - **Aldric, the first king.** Found the Ember. Aldric's Well still steams beside his barrow on the [Barrow Moors](../journey/barrow-moors.md). Cut the Kingsdelve. - **The third reign.** The Tidewall raised. - **The fifth reign, or the sixth in some songs.** The glass gardens of Saltreach planted. The first Gilded Embers minted, merchant's gold for a proud kingdom. - **Hadrec, the ninth king.** The first fallen come up from the shafts. Miners first speak of the Unlit. - **The tenth reign.** The fires spread. The Tallow Quarter burns. - **Orrin, the eleventh king.** His barrow dug in his first year. The Night of the Tide in his third.