AETHELGARD
Aethelgard / History
Chapter V

As the Mural tells it

We came on machines. We stayed on the backs of gods. Fifteen hundred years later, the season will not turn.

I · The Mural

Sixty metres of ink

On the outer wall of a Horn-Temple on the back of a god: the Fall, the whales, the Hole and the roads, with fifteen centuries of navigators adding to it.

Once a dimming the Elder reads it aloud at the Telling. The Flotilla say the Mural is the truth.

II · The record

Fifteen hundred years

  1. 150 dimmings ago

    The Fall

    A fleet of warships flew through a door in the sky and found a world with nowhere to land. Ships that came in fast burned in the air; they were the first fire the sky had ever seen. Ships that came in slow could hover for hours on the fuel they had left, and then could not. The crews had minutes.

    Those who jumped held anything that would slow them, sail, cloth, rope, and hung under it in the lit sky for most of an hour, like seeds. Some came down on the backs of whales grazing beneath the Hole.

    Ships that came in fast burned.
    The people hung in the sky for most of an hour.
    What the fleet saw
  2. The same hour

    Four choices

    From above, the crews could see the whole lit world through the glowing ceiling: a sea of cloud with ranges standing out of it like islands, and grey shapes moving on the glow. They chose where to come down ship by ship, and the four choices are the four peoples.

    A summitthe Zenith A whale's backthe Flotilla A cliff in the stormthe Aerie All the way downthe Abyssal
  3. The first generation

    The steel runs out

    A few ships came down whole, and for a generation the world ran on their steel. The engines died of fuel and spare parts within years; the hulls were cut up for tools and blades, and what was not used rusted where it lay. Then the steel ran out, and the world became what it is. The founders' own steel survives only as heirlooms, in the deepest vaults of the Crown.

  4. Every generation or so

    The Fallers

    Another ship comes through the door, burning or dying, the only news from outside. The Mural records each one.

  5. One dimming ago

    The Seventh Dimming

    The ugliest in memory. A toll dispute at a Zenith port, an Aerie "escort," and a god held at the moorings through a dim year until it starved and fell. Nobody killed it. Everybody let it die.

  6. Now · Day 401

    The Eighth Dimming

    It began on schedule. It has not ended.