Holding VI, The Others.
Opened Year 52. Kept current to Year 398. Our longest relationship with anyone.
They hold Keiter, the crystal world bored through by the tunnel, and have held it since long before we came to this sphere. They say they descend from explorers out of Rolara who settled during an age they name and we cannot date. Their halls are cut from crystal they say was carried from Xenov, which is the only account of Xenov we have ever got.
They are governed by a council seated on a principle they call Resonance, which covers their music, their craft tolerances, and how they reach a decision, all at once. We never satisfied ourselves that we understood it and wrote down that failure rather than a summary of it.
Three settlements are known to us by name: Belthorin, Karath-Dum, and Thuram-Gal. The last is monastic and the least willing to receive visitors.
The relationship
Opened Year 52. Ran three hundred and forty-six years without a serious rupture, which makes it the longest we have by half again, and the only one never allowed to lapse.
What we buy. Crystal, mostly. Aetherite in quantity, which we use for storage and never for regulation. Prismatic quartz for building. Magnetite in small amounts. They also sell light: the small crystals that glow while a living hand holds them and go dark when set down. We have bought those steadily and in bulk for the whole relationship, and they are why the residential corridors need no fixed lamp.
What we sell. Charts, corrections, and assessments. Our standing is that of a people who know where things are and whether they have changed, and it turned out to be the only thing we can produce in quantity without importing anything first. The governance record has treated information as our principal export since Year 84.
What we never sell. Remnari conduit theory, on standing order since Year 95. The reasoning is on the record: a people who sell the principle of their own machinery are selling the last thing that makes them worth keeping alive.
Sending a delegation
Time the approach to the hover. The moon’s passage through the tunnel governs the whole world and a crossing is not something you fly through. Both marks are in the standing list.
Ask which crystal fields are active before crossing any of them. They carry standing whirlwinds of loose magical energy, two of our transits recorded uncontrolled discharge inside them, and the dwarves treat them as ordinary weather and will not warn you unprompted.
Do not send anyone under instruction to conclude business in one sitting. They will fail and will be understood to have insulted the sitting. Rhoan Ilketh Deepkeel’s note of Year 282 goes out with the travel orders: They are not stalling. They are doing the thing. The thing takes four days.
What we owe them
Two debts, both ours. One small, one not.
Chart correction for the northern approaches, owed against a delivery of glow-crystal received Year 398 and not yet worked. On the arcanum’s schedule.
An answer, owed since Year 390, to a question the council put about whether this Enclave would stand with Keiter in a dispute they declined to name. The Exemplars have deferred it twice. It is carried forward at every seating and has never been given.
The keeper of this entry records, as a matter bearing on the relationship rather than on the question: the council will raise it at the next sitting, as they did at the last two. Three hundred and forty-six years of fair dealing buys a lot of patience and two deferrals have spent a good part of it. A delegation sent without an answer delivers a third deferral, which the council will treat as a refusal.