Holding VII, Remnar.
Written Year 149 by Ovin Keluth Slowlight, Keeper of Record. Renewed at every keeping since.
This fortress was not built by refugees from Remnar. It was built by their children and their children’s children, and that governs how this holding works more than anything else does.
No keeper of this holding ever stood on Remnar. What is here is second hand and further: a grandmother’s account of a city she left as a child, a song kept because a father sang it, a craft described by someone who watched it done and never learned to do it.
Read that as a warning about the material, not an apology for it.
Who told us
The holding rests on thirty-one named sources and nine unnamed, gathered between Year 1 and Year 367.
Four of the thirty-one stood on Remnar themselves. Their accounts are the only ones here at first hand, and between them they come to less than a page, because all four were small children at the flight and three said so before saying anything else.
| Source | Remove | Recorded | What they gave |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anwar Keluth Nightgiven | first | Year 2 | The sea, and the smell of it. Nothing else he would swear to. |
| Halas Anthek Farbid | first | Year 5 | The tiered streets, the climb, a door with a bell. |
| Oreth Stellara Waybound | first | Year 12 | The sky went wrong before the ground did. |
| Nevu Ilketh Quietkept | first | Year 14 | Refused. Gave a song instead. The song is held. |
| twenty-seven others | second or beyond | Year 1 to Year 367 | See each entry’s own heading. |
Nevu Ilketh Quietkept was asked twelve times across twelve years and refused eleven of them, giving a song on the last. We recorded the refusals as carefully as the answers, because a refusal tells you something about the thing refused. The song is in The Separation, at full length and without provenance, as she required.
What every entry here carries
Four things, at the top of the entry.
Who told us, by name where we have one. Nine entries rest on unnamed sources and say so.
When it was recorded, by our count. The earliest were taken in the founding years, the latest in Year 367.
How many tellings back, between the entry and someone who was there. Four entries stand at first hand. Most of this holding is third or further.
What agrees and what does not, by entry reference.
Where two accounts disagree we keep both, next to each other, unresolved. It is not our business to decide which grandmother remembered right, and an Archive that starts deciding will within a generation be an archive of its keepers’ preferences instead of the community’s memory.
How much to trust it
Practices, trust. Domestic habit, food, the shape of a working day, the observances. These survive because they were done daily in front of children. Where nine or more accounts agree on a practice, we treat it as established.
Places and events, be careful. The capital has three names and possibly was three cities. The size figures span two orders of magnitude. The end of the world is nineteen fragments nobody has reconciled.
Doctrine, barely at all. Sixteen accounts produced three incompatible origin stories and not one name of a god.
The standing caution: this material gets more detailed as its sources get further away, which is the reverse of what an honest record does. Every keeper since Year 367 must read the caution on The First City before entering anything new, and must apply its rule to what is already here. Where a full account and a thin one conflict, prefer the thin one if its source stood nearer.