Holding V, Stars.

Last corrected Year 400. Working reference. Corrected after every arrival and every return.


Rolaraspace is sealed. An old crystal sphere bounds it and everything below sits inside that boundary. We have never established who set it, when, or how it can be passed anywhere other than the places where passage is known to work.

The charts themselves live at the Terminals. What follows is the register: what is charted, what a navigator needs to know about it, and when we last had cause to change the entry.

The register

Body What a navigator needs Corrected
Keiter Bored through the core by a tunnel, with a moon passing back and forth through it without stopping. That passage governs everything: quiet while the moon hangs, violent while it crosses. Crystal surface, worked hard by the people there. Year 393
Perganis The third orb. Oceans, floating islands lit from below, standing mist over the marshes. A winged people hold it. The trade lane between here and Keiter is the busiest we chart. Year 379
The Moon Rolara’s own, tidally locked. A quarter gravity. The air will not carry a wing. Our flight works there. A hadozee’s does not. Year 364
The lesser sphere A second, much smaller crystal sphere in near orbit. Sealed. In the sky since long before us. Does not measure the same twice between transits. Ringed by asteroids under their own governance. Marked. Year 382
The North Star Held by a power we never approached and never had cause to. Nothing else is charted, and that blank is real ignorance rather than an omission. Year 125
Xenov Closest in to the sun. The dwarves of Keiter say the crystal of their halls came from there, which is the only account of the place we have ever got. Year 253
Motrolara Charted. Nothing else established. Year 182
Zohiruta Charted, inhabited, approaches marked after the loss of the Slow Return in Year 218. Year 220
The Silk Bridge A structure, or a formation, or a crossing. Three arrivals have described it and no two descriptions match. Kept under its common name for want of a better one. Year 328
The Zeb Rock Nine transits, no incident. Carries a contested hazard mark. Year 269
The Stone of Endurance This fortress. Charted because she is a body and because she moves, and a chart that leaves out a moving body is worse than no chart. Position entered at every flight. Year 400

Four entries carry corrections in the hand of Ami of the Ground, entered between Year 394 and Year 400: the Moon, Keiter, Perganis, and this fortress. He is not a navigator and the corrections are not navigational. They are what someone who has stood on a Material ground can tell people who mostly have not, and three of the four are about what a body looks like from below rather than from the Astral, which no keeper here had thought to write down.

Reading the dates

The date beside an entry is when a keeper last had reason to change it, not when it was last read. An old date does not mean a body is badly charted. The North Star has sat at Year 125 for two and a half centuries because nothing has been learned about it since.

Open: charting what is not a body

No chart here shows a route through a plane that is neither Astral nor Material.

We have no method for charting such a place, no instrument aboard that would register one, and no precedent in any chart we have bought or been given.

The question was entered against this holding in Year 400, on the reasoning at the foot of On Rolaraspace. It stands open. The keeper who entered it proposed no method and asked that the lack of one be recorded rather than worked around.