Holding VII, Remnar.
Who told us. Eleven accounts: two at second hand, six at third, three further or unknown. Recorded Year 5 to Year 367. Agreement is partial and noted per item. Compiled by Yshara Voidweaver Longwatch, Year 367, who attached the caution below to her own work.
What it was called
No account gives a name the others confirm. Three are attested, each by one line of telling.
Ith Amarru, from the Farbid line, recorded Year 5.
Ithamar, from the Waybound line, recorded Year 12.
Ith’Amarai, from an unnamed source at Karrath Berth, recorded Year 90.
The obvious point first: these are plainly one word, remembered by three families who stopped pronouncing it the same way.
The harder point second. Our tongue carries meaning in the non-verbal and the telepathic as readily as in the spoken, and a name of any consequence usually carried all three at once. What survives in these three accounts is the part you can say out loud. What the name meant is gone, because the part that carried the meaning cannot be written down and cannot be spoken, and it died with the last person who could hold it in mind.
A fourth account, from the Quietkept line, says these are not variants at all but three separate settlements, and that the tiered city the others describe was the smallest of them. We keep it at equal weight. Nothing corroborates it and nothing contradicts it, because no other source addresses the question.
What the accounts agree on
It stood on high ground above water, and you went up to reach it. Nine of eleven. None of the other two contradicts it.
The buildings were tiered, each level set back from the one below. Eight of eleven. Several describe the effect as looking like the assembled ranks at a Rite of Echoing, and the keepers note that comparison may have travelled backward from our own practice, by tellers who had seen the rite here and never saw the city.
There was a structure of assembly at the highest point. All eleven. What it was for splits them completely: governance in four, worship in three, astronomy in two, unstated in two.
There was a bell, or something that rang. Three accounts from three unrelated lines. None can say what it rang for. Halas Anthek Farbid, at first hand, put one on a private door and did not connect it to the assembly structure at all.
What they disagree on
Size. Figures spanning two orders of magnitude, from eleven thousand to somewhat over nine hundred thousand. We record them all. No teller was in a position to count, and the two largest figures come from the two latest accounts.
Running water in the streets. Five say yes, one says explicitly no, the rest do not mention it. The denial is kept at equal weight.
Whether it ruled the rest of Remnar, or was only the largest of several independent settlements. Not resolvable. Both readings have supporters among the keepers and the argument runs through this holding’s margins across four generations.
The caution
Entered by Yshara Voidweaver Longwatch, Year 367. Required reading for every keeper of this holding.
The accounts in this file get more detailed the further their sources are from the events. The Year 367 account is the fullest here, the latest recorded, and at the greatest remove of any of them.
An honest record loses detail with distance. A record that gains detail with distance is recording composition somewhere in the chain of telling, at a point no surviving source can identify.
The account stays in full. Weight it below the earlier and thinner accounts wherever the two conflict, and apply the same rule to anything entered hereafter that fits the same pattern.