Holding VII, Remnar.
Who told us. Nineteen accounts of the end of Remnar, four at first hand. Recorded Year 2 to Year 225. Agreement is poor and is stated per fragment. Assembled by Ovin Keluth Slowlight, Year 152. Never reconciled.
This entry holds what we were told about the end of our homeworld.
It does not hold an account of that end, because no such account exists. What follows is a set of fragments, kept in the words the sources used, arranged in the order the events seem to have happened and by nothing else.
The keepers have refused four separate proposals to work these into a narrative. The reasoning is recorded with each refusal and it is the same each time: a narrative built from this material would be the keepers’ work and would be read as the community’s memory, and within two generations nobody would be able to tell the difference.
The fragments
The sky. Four accounts, two at first hand, describe something wrong with the sky before anything was wrong with the ground. Oreth Stellara Waybound, at first hand, recorded Year 12: the sky went wrong before the ground did. Asked how, she said she had been six years old and that it looked like the air had things in it. Two later accounts describe wings, or something folded like wings, high and slow and in numbers. One describes leaves.
What came down. Six accounts describe something falling that did not strike and did not stop. Three put it in the sea, two on the land, one on both. None describes an impact. Two use the word seed. One uses a word the recorder wrote down as burrowing.
What grew. Nine accounts, more than any other fragment here, describe things growing that were not plants. Reaching upward. Of some hard bright substance. Cold. In four accounts visible at a great distance and getting bigger over days. Two insist they came out of the sea before they came out of the fields. One says they made a sound. This is the best corroborated description of the end that we hold, and we were never able to determine what was being described.
The water. Five accounts say the sea went first, and mean by that that the sea went away, or went wrong, or stopped being a sea. Three of the five come from families with no known contact with each other.
The light. Three accounts describe light leaving. Not falling and not spreading. Leaving, in one direction, upward and away, and continuing for a long time. Anwar Keluth Nightgiven, at first hand, recorded Year 2, gave the sea and the smell of it and would swear to nothing else, then volunteered this unasked and would not elaborate: it went up. It was ours and it went up.
The flight. All nineteen agree that those who left did not leave together, that nobody directed it, and that the lines of flight lost each other within the first days. It is the only thing in this entry with unanimous agreement, and the founding assembly built our entire purpose on it.
What we established, and did not
We never established how Remnar was ended. We established that it was ended, that a power ended it, and by Year 112 we had a name for that power, from strangers rather than from our own witnesses. The name and the standing order attached to it are in Holding VI.
Three questions stand open against this entry. We carry them as open questions rather than closing them as unanswerable, so that anything learned later has something to be entered against.
What grew. Nine accounts. Hard, bright, reaching upward, cold, out of the sea before the fields, getting bigger over days, and in one account making a sound. Never identified by anyone we asked, including four peoples with long memories.
Where the light went. Three accounts, all describing it leaving in one direction, upward, continuing a long time. No account describes it arriving anywhere.
Why. No motive obtained from any source. Entries proposing one are marked as speculation by Remnari authors reasoning from outside.
The song
Nevu Ilketh Quietkept, at first hand, refused to give an account on eleven occasions between Year 2 and Year 14. On the twelfth asking she gave a song instead, and asked that it be recorded as a song and not as testimony.
It is recorded here as a song. It has no provenance line, because she declined to attach one and the keepers judged that the refusal was the provenance.
Salt on the sill and the door standing wide, my mother’s hand and the long stair down. Ask me the year and I will tell you the stair. Ask me the stair and I will tell you the sea. We did not close it. We did not close it. Somebody tell them we did not close the door.
It is filed under song and is not counted among the nineteen fragments above. Two later hands entered marginal readings of it as testimony. A third struck both through, on the ground that the source refused that classification and this holding’s practice is that a source’s own classification of their material governs. The strikings are kept with the notes.