On Aur: The Heart of the East
There were five kingdoms once, in the lands east of the Wild Sea.
Most in Tuith will not have heard of them. The Wild Sea has seen to that. Its currents have broken enough hulls and swallowed enough crews that for most of recorded history the eastern continent has existed, if it existed at all, as a rumour carried by madmen and the occasional trade vessel blown catastrophically off course. What the western kingdoms knew of Aur before the settlers came could have been written on a single page, and most of it would have been wrong.
That changed some fifty years ago, when Aurian colonists crossed the Wild Sea and established footholds on the eastern coast of Tuith—the Chalk Towns in the north, and Hursts to the south. With them came language, trade, and gradually a fuller picture of the civilisation they had left behind. Fuller, though still incomplete. The settlers carried Aur’s customs and learning, but they carried them as exiles carry anything: selectively, and shaped by distance.
What follows is drawn from those settler accounts, from the records of traders who have made the crossing and returned, and from certain sources I am not at liberty to name. I have done what I can to separate the credible from the fanciful. The reader will note the places where I have failed.
Aur was the eldest of the five kingdoms. The others rose around it over centuries, drawing from its wealth, its institutions, its long memory of how things ought to be done. Together they formed what the eastern peoples called Greater Aur. Its courts were places of considerable refinement. Its scholars debated questions that, I will admit, the western academies have only recently begun to ask. Its temples taught a faith the people called Teccimi, and its priests—the Arkān, named with a similarity to the Paxic Arkani that I do not think is coincidental—wielded a power that will be familiar to those who have read my account of the desert kingdom, and whose implications I am not yet prepared to explore in this record.
The city of Aur rose from jungle in terraces of white stone and burnished gold, climbing the slopes of Donorbis, a mountain the Aurians held sacred. Temples crowned its heights. Gardens hung from its walls. At dawn the light struck the upper spires first and descended slowly, so that the city appeared to catch fire from the top down. Settlers in the Chalk Towns still speak of it in the present tense. I have not corrected them.
Aur knew little of war. The thousand year conflict between Pax and Byercet would have meant nothing there—the affairs of a distant continent, if they were known at all.
At the heart of the royal palace lived a figure the people called the Guardian. He was not of the royal line. He was not, by some accounts, entirely of Aur at all. He served the throne as adviser and protector, and he trained students in disciplines that had no names in the Aurian language. He carried with him always a stone—rough-edged, unremarkable to look at—that he never let leave his possession. What he guarded, the people of Aur did not ask. I do not blame them for this.
The revolutions came from within. Ideas that questioned why power should pass by blood rather than merit—not unlike debates in our own history, though the Aurians arrived at them with greater violence. The five kingdoms of Greater Aur tore themselves apart. Temples burned. Royal lines ended. Three kingdoms collapsed entirely. One reinvented itself into something harder and colder. Only Aur held, though the cost was considerable.
The Arkān were hunted down and killed. The religion of Teccimi was suppressed. It was during this period that the settlers came to Tuith’s shores—refugees, seeking to rebuild what had been lost to them in their own lands.
What followed was a period the Aurians themselves describe as recovery. I use their word. Whether it is the correct one, the reader may judge.
What happened next has barely reached Tuith. In the Chalk Towns there are whispers. In Hursts, less than that. I am aware that by setting it down here I may be recording something that most of my readers, if I have readers, will not yet have heard. I do so because silence, left unrecorded, has a way of becoming permanent.
I will set aside the historian’s remove for a moment. I have heard unsettling reports from the Chalk Towns—that King Clement Etienne is marshalling troops to retake old Aur, seeking to capitalise on whatever calamity has befallen it. I write to urge against such a move. I can only pray this reaches north in time.
It seems no army sacked Aur. No soldiers killed its people—yet the city fell nonetheless. Armoured columns entered through gates that did not close. The jungle did not burn. The temples did not fall.
The people stopped. That is the word used most often by the few who survived, and I have not found a better one. An entire city ceased, mid-step, mid-word, as if something had reached into the mechanism of the place and stilled it.
What Aur looks like now, I cannot say with authority. The few vessels that have ventured close report no smoke from the forges, no lights in the towers, no sound but wind through streets that may or may not be empty.
Aur was the heart of the civilised east. At the time of this writing, it is a question which no one can yet answer.