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My erstwhile companion in the research and study of Nymian history – one Alka Zolka, marauder, scholar, and royal marine – has oft tried to impress upon me the importance of a more narrative research journal to augment my formal notes. “Context is key in all matters historical, and we, too, are history,” says he. Ever have I brushed him off, but for this matter, at least, I feel I cannot conduct my work without commentary. Should these documents survive me, know that Dragana Svetasch writes here only her own thoughts, unburdened by academic rigor. Azeyma protect my research notes, that you may find something actually useful.
Let me begin with an indulgence, something I cannot risk my thoughts on going unknown: I do not care for this “Exarch”’s plan. Uaruru may be the greatest hero I’ve ever known, but she is only one woman. She has carried immense weight for others with nary a word of complaint, true, but to saddle her with the salvation of an entire star she has yet to so much as step foot on is, at the very least, presumptuous. Yet we, as well, have no option but to comply, compelled as we are to be here, and little to assure us but the word of a man with no name and the prophecies of a mercurial ally who blows hot and cold with every breath. I do not like it. I should be back at Ghimlyt, by her side.
Alas, I am not. I am to wait on the First until Uaruru can be called here. Would that I possessed Y’shtola’s willfulness to meander off and make plans of her own. But if this is to be our path, then I cannot yet quit the Crystarium. As my prior dated research notes attest, there is a vast collection of knowledge here. A single library, the Cabinet of Curiosity. Though I could easily list at least five grander collections that I myself have perused, it seems this may be my best chance to study the history and geography of this star. In this way do I hope to be of some little use to my friend. May I accumulate enough knowledge to provide at least some assistance.
What valuable information I have found is collected in my other notes. What I wish to write here is rather the thoughts that the research have left me with, which have begun to feel too central to ignore. “Context”, as it were. “Endeavor to leave the sort of documents you’d be thrilled to find,” Alka Zolka says. And “Your journals ramble without end,” as well. I hope I will see him again.
My first concern is the location of my research. The Cabinet of Curiosity is certainly not a humble library, and I would not normally think twice about making it a home base of sorts. But, it is the only library that there is. I am told the friendlier survivors of Lakeland and abroad have donated the greater bulk of their tomes decades ago, and the only other collections in existence lie either out of reach within Il Mheg, or else sequestered in private collections in Eulmore. For all intents and purposes, the Cabinet represents all written knowledge on the star.
The Cabinet of Curiosity is scarcely large enough to hold the works of a single generation, from a single city-state. It is the last bastion of the First’s history, and it is a pitiful monument to the incalculable loss of the same. My research is a never-ending nightmare of dead-end cross-references, untraceable allusions, and presumed common knowledge which is mentioned once in passing and never again. Every last tome is a vast graveyard of lost knowledge. If I cannot find the answers among the Crystarium’s residents, I must assume them forgotten to time. There are no lost histories to discover – I have seen what lies beyond the edge of the world. Or, rather, what doesn’t.
Let me recount a history to you, traced across several tomes in a fit of fascination one evening, yet unworthy of being compiled among my primary notes, of a place called Wolf River.
While it was apparently not counted among the Great Rivers of the star, it was nonetheless storied. The river was wide, and swift yet calm, and ran hundreds of malms until becoming a tributary to the seas. As such, it was vital to the movement of people and goods alike throughout the centuries, if not millennia.
I first encountered the Wolf River while reading a high-level collection of famous battles of Norvrandt’s north-eastern neighboring regions. At one point in history, two states at war shared the Wolf River as a border, and the foam that built on the shores was stained red as year after bloody year was fought across it. The most famous of those battles occurred at a relative narrow with historic ports on both sides. In the storm and raging battle that ensued, the two armies managed to switch sides, each stranding the other in enemy territory.
A few days later, while reading a treatise on the developmental antecedents to Voeburtian metallurgy, I caught another mention of the Wolf River. The author believed trading records suggested that all the tin in Norvrandt had originated at the far end of, and thus traveled the full length of, the Wolf River, thus earning early alloys the name “wolf metal”. It was this record that led me to scour the stacks for further mentions of the river.
One account told of a ten-year period when demand rose for a fragrant spice, which so dominated every shipment downriver that the waters themselves were said to smell of it.
A book of legends told of an old warrior who rowed against the river in a hand-carved boat, making the journey faster than any thus recorded, in order to deliver life-saving medicine to a village overrun by plague. No sooner did he hand over the last box than did he collapse, dead of exhaustion. Elsewhere, an essay of folk festivals recounted a bi-annual upriver race held in his memory and honor.
In a flowery travel log, one writer told of the iridescent waters of the river’s shallows, and the rainbow-hued stones that covered the shores. They recounted the succulent fish that could be caught and which wild herbs best suited each. They mentioned an artisan who sold them a beautiful carving of river-stone, and a baker who’s goods and prices were offensive to them.
A book of accounts recorded trade routes, taxes, and duties for every port from the river’s source to the sea. It reminded me of the port account records my Mama would reference in her bookkeeping work with the guilds.
Collected in a well-worn book of poetry was a long ode to the Wolf River, which juxtaposed the pure, serene beauty of its waters with its long and bloody history. A shorter work dated centuries earlier cursed the river for carrying the author’s father away, his life as ephemeral as the autumn leaves which the river pulled just as carelessly downstream, never to return.
A birdwatchers’ guide told of the lack of any unique endemic species to the river’s shores, and so suggested that there was no need to see it.
There is ever a sense of melancholy to a historian’s work. Details, stories, and knowledge are always lost, ruins and historical sites worn by time. I have read many a treatise on entire empires whose existences alone are mere speculation. The sense of loss, of stories to remain eternally untold, can be staggering. But nothing I’ve seen on all of Hydaelyn is like this.
For there is no Wolf River. There are no ports on its glitterless, stoneless, shoreless shore. No water flows, carrying no bounty to no sea. Even the memories of the states that could remember the states that fought over it are as blank as the flat, blighted waste that now consumes whatever may have been the Wolf River, and the states that lined it, and the regions it flowed through, and the source it sprung from and the sea it fed. A lifetime of writing could not record one river’s tale. Yet the river was but one footnote in the stories of one small region of this star.
My notes are meant to be a practical guide for my companions to navigate and to know Norvrandt. So what do I write? “To the north and east, there was once a place called Wolf River, and now there is not.” It feels improper, yet even that is more than is relevant. Time is precious and I must focus my research on what remains. So I have told you of the Wolf River, and though I may learn of a hundred more things like it I can spare them no time. Even now I catch myself rambling again.
There is a river that runs into Kholusia from the Duergar Mountains called Watts River. Should our endeavors on this star succeed, perhaps you may go and see it.
Dragana Svetasch