The Chroniclers

Subject: The writers whose accounts this wiki draws on
Number: Six named, between them narrating most of the accounts on this wiki
Convention: Their words appear on each article below the reference text, marked as an account
Caution: They are witnesses, not authorities. Several of them disagree

A great deal of what is known about Aropria is known because a handful of people wrote it down.

Their accounts appear across this wiki beneath the reference text, marked as what they are: a person's testimony rather than the site's assertion. That distinction matters, because they had different reasons for writing, different access, and — in at least two documented cases — strong opinions about the places they were describing.

Bevel Dart

The Musings of a Wanderer

The most travelled of the six and the most quoted: his account appears on twenty-three articles, more than any other source.

Dart is a wanderer by vocation and writes like one — first person, digressive, fond of the reader, and inclined to tell you what he thought of a place as readily as what was in it. He has been to Rowlem and does not recommend it. He made it to Besok through Garshalla, which almost nobody does. He calls Nashriam the jewel of the civilised world, which is worth weighing against the fact that he lives there.

Where his handwriting falters, later copyists have said so. At the Library of Kaas, describing what the fire took, it is recorded as quivering.

Illona Torok

A Collection of Thoughts

Twelve articles. Torok travels for the sake of what she finds interesting rather than to survey, and her subjects run to the spiritual: the Well of Souls, the Twins, the Pantheon, the Wayfinders, Whioma.

She is candid about how she comes by things. The Wayfinders' prayer reached her as a loose sheaf of parchment that "wriggled loose from its original source", carrying somebody else's notes with it — notes she credits, without knowing whose they were, to "whoever this 'Simm' fellow is".

Virgil Shelton

Eight articles, and the only one of the six who set out as a scholar rather than a traveller. He says so himself: he had spent most of his adult life studying the world from dusty classrooms and libraries before he started going to look at it.

The change did not always suit him. He spent three and a half months excavating under the Urun Peaks and admits to wondering whether he was cut out for the work, right up until the dig produced the sword that proved the Empire of Iron was more than a legend. He was on the bank of Lake Kea the night a Shelev took one of his party, and what he wrote afterwards is the reason that page exists.

Dennian Aewhol

Two articles, both of them systematic where the others are anecdotal: the congruence schools and the Cryptum. Aewhol catalogues. Where Dart would tell you what a place felt like, Aewhol will give you the taxonomy, the subcategories and a footnote.

Aewhol is a tortoise-kin, and it shows in the method. A cataloguer who can reasonably expect three hundred years will begin a taxonomy that nobody else would start.

Archivist Zephoya Simm

An archivist in the employ of a Curath estate, which shapes what she records and how. Her accounts cover Misku'un and the Congruence Stormchasers — a remote nation-tribe and a travelling community, both of them the kind of people a Curath estate has settled views about.

She is the one chronicler here who is read second-hand as often as first: Illona Torok came into possession of her notes on the Wayfinders without ever learning who she was.

Aethel Vox

An Expedition Journal

Two accounts, and the only one of these writers who set out to go somewhere nobody else would. Vox walked into the Blighted Lands with a pack mule named Nostrils and a silverbird named Tuki, on an expedition described as the one nobody else wanted to make.

Vox is a crow-kin, which may be the least surprising fact on this page. The quickenbloom is said to call the clever and the curious, and there is nobody in these pages more curious than the one writer who walked into the place where congruence stops.

The journal is the closest thing anyone has to a first-hand record of a place where congruence cannot be reached at all. Vox's other account, on the null daemons, follows a sound first heard there.

Reading them

Take them as witnesses. Dart is warm and partial. Shelton is careful and, early on, out of his depth. Torok is open to almost anything. Simm writes from inside an institution with opinions. Vox went where the others would not.

Where this wiki states something plainly and an account below it says something else, the difference is usually the point.