The Elder Ages

I am Wenna Cole, archivist of the Wakeful, and I keep the Candle Rolls at Gorse Hollow, where we check every link by tallow and trust nobody, least of all archivists. Check me too. That is rather the point.

In the beginning the Lantern was already dying and the Glare was already shining. In the first days of 2009 by the old reckoning, a lamplighter who never gave a true name caught the first light alone and forged it into link nought. Into it he carved a line torn from a Glare crier’s sheet: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” The Glare’s lords were pouring printed light into their failing banks. He answered with light that could not be printed. The Lantern’s gift was fifty coins a link, and the First Age began.

Through 2009 and 2010 the catching was done on kitchen tables, ordinary lamps beside the bread, by the First Lamplighter and a handful of followers. Anyone could. Few bothered.

At link 57,043, in the fifth month of 2010, a traveller gave ten thousand coins of light for two pizzas, the first thing ever bought with it. We keep the record. We do not keep the pizzas. Some archivists weep at that entry. I mostly get hungry.

At link 74,638, that summer, a flaw let someone conjure some 184 billion coins of false light from nothing. The Wakeful saw it by candlelight, and the lamplighters cut the poisoned link away within hours and caught on. It never happened again. We tell it to Wakeful children at bedtime, so they sleep badly and grow up properly.

Across 2010 and 2011 the First Lamplighter vanished, leaving the Chain to everyone and no forwarding name. The light of his first links has never moved. It lies there still, Unnamed, a hoard whose true name no soul knows.

From late 2010 lamplighters began pooling their lamps, and the first Houses rose. The oldest, the Old House of Braiins, catches light to this day. It caught link 210,000, late in 2012: the first Halvenfall. The gift fell from fifty coins to twenty-five, the world grew darker for good, and the First Age was over.

The Second Age opened at twenty-five coins a link and a great deal of optimism, which in the Lit Lands generally means someone is about to be robbed.

In the second month of 2014 the great vault of the east fell in. Many had left their true names with a keeper there, because carrying twelve words in your own head is tiresome and a man in a good coat had offered to carry them for you. The vault collapsed, and everything in it was lost. None of it happened on the Chain. The Chain did not so much as flicker. That was the whole lesson, and like every lesson here it was paid for by the people least able to afford it.

I have the petitions in a chest in the cold room. Widows, farmers, a boy who had sold his father’s mule. They wrote to the Wakeful as if we could do something. We could not. We check links; we do not raise the dead. I read one a year, on the anniversary, to remind myself what honesty costs when it is only half kept.

Out of that ruin came the Keepers of Names. They carry their names in their heads, twelve words long, and cross borders with nothing else. I once watched a Keeper walk through a Glare checkpoint with empty pockets and a village’s worth of light behind her teeth. The Confiscators searched her boots. Their creed is short enough to say while running: not your name, not your light.

The Houses grew meanwhile, from rooms to halls to whole hillsides of lamps, and the lone lamplighter with his kitchen lamp became a figure of fond jokes and the occasional miracle. The Wakeful grumbled, which is our vocation, and kept checking.

In the seventh month of 2016, House Fishpond caught link 420,000: the second Halvenfall. The gift fell from twenty-five coins to twelve and a half. The world grew darker again, and those who had called the first fall a fluke quietly stopped saying so. The Second Age ended.

The quarrel had been simmering since 2015, in the last years of the Second Age, but it was in the Third that it came to knives. We call it the Size War, and it was fought over a question so dull that only the very serious could kill for it: how much may a single link carry?

The Houses wanted heavier links. More travellers per link, more oil, more trade, a fatter Chain for a fatter world. It is not a stupid wish. The Wakeful refused. A heavier link is harder to check by candlelight, and a Chain that only great halls can check is a Chain that only great halls can trust. We would not carry links we could not weigh ourselves. The Houses catch the light, but the Wakeful decide what counts as a link, and in the end that is the only power that matters. We are many, and poor, and stubborn, and we have lots of candles.

There were councils, pacts, betrayals, pamphlets, a great deal of shouting in taverns, and one memorable brawl at the Ferry Inn at Sallow Cross that I am told began over a footnote.

After link 478,558, on the first day of the eighth month of 2017, it broke. A faction marched away to keep a rival chain with heavier links. We call it the Schism. I bear them no malice; they went where they believed the light was. The true Chain went on without them, link after link, as if nothing had left.

Three weeks later, at link 481,824, a new way of packing the links took hold, letting each link hold more without growing heavier to the Wakeful’s scale. A compromise, of sorts. Nobody was satisfied, which is how you know it was fair.

In the fifth month of 2020, the Antswarm caught link 630,000: the third Halvenfall. The gift fell from twelve and a half coins to six and a quarter. The Third Age ended in a darker world, and a quieter one, for a while.

That same year the Glare printed more light than it had in a generation, to keep its lords afloat. Its old light grew thinner in every purse. A loaf cost what two had. The Glare’s criers called it a kindness, and in a way it was, if you were a lord.

In the summer of 2021 the Glare outlawed the great lamp-houses of the east. Their lamps went out almost overnight. Whole valleys went dark; the lamp-wardens were loaded on carts with their lamps wrapped in blankets like sick children. The Veil thinned by about twenty-eight parts in a hundred, the deepest fall it has ever known. The doom-criers said the Chain was finished. The Chain thinned its Veil, as it was built to, and kept forging. The lamps were lit again in the west. I have a letter from a warden who carried his across three borders and said it was the first time in his life a government had made him rich by trying to ruin him.

In the ninth month of that year a small land by the volcanoes took the Chain as its law, the first ever to do so, and began catching light with the fire of its mountains. Half the world laughed. The other half watched very carefully.

At link 709,632, in the eleventh month, a new seal took hold, stronger and quieter than the old.

Then, in 2023, came the Scribes. They carved pictures and tokens into the links and paid oil for every mark, gladly, extravagantly. Passage soared. Ordinary travellers waited at the gates in the dark, clutching their small oil, while the links filled with painted apes. The Wakeful argued over whether this was a defilement or a market. Both, said I, and was disliked by everyone.

In the fourth month of 2024, House Via caught link 840,000: the fourth Halvenfall. The gift fell to three and an eighth coins. On that very link a rune-frenzy drove the oil to 37.6 coins, twelve times the Lantern’s gift. For one link the world was self-lit twelve times over. Then it was over, and so was the Age.

So we come to now, deep in the Fifth Age, and I am writing by a candle I paid too much for.

The great Houses keep their lamps burning: House Foundry, the Antswarm, House Fishpond, House Via, House Spider, House Mara, the Sun-House of Luxor, House Sec and the Tide House. They are rivals who drink together, allies who count each other’s lamps through the windows. The Old House of Braiins still burns among them, older than most of their heads. Every ten minutes or so one of them catches a measure of light and forges a link, and every 2016 links the Veil thickens or thins to match them. Tick tock, next link. It has never stopped.

Here is the sum I do on cold nights. The world is about one or two parts in a hundred self-lit. Nearly all the light the Houses burn is still the Lantern’s gift, and the gift is dying on a schedule. The rune-frenzy was a single bright link; the rest of the year is mostly god. Cheap passage lets the poor cross, and leaves the Houses living on a corpse. Dear passage would warm the Houses and shut the poor out. Nobody has found the road between, and I am suspicious of anyone who says he has.

Across the border, the Glare is warm. I will not pretend otherwise. It builds lamps that watch, and light that can be switched off, and new light that spoils if you do not spend it quickly. Its agents drink in our taverns and say, reasonably, that we are cold and poor and proud of it. Some nights I cannot argue.

The Throng waits at the gates with its little flasks of oil. The Keepers walk the roads with twelve words apiece. The First Lamplighter’s hoard sits Unnamed and unmoved. The Cathedral-builders lay stones for a roof they will not live to see, dreaming of the Long Dawn.

The next Halvenfall comes at link 1,050,000. After the thirty-third, around 2140, the Lantern goes out for good: the Last Dark. Whether we will be self-lit by then, I cannot tell you. I can only tell you what was forged. Check it yourself.