The Pensives

In the year 776 by Midrath's counting, the Schoolmaster Sicletrude raised a college in the south of Greater Curlail: a spire for the Order of the Pensives, the scholars and philosophers of the isle. It began humbly, a library of Feybles — fey-tales of the old world, gathered before anyone thought to fear their loss — and grew into great Midrathian acclaim. At its heart lay the Aurem Canus, the innermost chamber, whose seal was the highest honour a book could wear. Eager Prentices crossed from the many Isles to seek it.

The College kept its days the way a farm keeps its seasons. At Dayn the Archsage led the Twin Suns' prayer, and meditations began at birdsong. At Gale the Prentices held their morning debates. Pencraft brought the rite of ink and the doling of quills; Shelving, the lighting of the Aurem Canus lantern; and at Astone the silent bell was rung and quiet study commenced. Six tombstones stand in the garden below, each with its dry sentence of judgment — one scholar buried for disturbing the silence, another for the fruitless invention of parchment wings. The Pensives loved order the way a hearth loves its stack of split wood. An Envoy walking Greater Curlail today can gather the drifting History Motes at the tower and read these small doings again.

When the Sinecure came to Curlail they did not sack the College; they burned it. Every book within — the Feybles, the Histories, generation upon generation of patient copying — went into the fire. This was no accident of war but the invader's method entire: the charm-song hollows Midrath's folk of their own past, and even the names of the towns are taken off the land. An empire that rules by forgetting cannot suffer a library.

But burnt words are not gone words. Orlick teaches that what was written lives on in the smoke: the History Motes that drift over the isle like ash refusing to settle. Gather them at a ruin and the place gives back its name. His saga Oblivio puts the charge plainly — the enemy has taken even the names of the towns, and the Envoy is to take them back, page by page, for his book.

Orlick the Bicameral enrolled as a fresh Prentice in the College's founding year and rose to Sage, dreaming nightly of the Aurem Canus' seal stamped on a book of his own. The dream never came true in life. His treatise Capricious Crops was torn for trial on account of unsupported claims, in the same season his rival Sage Rodrich's The Forest's Vast Voices earned the seal. Rodrich's field notes survive: the mini-quest Burning Sage, playable since Preludes 14, retraces the route on which that masterwork was penned — a study of squirrels, beavers, and one much-mourned tavern rat, with unkind asides about Orlick along the way.

His long tenure was itself the secret. In the Aurem Canus Orlick had found a tome holding the secret of extended life, and worked its spell upon himself — with a fertility charm botched into the casting, whence came the Little Genius, the infant sage who sits his right shoulder to this day, whispering counsel he did not ask for. One hundred and twenty-eight years he kept his post before the Aftsage Proctor uncovered the trick. The Pensives' justice was the tower's own height: they threw him from the spire. The official record of Preludes 14 calls him, with courtly economy, "the dearly departed historian."

The Fable called The Last Pensive — in the game since the first Preludes, and still the first Ancestor tale an Envoy walks in the Preludes 15 build, hard on the heels of Rise, Envoy — begins when the Sparrow leads to Pensive's Tower and a voice speaks among the shelves of ash. The ghost has lost his quill. It lies south of the College in an unmarked grave, wrapped in a scroll from one called Sigil to one called Singer: the quill was stolen by the Sinecure and won back. Who Sigil is, and why the letters name the finder Singer — there the record keeps a gap, for the sources keep theirs.

Set the quill in its inkwell and the last Pensive follows the Envoy home. In the Nightfold a cairn of stones gives way, and a study rises out of the Silvern water: desk, shelves, and scholar entire. From it Orlick keeps the Journal and its Histories and the Codex, and dictates his Sagas chapter by chapter — a book of all Alca's mysteries that he resolves, part-way through the scribing, to make an autobiography, its second chapter ending atop the College at the very place he died. This archive will say it once and plainly: the Yorefold is kept in the Pensives' fashion, and Orlick the Bicameral is its patron. Where his order shelved, we fold. The trade is the same — keep the names, or the fire wins.