The Almanachus,

or, the Book of reputable knowledge pertaining to the matters of the Werld

Weight & measurement

haberty-pace

Haberty-pace is the prefered Eyrsh standard and replaced all regional varients by order of Wode Eyebre II. Though old scales or rulers might be found for sale in the rummage shops of Good Hope or in an old barn in the Wye, they are no longer legally permissable for usage and will not be accounted here, curious though they be.

length

The primary unit of counting for distance is the foot. The foot is precisely 10 inches long. There are three feet to a yard. There are a thousand yards to the mile and ten furlongs to the mile, by which the furlong is one hundred yards.

We are told, by chance, that some people in the Antipodes or some other unknown place use a measurement known as the meter, which by coincidence is precisely the length of of our Eyrsh yard. The odds of this occurance are astounding, and clear proof of the divine perfection of the Eyrsh yard that some other barbarians would even unknowningly accord their measurement after ours.

Timekeeping

days of the year

by Celerim Heimry Waxflesh, Grove-count of Markswrecqs
VIII 83 Mintober

Revised by Gorem Peerfax, Editor of the Wode Concameral Press
IX 44 Barnfast

There are several calendars which record the days, tenths, seasons, and years, though by custom all have agreed upon the Astrolog of Holystaine as the most correct of them. As there are precisely 381.125 days to the year, a leap day is added every eight years, known as the White Queen’s Day, which brings the calendar back to perfect alignment.

The 381 days are broken up into thirty-eight tenths supplemented by the extracalendar day of Mother’s Day, added at the end of the year.

Each tenth is itself divided into ten days, of which four are named: Kalend, the None, the Ides, and the Hour. Days are not counted up but rather one counts down the upcoming day. As Kalend is the first day of the tenth, the sequence of days thus goes:

Kalend of [tenth]
4th til the Nones of [tenth]
3rd til the Nones of [tenth]
The Forenones of [tenth], or 2nd til the Nones of [tenth]
The Nones of [tenth]
The Ides of [tenth]
4th til the Hour of [tenth]
3rd til the Hour of [tenth]
The Forehour of [tenth], or 2nd til the Hour of [tenth]
The Hour of [tenth]

In Landing the old custom is still common, especially among the older or more rural peoples, which is said to have its origins on the Antipodes. It goes as:

Sunday
Moonday
Trewsday
Foreday
Wodesday
Second
Thursday
Freeday
Sterday
Hourday

In Westremothe, Twyier, and Loewe, the Mothic form is prefered, which goes as such:

Calenne
Hirsces, or Dea gron
Dea rog
Dea sourt
None, or Dea d’Ouid
Dea gel
Dea d’êmith
Dea blue
Dea oit
Hor

tenths of the year

The tenths are named in the following sequence, with the meaning of the name—as far as is known—in parentheses (nb. many of these names are so obscure, few native Eyrsh speakers know their meanings):

Wyetenth (holy-tenth) Wy
Hoaring (frost) Hg
Skunktide (time of the skunk) St
Coming (inbound migration of birds) Cg
Horninga (horns growing in) Ho
Bruetenth (beer brewing-tenth) Br
Bloomstenth (flower blooming-tenth) Bl
Foreyear (the new year was once counted on the first day of spring) Fy
Lenten (springtide holy-tenth) Ln
Grestenth (grass-tenth) Gr
Midgetenth (mosquito-tenth) Mg
Wententh (meaning unknown) Wn
Mintober (meaning unknown) Mt
Breaktenth (break-tenth, meaning unknown) Bk
Suntenth (sun-tenth) Su
Wedenth (weed-tenth) We
Maxmisce (meaning unknown) Mx
Rasptenth (tenth the raspberries come in) Rp
Midsummer Ms
Frogtenth (frog-tenth) Fg
Hasing (hazy, or muggy) Hs
Heytint (hey harvesting-tenth) Hy
Herbenth (herb gathering-tenth) Hb
Hemptenth (hemp harvesting-tenth) Hm
Quithe (meaning unknown) Qu
Renth (Rain-tenth) Re
Gilbing (the yellowing of plants) Gg
Autumn Au
Ganstenth (goose migration-tenth) Gn
Perimalthus (meaning unknown) Pm
Fogtenth (foggy-tenth) Fo
Barnfast (barn closed/secured) Bf
Hacktenth (woodcutting-tenth) Hk
Lardenth (lard-tenth) Lr
Blodenth (blood-tenth, from the slaughtering of animals) Bd
Wittniss (white-ness, from snowfall) Wn
Darktenth (dark-tenth) Dk
Midwinter Mw

dates

Dates are written in the sequence of greatest to smallest:

Wheel year tenth day
Eg. VIII 22 Fo 3

By analogy, dates for days are counted from the Hour down, so 3 would be the 8th day of the tenth, the third til the Hour. 4 would be the 7th day, the fourth til the Hour. 9 would be the 2nd day, the fourth til the Nones.

Mother’s Day and the White Queen’s Day are written: IX 4 Md and IX 8 Wq

Dates can be written numerically, which is less common.
Eg. III 29 Cg 7 as 3.29.4.7 or III.XXIX.IV.VII

Mother’s Day and the White Queen’s Day would be rendered 9.4.1 and 9.8.2 respectively.

When a date is spelled out in full, it is written in the opposite sequence.
Eg. The Forenones of Bruetenth of the twenty-second year of the ninth Wheel.

Eoring

by Hare Professor Heimry Hide, Reader of the Wode Military School
VIII 76 Midsummer

What follows is not a history of kings, but of arrangements, of the ways men choose to live together, and the violence they permit in order to continue doing so. The history of the West is often told as the story of Eyr’s rise from a small agricultural city into the greatest state the Werld had yet seen, but this is only half true. Eyr did not create civilization in the West. Long before the Eyrsh crossed the Dwarrescarps, there already existed laws, customs, markets, alliances, rituals of violence, and systems of property older than the oldest Eyrsh records. The Eyrsh did not so much create order as inherit a landscape already full of it, though in forms they at first scarcely recognized.

The West is dominated by several large grasslands of immense size, broad and largely treeless plains stretching from the foothills of Orcadia in the east to the shallow western seas. These calm still seas are warm but extremely shallow, broken by endless reefs and shoals which prevent strong ocean currents from forming. It is to the north and the south that winds and rain blow in, from the north in winter and the south in summer, sweeping inland and bringing storms across the plains. For much of the year they remain dry, the grasses hardened golden under the immense skies. Forests struggle to take root in all but the highest hills and along the winding rivers and streams, as fires and vast herds of buffalo roam the plains, burning and trampling any saplings before they can mature.

It is from this ecology that emerged several distinct ways of life.

The first Thederim here were the Great Thede, nomadic hunters who followed the buffalo herds across the West. Though often described by later Eyrsh writers as savages or wanderers, the Thede possessed a highly developed social order adapted to mobility and uncertainty. Wealth among them was not fixed in fields or walls, but in animals, kinship, memory, and reputation. Authority was diffuse and situational. Men followed leaders because they were persuasive, brave, or fortunate, not because any institution compelled obedience.

Along the fringes of the plains arose the friths, semi-nomadic ranching clans who occupied the uncertain boundary between agriculture and pastoralism. Each frith collectively maintained great herds of buffalo, though individual families marked ownership through brands burned onto the animals. The herds were pooled together for protection and movement, with different families taking turns overseeing them throughout the year. Some friths remained almost wholly pastoral. Others mixed ranching with settled agriculture. Others still hunted seasonally while farming river valleys in winter. No sharp distinction existed between hunter, herdsman, and farmer. Most communities lived somewhere between all three.

The center of frith life was usually the burh. In its simplest form a burh might consist only of a fortified tower surrounding a mill, inn, smithy, and caravan stop. These smaller settlements, often called millburhs, existed where streams or wind could power mills and where caravans crossing the plains required shelter. Larger burhs developed into full stederiches: fortified hill towns that controlled surrounding farmland, grazing rights, markets, and roads. These places resembled neither kingdoms nor tribes so much as independent city-states, each governed by its own laws, assemblies, militias, and merchant interests.

The greatest of these stederiches eventually became known collectively as the Pentarchy, five competing states strung along the western shores and river mouths of the West: Good Hope, Brensa, Loewe, Cheapreshe’an, and Holystaine. Though wealthier and more urban than the friths, they remained politically unstable. Alliances shifted constantly. Rivalries between neighboring stederiches erupted into endemic warfare. Merchant leagues, ranching interests, aristocratic households, and militias all competed for influence. They were too fragmented to unite, yet too entangled to separate. The friths existed uneasily between these powers.

Central to frith society was the institution known as eoring. To outsiders eoring appeared little more than organized cattle theft, but among the friths it functioned as one of the principal mechanisms by which wealth, honor, and violence were regulated. An eor followed strict rules. Raids were conducted openly and during daylight. Riders announced themselves by blasting a horn before approaching a herd. Certain weapons were forbidden entirely, including bodkin-headed arrows and spears, and axes meant for close slaughter. The intention was never to kill or injure. Killing cattle was likewise considered abhorrent, as it destroyed wealth rather than redistributing it. Likewise, no cattle could be taken from a man who possessed five or fewer head, preserving a minimum means of survival even among rivals. No one might raid a home when the head of the household was absent, injured, or ill.

The purpose of eoring was not annihilation but releasing tension. Young men gained status through daring and skill. Wealthy households could be challenged and partially humbled without provoking exterminatory violence. Grudges found release through ritualized conflict. Raids redistributed animals across the plains and prevented dangerous accumulations of wealth and influence. Most importantly, eoring provided an alternative to war.

When conducted properly, an eor remained bounded by custom and mutual recognition. But when individuals violated those customs—raiding too frequently, using excessive violence, killing herdsmen, or employing forbidden weapons—the system itself became endangered. Only then did the friths unite for true warfare. Such wars were usually not fought for territory, but to destroy the individuals or lineages deemed responsible for breaking the order that allowed the plains to function at all. In this way, violence among the friths was not lawless. It was governed by a social logic older than any written code.

It was into this unstable but functional world that the Eyrsh entered.

Orcadia, unlike the West, was a land of rivers, storms, forests, and enclosed valleys. Much of the volcanic, mountainous region was lashed by seasonal thunderstorms and tornados, though the basin surrounding Eyr itself lay within a calm rain shadow and proved suitable for intensive agriculture. There the Eyrsh developed a society unlike that of the plains. Wet farming required coordinated labor, irrigation, flood management, granaries, surveys, and permanent infrastructure. From these conditions emerged the Eyrsh state.

The early Eyrsh were locked for generations in conflict with the Tweirites, a nomadic people of buffalo hunters and ranchers native to the grasslands surrounding Orcadia. The Tweirite Wars lasted roughly a century and transformed Eyr permanently. The Eyrsh sought to expand agriculture into the basin grasslands; the Tweirites resisted enclosure and displacement. In time the Eyrsh prevailed. The Tweirites were expelled eastward into the West in a region between the Wye and Mothia now known as Twyier, where their arrival destabilized already delicate balances among the friths and stederiches.

The mechanism of Eyrsh expansion into the West began almost accidentally. As part of the settlement ending the Tweirite Wars, the Eyrsh proclaimed themselves protectors of the displaced Tweirites in exchange for tribute and military obligations. When the Tweirites almost immediately became entangled in disputes with neighboring friths and stederiches, they appealed to Eyr for assistance. The Eyrsh intervened, won several early victories, and extracted tribute from defeated communities.

At first these interventions were limited and pragmatic. But the political structure of Eyr itself soon encouraged escalation. A breakdown in political norms in Eyr created the custom of suspending elections for wode during times of active war. This created a powerful incentive for political elites to maintain ongoing conflicts or frontier emergencies. Military campaigns in the Wye became not merely profitable, but politically useful. Thus Eyr was drawn step by step into the affairs of the entire region.

Over generations the Eyrsh gradually subdued the larger stederiches of the Pentarchy, imposed tribute upon many friths, and established themselves as the dominant power of the West. Yet the Eyrsh discovered quickly that direct suppression of frith customs proved impossible. Attempts to abolish eoring only intensified violence. Without ritualized raiding, wealth accumulated dangerously, grievances festered unresolved, and feuds escalated into genuine wars that disrupted trade and taxation alike. Moreover, Eyr lacked the wealth or manpower to endlessly garrison and occupy the region. Instead, gradually, the Eyrsh adapted.

Rather than destroy eoring, they chose to regulate it. The state began distinguishing between lawful eors and unlawful violence. Eyrsh magistrates inserted themselves as neutral arbitrators in disputes between friths. Tribute and taxes were levied upon herds and raids alike. The Eyrsh increasingly portrayed themselves not as conquerors, but as guarantors of peace between the clans and protectors of the friths against the meddling ambitions of the stederiches. In time this arrangement became one of the foundations of Eyrsh imperial rule.

The irony was never lost on the friths. The Eyrsh claimed to have civilized the West, yet much of the stability of the plains rested not upon Eyrsh law, but upon older customs the state had once condemned as barbaric. The Eyrsh had not abolished the order of the Wye. They had merely learned to tax it.

Of the Osing-way

by Professor Regnier Frobisher, Head of the College of Divinity, the Scola
VIII 86 Barnfast
Revised by Professor Tiffin Carver, Reader of the Garant School of Divinity, Harrow
IX 45 Horninga

“The Werld will not save you, but it is alive, and you owe it right conduct.”
Earatha Childenkeeper

the nature of folkish belief

Among the Thederim there is no single word for what Westerners often seek to name as a single thing. The Thederim do not commonly speak of a bounded “faith” that one enters and cannot depart, nor of belief as an exclusive pledge. Rather, their customs and understandings are lived as part of ordinary life: the keeping of days, the tending of shrines, the speaking of names, the avoidance of certain acts, the telling of old tales, the making of offerings, the taking of vows, and the disputing—endlessly and with relish—of what these things might mean.
For this reason, when the learned must speak of the matter in a single phrase, Osing-way is serviceable, though imperfect. The word is encountered most often in its plainest sense: a way-path to a shrine, grave, standing stone, holy hollow, or other place where osings are known to gather. By extension it also denotes the body of rites, observances, and devotions conducted along such ways. It does not necessarily denote a single doctrine, nor does it require assent to a single account of the world. In Thederim speech, the “why” and the “how” are rarely forced into agreement; correctness is more often measured by doing than by saying. Orthopraxy, not orthodoxy.
The Thederim will sometimes speak instead of nature—not merely trees and weather, but the proper shape of living: the pattern by which people, beasts, spirits, and seasons interlock. Much that a stranger might press into “theology” is, for the Thederim, a question of whether a life is lived in keeping with nature, or against it.
During the last fifty years—owing to increased intercourse with Westerners, the needs of diplomats, and the habits of schools—there has arisen a more orderly account of the Osing-way than many householders would ever attempt. This account is useful, but it must be handled with care. The Osing-way is, by temperament, paradoxical: it admits contradiction without shame, prefers the suggestive over the exhaustive, and treats vagueness not as failure but as room for the Werld to remain wonderous.
What follows, therefore, is a map—not the land.

a note on old orders: cyrl, wyling, eyrl

The Folk-from-across-the-Sea were not one people in their origin, yet they carried with them a familiar ordering that appears—under many names—across the Antipodes:

Cyrls, free farmers and householders,
Wylings, priests and custodians of rites,
Eyrls, warrior nobles and patrons of war-cults.

The ships that made landfall did not carry these estates in equal measure. Most were crowded with cyrls; few bore many wylings or eyrls. In the old lands, priest and noble often propped one another up; in the new, severed from the weight of ancestral property and retinue, such arrangements withered. The formerly enslaved cyrls, being the multitude and the muscle of settlement, quickly established the radically egalitarian moral temper resentful of all bondage that would come to be treated as ancient law: that men and women are born equal in standing, whatever their parentage.
This matter is not merely political. The Osing-way mirrors the society that keeps it. Where class is thin and mobility is real, a religion that insists upon fixed spiritual castes will not be long endured. Over generations the inherited myths were reordered, reinterpreted, and—where needed—re-homed upon Werld soil.
Even so, the old tripartite ghost lingers in the broad division that scholars commonly use when speaking of Thederim tradition: Folklore, the Courts, and the Psealms.

the three strata of the osing-way

I. Folklore: osings, ylmre, wonders, and terrors

Folklore is the low myth of the Thederim: household tales of osings, ylmre, monsters, witches, wizards, and the hidden rules of luck and spite. It is carried chiefly by speech and habit—mother-to-child, neighbor-to-neighbor—and has shown remarkable stability since the Landing. New stories are forever being grafted on, but the oldest cores change little. The greatest alteration, more often than not, is simply this: events once set “elsewhere” are relocated into the Werld, with beasts and plants adjusted to match the country.
Folklore is not “lesser” in its power. Many scholars learn that a proverb muttered over a threshold may govern more behavior than a hundred sermons.

II. The Courts: shrines, orders, and the Six Queens

The Courts are the organized heart of wyling practice: networks of shrines, vows, calendars, and custodianship. They are commonly understood as a long synthesis: remnants of older war-cults and priestly authority, braided together with practices learned from Wels and Elandie as the Folk assimilated and intermarried, all institutionally reformed to create a social compact propped up by, and propping up, the state.
As the eyrls dwindled in worldly authority, many priests gradually turned away from gods of rulership and conquest—figures too closely resembling the old aristocratic bargain—and toward powers more chthonic, nearer to hearth, grave, childbirth, sickness, weather, oath, and wheel, though the process was gradual and generational. It was the Sesbrean and Vilbraennean Reforms of the V Wheel which produced the Courts in forms recognizably akin to those kept today.
The Courts are six, each associated with one of the Queens. Because the wylings no longer hold social supremacy, membership and service are open to all who can endure the discipline and the obligations.

III. The Psealms: song, city, and the memory of glory

The Psealms are the song-memory of older noble rivalry: tales once composed to praise heroic ancestors, justify old claims, and recall battles against monsters and chaos. In the Antipodes these songs belonged chiefly to eyrl-houses; most cyrls neither knew them well nor needed to.
In the Werld, however, the shape of the thing altered. Even where households did not preserve the old Psealms, they remembered what such songs were for. Within a few generations new cycles were being made—less for bloodline than for clan, band, and above all city. These works spread quickly, often taking a middle ground between practical folklore and the more inward rites of the Courts: entertaining, political, and sticky in the mind. Among the best-known are the Wolfing Cycle and the Eyriad.

of osings and offerings

A common axiom of Thederim thought is that all matter is ensouled: beast, plant, stone, metal, river, and wind. Learnèd disputation may refine the claim—some arguing that “soul” is distinct from matter, others that it is the very same substance seen under a different aspect—but in practice the consequence is plain: the Werld is full of presences.
Osings are presences unbound to a single object. One may think of them as souls made person-like: spirits inhabiting nature, animate and inanimate; or as the “faces” by which the ensouled world can be addressed. They range from petty household osings to mighty Queens. Even when speaking of the Queens, Thederim commonly resist the word “gods,” preferring instead: osings of surpassing power.
Dealings with osings are often transactional, though the wise will add that the osings themselves set the price, and that what they value is not always what a supplicant expects. Offerings, abstinences, and proper speech matter less as “bribes” than as the manners by which one approaches a will that is not human.
Notably, communion with osings is not confined to the Courts. Ritual trance—sometimes aided by mushrooms, smoke, fasting, chanting, or sleeplessness—has long been the province of folk-practitioners: dryce, galdners, and others broadly named witches. In theory anyone may attempt such commerce; in practice, the attempt is perilous and talent is unevenly distributed, thus the role of tercines, the college of priestesses specially trained to offer the correct sacrifice on behalf of supplicants.

the mother and the six queens

The Thederim all speak of a single Creator as the Mother—unknowable, infinite, and withdrawn from the Werld. The Mother is said to have birthed six daughters, the Queens. Yet even here the Osing-way refuses neatness: most will insist the Queens are not “deities” but osings, and that divinity is a category mortals invented to flatter themselves into comprehension.
The Mother is rarely worshiped directly. She is too great, too far, and too uninterested. The Queens are nearer: not necessarily kinder, but nearer. It was, after all, the White Queen, not the Mother, who created all men and women in Her image.
Though endlessly disputed in detail, all agree the Mother, self-begat, emerged from the Cosmic Egg, which She made. Standing upon the shell, She formed the Werld out of the spilled contents, forming the land, the sea, and the sky. The shell itself became the great baetyl of the Navel of the Werld in the Omphales.
Afterwards She fashioned the Father out of wood and brought him to life by placing an egg within his chest. Mounting him, the Mother then became impregnated with the White Queen. The Mother then sent the Father down from Heaven to gather materials across the Werld to build a crib for their daughter. From this point the traditions diverge in their telling, but most liviers agree that the Father, upon returning to Heaven, beheld the White Queen and desired Her and stole Her away. The Mother struck him down with Her lightning sword, castrating him and casting him from Heaven. Pathetically, he crawled the Werld searching for his severed member, but the wrathful Mother sent down three ravens who gobbled his parts, granting them the spark of intellect, speech, and consciousness.
Thereafter, disgusted by Her creation, the Mother withdrew. In this withdrawal the Thederim find their chief answer to the question of evil: She does not tend the garden. The Werld has been abandoned. In the quasi-livier Apocrypha & Unwanted Things, the Mother, disgusted by the Father’s betrayal and deeming the Werld a failed work, turned Her attention to the making of new and more perfect worlds.

reincarnation and the selfsame soul

Reincarnation is among the central habits of Thederim thought. Upon death, it is commonly held, the Black Queen decides what life follows.
Because reincarnation is not understood to be bound by the order of space or time—one may die in the future and be born again in the past—many philosophers argue toward a startling conclusion: that all lives are, in truth, the lives of one soul lived in innumerable shapes, known by scholars as radical solipsism. From it follows the moral idiom sometimes called selfsameness: to harm another is to harm oneself, because one must one day live that harmed life; to cheat is to be cheated; to kill is, eventually, to kill oneself.
Those who favor this doctrine will sometimes address strangers as selfsame-brother or selfsame-sister, not as sentimental piety but as literal metaphysic.
There is also, among the bolder disputants, a strain of argument that time itself is illusory, and that “before” and “after” are conveniences of the body rather than truths of the Werld, though this belief is by no means universal.

The Doom of the Son of the Sun

by Hare Peer Willemson, Historian of the Wode Concamera
VIII 49, Bruetenth

The writers who have most influenced the common understanding of these matters are not the chaunters and seers, who speak in riddles, but those of a sober temper, who delight in causes and character. For it is plain that even in the ancient shets the osings are made to act from passions familiar to men, and that the fates of worlds often turn upon the same things that turn a household: envy, desire, a wound to pride, and the strange steadfastness of those who will not endure dishonor. It is my humble wish, through this understanding, to make the contents of the Shet of the Doom laid bare.
Now the Father—whom some call the first-born soul and others the last—was by nature sharp of wit and vehement in will. He could not bear that the Mother’s workmanship should stand independent of him, and, being unable to mar it by strength alone, he set about it by craft. And because he understood that light is the bond of all living things, he judged that if he could steal the Sun, he might not merely harm creation but unmake the very conditions under which it persists.
So he assumed the form of a swan, for swans are pleasing to behold and are especially dear to the White Queen. In this he showed both subtlety and insolence: subtlety, in choosing a shape that would draw the Yellow Queen near without fear; insolence, in profaning a creature held sacred by his Daughter. The Yellow Queen, being by disposition attracted to beauty and movement, followed him into a thick wood; and at the end of a stagnant pond there was a small cave, into which the swan flew. When She entered after him, the Father caused the mouth of the cave to collapse, and the ruin became as one solid stone, so that the Sun was imprisoned in rock. From this came the Eternal Night, during which living things languished and the Werld approached extinction.
In this crisis it is the White Queen who is praised, and not without reason. For She did not rage in the fashion of those who are quick to anger and quick to tire, but persisted with the patience of a lawgiver pursuing a single case. She traveled through the whole Werld seeking Her Sister and found nothing, until at last She came, worn with labor, to the very pond where the deed had been done. There She saw a swan upon the water; but when She approached it, the bird hissed at her, which swans do not do when they are in the White Queen’s company. By this She perceived the deception, and with Her sword, Eyenbite, She struck off its head. Then a thing occurred which the myth-makers always take pleasure in: for instead of blood, poison poured out, and filled the pond, making the water itself a vessel of corruption. And immediately She heard the Yellow Queen calling from within the stone. The White Queen, therefore, smote the rock with the same sword and severed it, as if stone were cloth, and brought forth Her sister.
But the consequences of one act, even when it is just, are not always just in themselves. For the Yellow Queen, having been long shut up, bathed in the pond before departing, and the poison entered her. Thus She conceived the Son of the Sun, not by any marriage or consent, but by the residue of violence. This is why the wiser among the liviers say that the Werld is not governed by simple oppositions of good and evil, but by entanglements: even rescue carries a seed of calamity.
And the severed head of the swan, having served its purpose, did not die as other things die. It sloughed off its feathers, shed its skin, and rose again in a new and monstrous form; and this was the Wirm. In the moral of the tale it is plain enough what is intended: that deceit, when cut down, does not always perish, but may return as a more naked and terrible thing. And the Wirm is said to be the Father’s former evil given body, so that the world might behold, and later judge, what had previously been hidden in counsel and intent.
Now as to the Son of the Sun, the doctrine of the Selfsame Soul is introduced, which many receive because it accords with the sense that the same faults recur through ages, as if history were one man making the same error under different names. They say there is but one soul in all the universe, reincarnated nearly without end; and that in its final course it shall be the first born on the Werld: the Father. But when the Father dies, his soul shall go immediately into the Son, so that the Son is the Father again, but given the opportunity to become what the Father refused to be. For the Son is appointed to slay the Wirm, which is the Father’s wickedness made visible; and in this, redemption is not escape but confrontation.
The End of these Things is tied to the tolling of the Three Bells of Doom, which the poets describe as if the Werld itself were a great machine whose turning keeps order. The first bell tolls when the Unyielding One breaks free: a vile wizard whom the White Queen once subdued and bound in compelling chains, setting him in the planet’s core to turn the gears that spin the world. Yet he, being of a mind that delights in loopholes, shall deceive the Red Queen into releasing him; and by this act the hidden races beneath the mountains will awaken, and the guebbelins will rise and assemble under the ettins.
When the Werld ceases to spin, the second stage of ruin shall follow in a manner that is both grand and instructive. For it is not by a single blow but by the failure of order that the greatest destruction occurs. The mountains shall tumble, the stars shall fall and burn the earth, the seas shall evaporate, and life shall perish. Then the second bell will toll, and the Queens with their osings will make war against the ettin hosts, and though they will prevail, they do so at great cost—showing that even divine victory is a kind of loss when the field itself is ashes.
But the third bell will toll, and the Wirm will appear not from earth but from the night sky, and first will devour the Moon and then attempt to devour the Sun. Here the fate of all things shall reach its proper climax: the Son of the Sun will emerge from the rays of his mother and battle the Wirm, and slay it. Yet the Wirm’s venom is fatal, and the Son shall die. Some say he will weep for the Wirm even as he kills it, which, if one chooses to interpret rather than merely recite, suggests that he recognizes in the monster something of himself—an evil he did not invent but must nonetheless end.
At last the Mother shall return, drawn by the Son’s cries. Yet She cannot save him from death; and so She does what is greater than saving a life—She will end the cycle. She shall forgive us, the Selfsame Soul, and time itself shall be brought to a close; and thereafter will She make a new World, which they call Paradise. Thus fate concludes not with the triumph of power but with the primacy of mercy, and teaches, if it teaches anything, that the highest act is not to conquer the enemy but to refuse the endlessness of punishment.
Such is the account, as it is commonly told among the liviers; and if there are contradictions in the details, this is not surprising. For in matters so old and so exalted, men preserve the shape of meaning more faithfully than the measures of fact.

Osings, demons, & beasts of wonder

by Gaven bythe Wells, Lecturer of the College of Divinity, the Scola
IX 46 Lenten