The Almanachus,

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

Weight & measurement

haberty-pace

Overseen and regulated by the Measure-keeper in Eyr, 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.

Coinage

Since the arrival of the Folk and their coin-using descendants, the states of the Werld have primarily used silver coinage, though modern Eyr notably uses a bimetallic silver and gold currency. Though it is not used for many daily purchases, the purest coin minted is the crowne (₢), plural crowners, which forms the basis of the Eyrsh currencies. It was first developed in the I Wheel by the men of Twicrownie who minted coins of remarkable silver purity stamped with two crowns. The modern crowne is made of 95-98% pure silver, depending on the year and mint.

Below the crowne in value the penny (¢) made of silver mixed with zinc or tin, depending on the year, mint, and specific denomination. 100 pennies constitute 1 crowne. Below the penny is the mill (₥) made of debased copper. 10 mills make 1 penny and 1000 mills make 1 crowne, hemce its name.

Above the crowne is one more coin, the guilder (₲), made of nearly pure gold. Historically 10 crowners have made 1 guilder, though the price has been allowed to drift since the discovery and large-scale mining of gold in Oslee, and it now hovers around 7 crowners to a guilder. The guilder is almost exclusively used by merchants dealing in long distance trade, by bankers storing and backing up large sums of wealth, by the state to pay their accounts, and by the government paying troops, bulk purchases, or architects for building projects and the like. Normal people rarely see one and would certainly never use one in their entire life. Note that the guilder symbol, ₲, is only used for represnting actual gold coins. Ten crowner coins would be written as ₢10, not ₲1.

list of current eyrsh coins

1₥ Mill
5₥ Halfcent
1¢ Penny
2¢ Twopenny
3¢ Thrime
5¢ Halfdisme
10¢ Disme
20¢ Double-disme
50¢ Halfcrowne
₢1 Crowne
₢2.50 Quarter-guilder
₢5 Halfguilder
₲1 Guilder
₲2 Double-guilder

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.

The Chariots of Wode Gadred

On the silver procession-car, the Queen’s Chariot, and the late ceremonial machinery of the wodeship

by Eafred Conter, Professor of Witminster
IX 40 Mintober

Among the many remembered vanities of Gadred’s late reign, none are more characteristic than his chariots. Earlier wodes had ridden horses, walked in procession, or been borne in solemn chairs according to the rite required. Gadred did all of these things, and was careful never to abandon those ceremonies in which the wode must go on foot before the White Queen. Yet he also delighted in moving machines, in vehicles that did not merely carry him through Eyr but announced him, surrounded him, and changed the air before his coming.

This habit has often been treated by later writers as simple decadence. That is not wrong, but it is incomplete. Gadred’s chariots were not only ornaments. They were arguments. They proposed that divine presence might be given wheels, sound, scent, silver, flowers, horses, and wheelfire. They made the wode visible not merely as a ruler, but as the living surrogate of the White Queen in the Werld.

the silver chariot

The first and most beloved of these vehicles was the Silver Car, which was driven before Gadred in his great civic processions through Eyr. It was not, despite the name, made wholly of silver. Its body was wood and light metal, but the visible surfaces were plated, polished, mirrored, and chased so richly that witnesses said it moved like a piece of the White Moon drawn through the streets.

The Silver Car did not usually carry the wode himself. Rather, it preceded him as a heraldic and sacred machine. Its passage prepared the street for his arrival. Built into its body was a stringed instrument, a long zither, whose strings were sounded by a concealed wheelwork and by musicians riding within or walking beside it. The effect was not a song in the ordinary sense, but a continuous trembling music, bright and metallic, like plucked moonlight.

Small vessels hidden in the chariot released a mist of perfume as it passed. Other compartments scattered flower petals behind it, so that the way before and behind the Wode was altered: the air sweetened, the paving stones brightened, the common street briefly becoming a ritual path. Children remembered the petals. Old women remembered the scent. Priests complained that the device confused beauty with holiness, but even hostile chronicles admit that crowds gathered early to see it pass.

After the Silver Car came Gadred himself. At times he drove his own ceremonial car, particularly in dynastic festivals and triumphal entries. At other times he was carried in a sedan, screened by white cloth and silver lattice. On the holiest days he walked, bareheaded or crowned according to the rite, because no machine could substitute for the wode’s body where the old law required his feet upon the road.

This distinction mattered. Gadred did not replace the old processions with machinery. He surrounded them with machinery. The Silver Car was therefore both innovation and embellishment, a wheeled prelude to kingship. Today it has become the emblem of Gadred’s beautiful excess: expensive, theatrical, unnecessary, and yet genuinely loved.

the queen’s chariot

The later and more terrible machine is remembered under several names: the Queen’s Chariot, the White Queen’s Chariot, the White Chariot, the Thunder-Chariot, and, in hostile sources, Gadred’s Folly. It belonged to the final period of Gadred’s reign, when his fascination with wheelfire had become an obsession. Where the Silver Car made divine presence fragrant and musical, the Queen’s Chariot attempted to make it dreadful.

It was drawn by four white horses, for no other team could properly signify the wode’s office as the human surrogate of the White Queen. These horses were selected, trained, and armored with extraordinary care. Their barding was of bronze scale over thick leather and felt, both for spectacle and for such protection as the engineers believed possible. The chariot body itself was gilded and silvered, with white-painted wood, bronze fittings, mirrored disks, and a high platform from which the wode could be seen by both armies.

Gadred intended the rider to appear not as a captain but as an apparition. The wode wore a gold breastplate and a shining helm. He bore a great round shield polished to a mirror surface, so that sunlight, banners, faces, and the flash of wheelfire all moved across it. He carried a vast war horn, built to sound through the body of the chariot itself. Later descriptions say that when the horn was blown the machine answered beneath it, making a second voice, lower and stranger than breath.

The most notorious feature lay in the hubs. From the wheels projected long bronze and iron scythe-points, not broad mowing blades of the ancient sort but spearlike crescents and hooked teeth. These were not meant primarily to reap ranks of infantry, whatever later stories claim. Their true terror was that they could be charged. When the chariot was awakened, blue-white electricity crawled around the hub-crowns, snapping between small teeth of metal. In its most dangerous setting, the charge could be carried into the scythe-points themselves.

The common account says that the chariot cast lightning from its wheels. This is poetically true and technically false. It did not hurl bolts across the field like the hand of a god. Rather, it stored wheelfire in sealed vessels beneath the floor, charged before use by stationary engines, and maintained in motion by a drive taken from the axle. A clutch could wake the system as the chariot rolled. When engaged, the wheels dragged, the frame hummed, the horses labored, and fire appeared to live in the metal. Contact with spearpoints, shields, wet ground, armor, or bodies could release the charge in a violent flash.

This difference would have meant little to those who saw it. To men who understood wheelfire as a magical substance, the Queen’s Chariot did exactly what the stories said: it brought the White Queen’s fire into the battlefield.

use in procession and war

The Queen’s Chariot was never a common weapon. It may have been brought out only four or five times in all its history. During Gadred’s life it seems to have appeared chiefly in military parades and courtly demonstrations, where it could be shown at a controlled pace, on prepared ground, with trained attendants and carefully managed charge. These appearances were enough to make it famous. The horses, the mirror shield, the terrible horn, and the crawling fire around the hubs gave the impression of a sacred engine more than a vehicle.

Its first true military use came only after Gadred, during the Brother's War under his son Wode Heron. Heron did not, by most accounts, fight from the chariot. He rode before the army in it, using the machine as a sign, a threat, and a proclamation of legitimacy. In a war where the right to speak for the old order was contested, the Queen’s Chariot allowed Heron to appear as heir not only to Gadred but to the divine office itself.

On at least two occasions the display seems to have worked as intended. The chariot passed before the ranks, the white horses held, the horn sounded, and fire gathered in the hubs without disaster. The army cheered. Enemies hesitated. The machine did not need to kill anyone to succeed. It had already done its work by making Heron look impossible to oppose.

But the chariot was always more dangerous to its keepers than to its enemies. It was heavy, temperamental, frightening to animals, dependent on dry fittings and disciplined handling, and intolerant of haste. Its wheelfire vessels had to be charged before use. Its insulation had to be maintained. The horses had to be calm beneath armor, noise, heat, and the prickle of charge in the air. The driver had to control both the team and the machine’s waking. The attendants had to remember which parts could be touched and which were death.

the disaster

The disaster that ended the chariot’s active life is reported differently in every source. Some place it before a battle, some during a review, and some in the confused movements before an attempted sortie, though most scholarly consensus today places the event at a skirmish near Tin Station just south of Eyr. All agree on the essentials: the Queen’s Chariot was awakened too near friendly men, in poor conditions, and in a mode too dangerous for display.

The ground may have been damp. The horses may already have been sweating beneath their bronze scale. A ground-chain may have tangled, or the axle clutch may have jammed. One account says an attendant tried to clear a fouled hub and was killed instantly, his body locking against the wheel. Another says the charge leapt through spearheads in the front ranks. A hostile pamphlet claims that the white horses screamed like women and dragged the chariot sideways through Heron’s own guards.

What likely occurred is less clean and more horrible than any single story. The charge found paths its builders had not intended: through wet leather, metal tack, the chariot frame, the scythe-points, the driver’s rail, the ground, and the bodies of men packed too close around it. The horses panicked. The scythes cut. Men were shocked, burned, trampled, and crushed. The horn, whether by accident or by the dying movement of the machine, gave a long broken note that witnesses remembered more vividly than the screams.

Later generations said that the chariot had eaten its own army. Priests said the rites had been violated. Engineers blamed storage, weather, overcharging, and incompetent command. Heron, who had once used it to embody his right to rule, appears never to have trusted it again.

mothballing and loss

After the disaster the Queen’s Chariot was not destroyed. No one wished to be the official who ordered the White Queen’s own vehicle broken up. Instead it was withdrawn, purified, repaired in part, and stored. By the time Eyr itself came under siege, the chariot was somewhere within the city: perhaps in an arsenal, perhaps in a court stable, perhaps in one of the old ceremonial houses attached to the wodeship.

There it seems to have remained. The war moved on without it. The trained horses were gone. The specialists were dead, dispersed, or occupied with more useful work. The wheelfire vessels were removed or allowed to decay. The great chariot, once built to make the wode appear as a living god, became an awkward relic under cloth.

Its final fate is unknown. Some say it burned when Eyr fell, its white-painted wood catching in the last fires of the siege. Others say the metalwork was looted, the mirror shield taken, the scythe-hubs broken off and stolen as booty. A few late tales claim that the chariot was hidden beneath the city before the end, still waiting in darkness with dead wheelfire in its vessels. Such stories belong more to romance than history, but their persistence shows how powerfully the thing impressed itself upon memory.

memory

The two chariots of Gadred are often paired in later writing, and rightly so. The Silver Car and the Queen’s Chariot were not opposites but siblings. Both expressed the same impulse: to make sacred authority sensory and undeniable. In one, the Wode came with music, perfume, silver, and flowers. In the other, he came with white horses, gold armor, mirror-light, scythes, and fire. The first made the city feel blessed. The second made the army feel chosen, and then afraid.

It is tempting to laugh at Gadred’s machines, and many have. Yet ridicule alone misses the force of them. For a brief time, before the ruin of the civil war and the fall of Eyr, the chariots made visible a dream at the heart of Gadred’s reign: that the old holiness of the wodeship could be renewed through spectacle and wheelfire. That dream was beautiful in silver, terrible in white, and finally unsustainable.

In his youth, Earren Lake wrote, Gadred walked before the Queen. In his age he made silver wheels sing before him. At the end he harnessed white horses to thunder, and called it holiness.

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