Series
The Forgotten History
by Alaric Vesper · 3 of 20 books
Books in this series
Book 1
First Light
science fiction / speculative fantasy
I begin this record at the request of no one. The practice of documentation is its own justification. What follows is an account of variables introduced to a system I have observed for a duration I will not quantify here, as the number would contextualize nothing for a reader operating within biological time. I will note what changes. I will not speculate on significance. The ridge upon which I have maintained this particular observation post is composed of basalt laid down during a volcanic episode approximately fourteen million years before the present notation. It extends in a rough crescent along the eastern face of the high plateau, rising some three hundred meters above the lowland basin that stretches toward the coast. The basalt is dense, stable, and thermally inert to a degree that makes it suitable for prolonged habitation by a being of my particular sensitivities. I have occupied this ridge, intermittently, for eleven thousand years. In that span, the basalt has eroded by four centimeters along its western face. I note this to establish the temporal scale against which the events of this record should be measured. Four centimeters. Eleven thousand years. This is the rhythm of the world I have known. The planet at the time of this notation is in a state I would characterize as stable, though the term requires qualification. The continental plates have achieved a configuration that will persist, with modification, for several hundred thousand years before the next major reorganization. The landmass upon which I stand extends further to the east than future geographies will reflect — the coastline lies some four hundred kilometers beyond the point where later epochs will place it, and the lowland basin below my ridge is not the arid expanse it will become but a mosaic of waterways…
Book 2
The Makers
science fiction / speculative fantasy
I begin this account with arithmetic. The displaced number nine hundred and seven. At the time of the Arrival, they numbered two thousand and fourteen. I present these figures without commentary, as the commentary is contained within them. Five thousand and forty-one solar cycles have elapsed since the seven crystalline vessels descended onto the high plateau in what will, in some far era, be called East Africa. I have observed each of those cycles. I have noted the births, the deaths, the slow attritions that do not announce themselves. I have recorded the evening on which the last of the original arrivals perished — a woman named Ilien-Ras who had been a child of fourteen on the day the navigation crystal failed and her mother carried her down the ramp. She lived to be four thousand seven hundred and ninety-three. Her death was attributed to cumulative gravitational fatigue, a clinical phrase that means her bones could no longer carry her weight against the planet's pull. I documented the chemical composition of her final breath. I did not document the silence that followed it, as silence is not a measurable phenomenon, though I have begun, in recent millennia, to suspect that it may be. The colony has contracted to the inner three terraces of the plateau. The outer four — once spires of grown crystal humming with the resonance of full occupancy — have been sealed and allowed to go dormant. I have walked their corridors at night, when the bioluminescent panels still pulse on a slow ancestral rhythm that no living technician now bothers to recalibrate. Dust in the geometric forms peculiar to Maldek crystal residue has settled on the floors. I note that I have walked these corridors fourteen times in the past century. I had not previously catalogued…
Book 3
The Golden Age
science fiction / speculative fantasy / mythic epic
I have begun many accounts. I have not begun one like this. I am setting down a thing that is. I am setting down a thing that is, in order that someone, in a register I do not yet know how to name, will know that it was. The kind calls this hour the hour of remembrance. I had not, until tonight, understood why the word remembrance carries forward as well as backward. The eleventh stair of the Conservatory faces east-southeast at this season, and from its outer railing the world unfurls in the order I will now try to set down — the order of light, then sound, then the slow shared quieting that is the nightly common breath of the kind. I am standing where I have stood almost every evening of the last seven hundred years. The basalt under my hand has accommodated the weight of my hand. There is a faint depression in the stone where my fingers have come to rest, and I did not put it there with intention; it was made by the unintentional return of an attention I no longer try to govern. I am setting that down because no one else has ever needed to set it down. I am carrying this. Below me, the Conservatory descends in seventeen concentric terraces toward the Hall at the center, and each terrace is lit at this hour by the cultivated crystal that has burned in this place without interruption since the day Herath-Vos last entered her own laboratory. The crystal is not bright. The kind learned, six hundred generations ago, that the light a room needs after sundown is the light a sleeping child needs — not the light that drives the dark away, but the light that consents to the dark. The…