Book the First
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of the Sundering, and every Watch since
Nine thousand years ago, the world was Ulgareth's. Then it was not.
What follows is set down by the hand of the Ferrum, who keep the chronicle of every Watch — every oath sworn, every name added to the banner, every line that was held and every line that broke.
Turn the page, stranger. Read of what came before you, that you may know what you are asked to stand against.
I
before all that is remembered
In the beginning there was only the silence of the deep earth. Then came the Hollow King, and for an age of ages Thairen was a land of dust and shadow.
He was not born. He emerged from the deep places, a being of void and hunger, and he ruled as the world's first tyrant.
The First Age has no chronicle. No people kept records under his hand. What we know of it survives only in the songs the Highkin still sing in the older tongue, and in the dreams of the Wyrmsworn, who say their kind was bred to serve him before the Sundering broke their oaths.
II
nine thousand years ago
It was the Highkin who first rose against him. It was the Stoneborn who first struck him down. It was the courage of all the free peoples — in fragile and reluctant alliance — that broke him at last.
Not slew, for he cannot be slain. They broke his unbreakable body and buried it beneath the plain that is now called the Ashenwaste.
That was the Sundering.
The world the Hollow King had made would not let him die. The world the seven peoples remade would not let him rise. Both wills are still at war beneath the waste. First Lord Aentor of the Ferrum, Year 14 after the Sundering
The alliance did not hold. The peoples parted, each to their own lands. But the Ferrum was founded that year, that at least one order would keep watch where the body was buried, and at least one voice would call the peoples back when the waste began to stir again.
III
from the First Watch to the Forty-Sixth
Every seven years, he rises again. The free peoples of Thairen have gathered forty-six times since the Sundering to stand against him. They call each cycle a Watch.
Some Watches end in victory. Some end in flight. Some end in the betrayal of one people by another.
The Ferrum keep the names of all who fell in each Watch, and the names of all who broke their oaths. Both lists are read aloud on the eve of every new Watch. Neither is short.
Of the forty-six recorded:
— twenty-nine were repelled with all seven banners standing;
— eleven cost the loss of cities;
— four ended in Horde devastation across the Middlemarch;
— two ended in disbandment of the alliance.
We do not call the lost Watches defeats. We call them lessons, because we cannot afford to call them anything else. First Lord Selva, after the 22nd Watch
IV
nine weeks hence
The forty-seventh Watch approaches. The Ferrum are troubled.
In the recent cycles the Horde has grown larger. The Unbound have shown capacities not seen in earlier Watches — coordinated tactics, ambush patterns, use of the terrain. It is as if Ulgareth is learning. As if he has been waiting longer than any living eye has seen.
First Lord Malachar Vorn has issued a rare public communiqué. What follows is its closing line, copied here in the Ferrum's hand:
I ask the seven peoples not for courage — you have never lacked that — but for clarity. Know why you fight. Know who stands beside you. Know what you are willing to lose to keep Thairen standing. First Lord Malachar Vorn, on the eve of the 47th Watch
— recorded by the Ferrum