The Codex of Aetheria

I The World

Aetheria is not one world but the bruise where three of them touched. The Sundering tore the sky open; the Tide rushed in. What remains is held together by debt, faith, and the bells of Solgrad.

The land is governed by Six Realms, each a survivor of the Sundering. They share a continent, a calendar, and a tense peace. The sky shows two moons: Iva the white, and Carn the red. When Carn rises full alone, debts are forgiven and oaths are tested. When Iva rises full alone, the dead are said to walk inland.

Travel between the Realms is regulated by the Stag Pact, signed after the third Bell War. The Pact does not forbid violence — it merely forbids surprise.

II The Six Realms

Six survivors of the Sundering. Six accents, six laws, six ways to die on a Tuesday.

III Factions & Guilds

Power in Aetheria flows through three rivers: gold, fear, and oath. The factions below sit at one of those mouths. Most lie about which.

IV Faith & the Pantheon

Five gods are remembered. Two are worshipped openly. One has no name and demands no temple. Bells are mandatory in all but the last.

V Aether & Magic

Magic in Aetheria is not a gift. It is the Aetherial Tide spilling through the wound the Sundering left, and you are catching it on a spoon. Cup it, bend it, drown in it.

Every spell is a bargain. The Tide gives, but it also takes — weight from the body, time from the lungs, names from memory. Most practitioners count tithe in coins. Real ones count it in mornings they forgot.

Five disciplines are taught at the Solgrad Academy: Resonance (bell-singing, oath-binding), Verdancy (life-shaping, kept under Greenhand law), Tideturn (water and weight), Pyrotelos (fire and edge), and Hollowing (the cold work — restricted, taught nowhere officially, practised everywhere quietly).

VI Bestiary

Selected entries from the Archivist's working notes. None of these are guaranteed safe. Several are guaranteed unsafe.

VII Timeline

Years are counted P.S. — Post-Sundering. Anything before is merely "the older year".

VIII The Nine-Day Bell

The cathedral bells of Solgrad rang for nine days without a hand, from the morning of the Sundering through the last note that fell at dusk on year 0 P.S. + 9. No record of the realm has matched it since. The fragment below was unsealed this week by the archivists; the rest of the account remains under House Vey lock.

The day the rope cut itself

At the eleventh hour of the morning the great bell of Solgrad Cathedral — bell-bronze, three tonnes, named Solenne's First Word — began to ring. The bell-master was absent. The rope was found later in the bell-tower, cut clean at both ends, as if the bell had paid for its own freedom.

Witness Ralin Cobble, a candle-trimmer of the cathedral school, testified that the rope was intact at second hour and severed before he was driven from the tower by the sound. He counted eleven hundred and eleven strikes in the first day and lost his hearing in the left ear forever.

The nine days, in brief

1. Day I. The bell rings alone. The Sundering opens above Ironspine; the Tide enters the world for the first time.
2. Day II. Three Vey accountants — sent to silence the bell — die at the foot of the tower without a mark on them. The first Bell-Wight is sighted.
3. Day III. A delegation from Northreach is refused entry to the cathedral by a door that nobody recalls closing. The bell continues.
4. Day IV. Carn rises full alone in daylight. Debts across Solgrad are reported as forgotten by the holders, then remembered, then forgotten again until sunset.
5. Day V. The bell skips a single strike. Mira Vey, then nineteen years old, begins the Codex.
6. Day VI. Drowned Coast tides arrive an hour early; the harbour-master of Tide Port records the first inland sighting of a Long Hound.
7. Day VII. A Pale Choir priest — heretical, then unnamed — is admitted to the cathedral and sings a single hymn. The bell answers in counterpoint.
8. Day VIII. The Stag Pact is drafted in the cellars of Highkeep. It will be signed sixty-one years later, but its language is written down now.
9. Day IX. At ninth hour after noon the bell strikes once and stops. Solgrad falls silent for the first time in nine days. The silence lasts seven seconds and is recorded by every clerk in the city.

What it cost

The cathedral lost its bell-master, its candle-trimmer's hearing, its delegation from Northreach, and three Vey accountants. The bell-rope is preserved under glass in the chapel of Solenne the Bell. It is not bell-bronze; it is hemp. There is no cut-edge.

What is on record, and what is not

The official record — kept at the Solgrad Cathedral archive, cross-indexed at Vernholt — lists eleven thousand and eleven strikes over the nine days. The Codex of Aetheria lists eleven thousand and twelve. The discrepancy has never been reconciled. Mira Vey, asked about it once in public, said only: "One was mine."

Read further: the Codex chapters VII · Timeline and IV · Faith & the Pantheon cover the wider context. The full account, including the seventh-second silence, is kept under seal at House Vey until the next Codex unsealing.

IX Glossary

Words you will hear at every tavern, court, and gallows in Aetheria.

Aether

The substance of magic. Pre-Sundering, theoretical; post-Sundering, a weather pattern.

Bell-bronze

Alloy used in Solgrad bells. Holds resonance. Cannot be melted by ordinary fire. Worth more than gold by weight, less than oath by edge.

Carn

The red moon. Debt-mover. When it rises full alone, contracts are voided and rivals embrace; in the morning they remember why they shouldn't have.

Iva

The white moon. Memorial-mover. When it rises full alone, the dead are said to walk inland from the Drowned Coast.

Ledger

A House Vey contract. Binding in every Realm. Most are paid in coin. A few are paid in mornings.

P.S.

Post-Sundering. The official calendar of the Stag Pact.

Tithe

The cost a spellcaster pays for using the Aetherial Tide. Sometimes a memory. Sometimes a tooth. Sometimes a year you didn't know you owned.

Wake

A funeral attended before the death. Required for advancement in the Ashen Vow. Optional everywhere else but ill-advised to refuse.