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What reach-folk say about the world before the Unmaking is inconsistent on its face, lovingly preserved, and almost certainly wrong in most of its specifics. The Wren Academy has spent four centuries trying to extract historical truth from reach-myths of the Old World, and has produced, in its honest moments, the conclusion that the myths are post-Unmaking adaptations: that what reach-folk say their grandmothers said about the Old World is largely what reach-folk needed to say to their own children, in the years after the breaking, to give the world they had now a shape they could live with.
This does not stop reach-folk from telling the tales. The tales are, by most reach-grandmothers’ working standards, what the children should know. The tales also vary, considerably, by cluster.
What is most often said
A few elements appear in almost every reach-cluster’s Old-World tales, with small variations:
- The world was one ground, not many isles. A continuous land, vast, with the sea around it but not under it. People walked from one end of a kingdom to the other on their own feet. Children could be born and die without ever crossing water
- The forests were tall. Reach-children are told that the trees of the Old World were taller than the masts of any working ship, that the forests were so thick that sunlight did not reach the forest floor, that there were entire countries of trees with no cleared land in them at all. The forests are, in most cluster-versions of the myth, Nymira’s — the wild green (see The Two That Fell) — and their loss is one of the Old-World tales’ most consistent griefs
- The cities were stone, and they stood for a thousand years. Cities of stone, raised generations before the people remembering them, with foundations laid by hands no one alive could name. Some cluster-tales claim particular Old-World cities by name — Caer-Velinn, Ostremor, Threshhold, Anvil-of-Dawn — though no two clusters agree on which cities existed and most scholarly attempts to cross-reference the names have produced contradictions
- The rivers were long. A walking month from the high-source to the sea was, in some cluster-versions, the smallest river. Other versions hold that the longest river of the Old World ran for three walking months. There are no rivers in the modern Reach; every reach-isle is too small for one. Reach-children sometimes ask, on hearing the tales, what is a river?, and the grandmother explaining must work through the geography slowly. The grandmother is, in most cases, herself working from a tale her own grandmother told
What the clusters disagree on
- The Quiet Reach holds the Old World had a great inland sea at its centre, around which most of the Reckoning’s surviving peoples lived. This sea is, in Quiet Reach folk-tale, Mara’s — the deep currents (see The Two That Fell) — and her presence in it explained both the prosperity of the lands around it and the relative gentleness of those lands’ weather
- The Copper Ring holds the Old World was full of markets and fair-cities — that the trade was older than the gods, in some brasswright tales, and that the Ledger’s pre-Reckoning volumes contain entries from these. Brasswright-tales of the Old World are notably more commercial than other clusters’ — there is less mention of forests and rivers, more mention of long-haul caravans and sworn-trade and inter-city alliances
- Ironvale and the Anvilbound hold the Old World had mountains taller than the modern Upper Reach, and that the dwarven clans remembered them in old songs. Some Anvilbound songs allegedly date from before the Unmaking; the Wren Academy has not been able to confirm or refute the claim, and the Anvilbound have not been pressed
- The Veiled-folk villages keep almost no Old-World tales. What they have are fragments — half-stanzas, partial phrases — and the elders say their grandmothers said the Old World was too far now to remember well, and that some things the Old World had had not survived being broken into pieces small enough to carry. This is the Veiled-folk’s most consistent Old-World statement. It is also, by reach-judgement, the least comforting
What no cluster agrees on
The reach-clusters disagree, sometimes sharply, on:
- What the Old World was called. Some clusters use the Whole; some use the World That Was; some use simply the Old. The Wren Academy’s preferred scholarly term, the Pre-Unmaking World, is universally rejected by reach-folk as cold
- How many gods there were. Most reach-tales agree on nine, matching the Old Way’s count. Some Quiet Reach fishing-village tales hold there were eleven — adding two whose names have been entirely lost. The temple of the Seven has, predictably, no position
- Whether the Old World will return. Some reach-traditions hold that the Reach is temporary — that the world will, in time, re-form. Some hold that the Reach is permanent — that the Unmaking was the world being made small enough to survive itself. The temple holds neither. The temple holds that the question is not the temple’s question
Why we still tell them
Reach-folk who have considered the matter — and most reach-folk who are old enough to be telling the tales themselves have considered the matter — give roughly the same answer: that the tales are not about the Old World, exactly, but about what we still hold in the absence of it. A grandmother telling her grandchild about forests so thick that sunlight did not reach the floor is not delivering historical instruction. She is telling the child that the world was once large. That the world was once large is, in itself, a thing the child should know.
The Wren Academy will go on, into a fifth century, sorting and cross-referencing and politely disagreeing. The grandmothers will go on, into a fifth century, telling the tales. Both have their place. The tales were here first.
“My grandmother told me that the trees of the Old World were tall enough that birds could nest in them all their lives without ever seeing the ground. I believed her. I was four. I am sixty-one now. I still believe her, in some way I cannot quite explain. I have told my own grandchildren the same. I have not made the trees any shorter in the telling. They will not make them shorter for theirs.”
— attributed to a Pike’s Reach grandmother, recorded in the margins of an itinerant scribe’s almanac, undated