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The skyfarer’s trade is older than any reach-record of it. The Wren Academy’s working position, established about a century ago and still defended in the Academy’s published manuals, is that the first crossings were made before the first records were kept, and that no specific first skyfarer can be identified by name with confidence. The Reach’s clusters, on hearing this, have continued — each in their own version — to identify a first skyfarer by name, with confidence, in folk-traditions older than the Academy itself.
The Academy is technically correct. The clusters are, as is usual, more interesting.
The folk-versions
Each major cluster has at least one Old-World-aftermath tale of how the first crossing came about. The tales contradict one another in specifics, agree in shape, and are repeated in roughly identical form by grandmothers in clusters that have never met one another. The shape, in its plainest terms, runs:
Year One was hard. The survivors were on the floating things — the isles — and the isles were too far apart to walk between. Most of the survivors stayed on whatever isle they had been on when the world broke. The few who tried to leave them, in the early months, did not return. Then someone — and here the cluster-tales diverge — found a way.
The cluster-versions of who found a way:
The Copper Ring’s First Skyfarer
The Copper Ring claims Aldine of Brassmarket — a brasswright’s daughter, in the older folk-version a smith’s apprentice, in the older still simply the brass-girl — who, the tale runs, found a loose aetherstone in the rubble of a fallen workshop, recognized that it would not stay on the ground, and built around it a small boat-platform that was carried by the air. She made the first crossing in late Year One, returning with news of survivors on the next isle. The Brassmarket temple of Thorin keeps a small iron plaque commemorating Aldine; the plaque was installed in 102 AU, about a century after the events the tale describes, by a then- Council-of-the-Anvil delegation that the Copper Ring still slightly resents
The Quiet Reach’s First Skyfarer
The Quiet Reach claims a fisherman whose name is given variously as Brennan, Brendan, or Bren, who, the tale runs, was already a boat-maker before the Unmaking and adapted his craft to the new conditions. The Quiet Reach version is practical: it does not emphasize the discovery of aetherstones (taken for granted), it emphasizes the patience of working out how to keep a craft aloft under load. In the Quiet Reach version, Bren took most of Year One simply to test designs, and made the first useful crossing in early Year Two — a year later than the Copper Ring’s Aldine. The Quiet Reach tellers regard the lateness as an asset, not a flaw: their first skyfarer, they will tell you, did the work properly
Ironvale’s First Skyfarer
Ironvale claims the dwarf Brom Stoneforge, of the Anvilbound clans, who in the Anvilbound tale was already in the high mountain forges when the Unmaking came and worked in stone through the year of the breaking, emerging on the far side with a working understanding of the aetherstones’ resonance. Brom’s first crossing, in the Anvilbound version, was between mountain isles, not from the Middle Reach to anywhere else; the Anvilbound crossing is older than the Middle’s by some uncertain margin, but the Anvilbound did not advertise it, considering the trade a private matter for some decades. By the time the Middle Reach heard, the Anvilbound say, the matter was already routine
The Veiled-folk’s First Skyfarer
The Veiled-folk villages keep no name. They keep, instead, a phrase: the first crossing was made by the one who had nowhere to return to. The phrase implies, in its older readings, that the first Veiled-folk skyfarer crossed without a home-isle to head back toward — that the first crossing was, from their perspective, a leaving. The phrase is told without elaboration; pressed for specifics, the Veiled-folk elders will say only that those who crossed first did not always intend to come back, and will change the subject
The scholar’s version
The Wren Academy’s working version, in its plainest form: there were probably many first crossings, made independently by survivors on different reach-clusters, in roughly the same first post-Reckoning years. The aetherstones were widely scattered. Many people understood, in those years, that something had to be done. Many of them tried. Most of those who tried failed. A small number succeeded. The successful early crossings were, by working inference, not coordinated — there is no surviving record of a first in the singular.
The Academy publishes this. The clusters note it, in their working mode of taking what the Academy says and putting it on a shelf. The clusters go on telling the tales.
What is plausibly true
A few elements of the cluster-tales survive cross-referencing:
- The first useful crossings happened within the first three years of the Reckoning. This is consistent across cluster-tales and consistent with the Academy’s reconstruction
- The first crossings were almost certainly made without navigation in any modern sense — by line of sight, by feel, by the mercy of the conditions. Most early crossings, in the surviving folk-stories, are short: between visible isles
- The aetherstones were already known to the survivors. The Unmaking did not invent them. They had been in the Old World in some form, the cluster-tales hold, and were rediscovered or reapplied by the early skyfarers. This is consistent with the Academy’s view (see Aetherstones — A Layperson’s Guide)
- The first skyfarers were almost certainly not heroes in any later-romantic sense. They were people who had lost most of what they had, who did the work that needed doing, and whose names were either remembered in a single tale or were lost entirely. The trade has, by working tradition, kept this in view: most working captains, asked who they think the first skyfarer was, will say someone who did not come back from the second crossing. The line is partly a joke. It is partly the trade’s most honest statement on its own origins
“My grandfather’s grandfather was a Brassmarket brasswright, and the family-line knows the story of Aldine the way the Copper Ring does. I have crossed under the Copper Ring’s flag for twenty-six years. I have also drunk, in my career, with Anvilbound stonewards, with Veiled-folk first hands, and with one grandmother in Pike’s Reach who told me the Quiet Reach version with such firmness that I let her finish without correcting her. I have stopped having a single first skyfarer. I now have several. I do not consider this a problem.”
— Captain Vesh of the Marrowkeel, in conversation with a Wren Academy delegate, 412 AU