The Sundered Crown

The Sundered Crown was the imperial crown of Varrow, broken on the Sundering Night and lost with the fall of the Cathedral of the Hymns. No fragment accepted as genuine by the archive is known in 312 AS. Yet the Crown remains an instrument of politics: Caldmere's Regency Council rules 'until the Crown returns', and Crown-men read those words as law rather than ceremony.

Description

No undisputed likeness survives. Coin portraits are too small, Cathedral windows too late, and later paintings too fond of tall points and jewels. Regalia rolls copied in the second century AS describe a closed crown of dark red gold, weighing six pounds and some ounces, with four low arches meeting over one oval grey stone. One copy calls the stone 'without fire'; another identifies it as sapphire, plainly in error. Black river-pearls stood between leaf-shaped points, and the inner band was stained by use.

The cap was dark velvet, renewed so often that no two inventories agree upon its colour. The crown was heavy enough to be carried on a cushion before and after rites. The look given above follows the two fullest rolls; even so, it remains a reconstruction, not a certainty.

History

The maker and first wearer are unknown. The archive has no record of the Crown's making, though its metal was already called old imperial forging before the Sundering. By the Empire's last century it was kept in Caldmere in an iron-bound transport case, now called the Crown Case, and taken to the Cathedral for coronations and the greatest Hymn feasts. The case preserved at Caldmere is empty, heat-split along one seam, and not beyond doubt.

What happened on the last night is disputed. Preceptor Corvin Hale's history, the fullest later account, has the Crown burst apart upon the Cathedral's high altar as the building fell. The Ashwater Deposition, a much-copied statement attributed to a junior sacristan, says the case was given to a serving man before the roof failed and carried west along the lake road. Its names change between copies. A third tradition holds that the case was a decoy and the Crown had already been hidden elsewhere.

No verifiable piece reached the imperial treasury after 0 AS. When Corvan IV died without an heir in 297 AS, the old formula acquired legal weight. The Regency Council funds no search. Master Oswin Prall maintains his own Crown-Shard Reward, while the Mallory Reward for old imperial metal is widely read as another hunt for the same prize.

Where the pieces went

Later writers cannot agree even on the number of pieces. Three principal fragments are often named, but no early source gives that figure; it may come from antiquarians trying to reconcile incompatible tales. If Hale is believed, some part lies beneath or within the Glassmere. The Mere Watch turns back most parties, the Lantern-Wardens decline antiquarian escorts, and the archive has no reliable survey of the ground.

The road story produces a richer crop of claims. Old rings, buckles, ingots and grey stones have all been offered as crown-metal or crown-glass. The Goldsmith's Ledger records an unworked grey stone sold in Saverra in 288 AS that cut glass clean; it was bought by a steward for a house north of the river Sull, though the name was withheld from the public reading. The ledger does not call it a shard, nor does hardness make a provenance. The Thornwick forgeries show what a skilled hand and a hungry buyer can do.

A western tale removes at least one piece farther. The Song of the Drowned Diadem, known in several debased versions, says that an imperial jewel was sent to Ilm for safekeeping and remained there until the Drowning. No text earlier than the second century AS says so, and the song may only explain why no one can produce the jewel it describes. Still, divers on the Drowned Coast bring up old metal often enough to keep the tale alive.

Then east was broken, and westward ran The crown's cold eye to the drowning land.

Claims and doubts

The Crown's only clear power was legal: an emperor was made under it before the old gods. Later claims are less sober. Crown-men hold that no succession can be lawful while any piece is lost. Some chapbook writers promise that a reunited Crown will make the gods answer, quiet the Unquiet, or close the Wound. The archive knows no pre-Sundering source for any of these hopes.

Doubt is also the safer guide with supposed fragments. Old imperial gold can be identified only by workmanship and metal, both of which may be copied. A grey stone that cuts glass is merely a hard stone. Until a piece arrives with a history stronger than the appetite of its finder, the Crown remains less an object than an absence around which Varrow arranges its quarrels.