The Sundering

The Sundering is the name given to the night, reckoned as 0 AS, on which the Cathedral of the Hymns fell, the old gods fell silent, and the Wound opened in the sky. Every calendar in the Reach counts from it. Every faith, charter and grievance in the present age is, in some part, an argument about what it meant.

What happened

The Cathedral of the Hymns stood in the lake-country of central Varrow, the last great house of the old gods and the seat of their Hymn-priests. On the Sundering Night it was full: the archive's best authority, Preceptor Corvin Hale, writing some forty years after, puts the number within its walls in the low thousands, priests and pilgrims together, and records that the choir had been singing without pause since dusk. What happened inside is not known. What happened outside is attested by survivors of the lake villages: a light, a sound compared variously to a bell, a tearing of cloth, and the ending of song; and by morning the Cathedral was a ruin, the lake and the land for twenty miles about it had become black glass, and a thin milky line stood in the sky where none had stood before.

The glass waste is the Glassmere, forbidden ground to this day. The line in the sky is the Wound, which has not faded in three centuries and brightens in winter. And from that night, no prayer to the old gods has ever again been answered. Fragments of their Hymn-script survive — see the surviving fragments — but reading them aloud does nothing that anyone can prove, and the Hymns' miracles, which shaped the old Empire, are lost.

The competing accounts

No two traditions agree on the cause. The Pale Choir, founded at Ostrovane fifty-eight years after, holds that the old gods were false doors and that the Wound is the opening eye of a true god coming slowly into the world; in their telling the Sundering is a birth, not a death. The Hask say the priests of the Cathedral grew proud and sang beyond their office, and that what befell them was a warning, not a mystery; the Hask do not speak of it willingly. Preceptor Hale's own view, cautiously worded, is that the Hymn-priests attempted some working beyond precedent — he notes, though he cannot corroborate it, that survivors recalled the singing swelling louder in the last hour — and that the effort broke them, their Cathedral, and something else besides.

There are lesser accounts. A Varrow peasant tradition holds that the old gods abandoned the world out of grief at its wickedness, and keeps saints' shrines against their return. The Collegium of Ash in Saverra declines to speculate, remarking only that the Sundering is the one great event its art cannot illuminate, since ashcraft itself dates from after it. The archive records all of these and endorses none.

Ask not why the singing stopped. Ask what it was that answered when it did not.

What it changed

The years that followed are called the Grey Years: famine, failed harvests, and the first risings of the Unquiet, the dead who do not stay dead. The Hask began burning their dead within a generation, and keep the custom still. In 31 AS the Lamplighter founded the Lantern-Wardens to hunt what rose. Winters have lengthened since, slowly but measurably; the Hask now reckon half their year to snow.

The Empire endured, but hollowed. Its crown — the Sundered Crown — was broken on that night, its pieces lost, and no emperor since has worn it. When Corvan IV died without heir in 297 AS, the realm found it had been living on habit, and the Regency that governs from Caldmere governs a throne it cannot fill. The Pale Choir claims the Glassmere as holy ground; Varrow refuses; the argument is three centuries old and no nearer settlement. And since the Sundering, the only magic that works in the Reach is ashcraft, which burns a practitioner's own memories for fuel — a fact the archive records without explanation, there being none upon which the learned agree.

Three hundred and twelve years on, the Wound still glows, brighter each winter. The Grey Pilgrims walk west in greater numbers than any living memory recalls. What the Sundering began, the archive cannot say; that it began something, no one in the Reach disputes.