It was in the olden days considered that the chroniclers were the most important of the old orders. Laboring away day and night, recording all of the little happenings of the greater realms, the chroniclers had been imparted with the monumental task of preserving the history of Zytegna. Their maesters would boast to the new initiates of how it was a task assigned them by divine machination. Or so that is what has reached my ears.
Scribes, translators and archivists littered their ranks, using any such instrument that might aide them in their greater cause. Skins of animals as extravagant as krakens and mammoths, quills made of feathers plucked from chimeras and the wings of harpies. Such were the tools and luxuries the order of the chroniclers was afforded. Their scribblings formed a vast library – or rather, I should call it an archive, upon which their pristine, marbel athenaeum once rest. This underground archive once had more books in one of its rudimentary halls than all of Forencia, from what I have heard.
It was their thinking they had taken the favor of the autarchy and that it was for this reason their order was given such prestige over the others. (I should mention there were many more orders – and there are still many more so.) And it might have been – in fact, it was likely true. But like all things, an authoritarian favor does not last till the end of days.
Now, there is nothing but ashes and charred wood, baked leather and singed quills, burned parchment and fading text, a marbel column and a collapsed roof and but one surviving member. If you would count me among their ranks, you might say there are yet two but I must confess that I am not knowledgeable of their ways and traditions nor am I a learned man. It is simply so that I understand the importance of preserving who we once were, who we are now, who we might have been and who we might yet be. It was for this reason that I departed upon the journey that I am chronicling now and it is for this reason that I have undertaken this task, sacrilegious as it may be. And yet it is also because there is not one more than I to do this.
Before I begin, however, it is important to understand the elder teachings, the knowledge imparted upon the realm by the hierophants of the Order of the Sun. They, and a large portion of the Forencian population, out of fear of torturous reprimand, heed the books of the All-Father. I, myself, am not devoutly religious and the Sun does not mind this – it is only by being blasphemous that someone might incur the wrath of the autarchy. It is not for me to say, but I might venture a guess that the order of the chroniclers might have been smitten as they were for similar reasons.
Nonetheless, as I have mentioned before, it is important for me to begin from the very start, for you, my reader, may not be as acquainted with the teachings of the Land of the Sun as I am.
Edited by Dion, 22 June 2015 - 07:37 PM.