Leather and the Old Lore

An easter egg for those who understand the importance of old leather books

In the unlikely event it has somehow escaped you that Castalia House has published a new children’s fantasy novel, which, if it is successful enough, may eventually find its way into a leatherbound edition, this is an example of the deep lore lying underneath the text of Dorian Vane and the Vampire’s Blood.

This small selection from the Chronicle written more than 500 years before the events of the book appears nowhere else, not in the book, not on any other site, and while it will almost certainly appear somewhere in print someday, for the nonce, only those who read this site will know the true history behind a very different sort of binding.

A Chronicle of the First Rising and the Binding of Mordreth the Undying

Being an Account of the Great Calamity that befell the Realm of Inghiltar in the Year of Our Risen Lord 1291, the Sacrifice of the Seven Wardens, and the Founding of the Royal House that thereafter claimed its Current Dominion over Inghiltar, Kerlow, and Wellys

Compiled from the ancient sources and set down for the instruction of those who would understand the origins of the institutions that govern the magical governance of the realm unto this day.

Book the First: Of the State of the Realm Before the Rising

In those days before the great calamity, the lands south of the Wall and west to the grey sea were governed not by any single crown but by the Compact of Aldworth, which had been sealed in the time of King Aldworth’s grandfather and had held the peace for the span of three generations. Under this Compact the seven Thanes of the realm — being the lords temporal and the lords of the vinculum, which is to say those who held dominion over both land and ley-line — swore to maintain the wards of their territories, to keep open the channels of the vinculum upon which all workings depend, and to submit their disputes to the judgement of the Warden’s Council, which sat in those days at Dunmore upon the northern marches.

Now the Warden’s Council was a body of seven learned men and women, appointed each by their respective Thane, whose office it was to oversee the maintenance of the great ward-network that protected the cities and the roads and the ley-line channels from such daemonic, sorcerous, and haematic threats as had plagued the land since the first workings were drawn from the deep earth. And it must be understood that in those days the ward-network was not as it is now — a seamless lattice of interlocking geometries maintained by trained practitioners and anchored in the ley-lines by methods refined over seven centuries of study. In those days the wards were cruder things, raised by individual masters in their own frameworks and joined to one another by agreements of craft and mutual obligation rather than by any unified theory. Each city had its warden, each warden had his method, and the methods did not always speak to one another, so that the ward of Dunmore, which was cast in the old northern style with anchor-stones set at the cardinal points, could not readily be joined to the ward of Ashmore in the south, which was woven directly into the ley-line channel by a technique that the Ashmore masters guarded as their particular treasure.

This want of unity was known. It had been remarked upon by the learned for a generation. But as is the way with known deficiencies in the governance of realms, the knowing of it and the mending of it were separated by a distance that no amount of urgency seemed able to close, for the Warden’s Council was constituted in such a manner that the approval of five of the seven members was required for any alteration to the established protocols, and no five could be found who agreed upon what the alteration should be, each being naturally inclined to favour his own method and to view the methods of others with the particular suspicion that practitioners of the magical arts reserve for those who practise the same art differently.

Into this state of learned paralysis there came, in the spring of the year 1291, the breaking of the Compact.

Book the Second: Of the Rise of Mordreth and the Breaking of the Compact of Aldworth

Of the origins of Mordreth, whom the chroniclers call the Undying, and whom the common people of later ages named the Dread King, the Usurper King, and the Warden of Souls, there is much dispute among the learned and little that is certain. The Thurlow school of historiography, whose founder maintains with considerable vigour that his predecessors have been inadequately attentive to the documentary evidence, holds that Mordreth was born in the northern territories beyond the Wall, in the wild lands where the ley-lines surface raw and unworked and the vinculum runs through the very stone of the mountains. Other authorities place his birth in the fenlands of the east, where the channels run slow and deep and the earth has a particular affinity for the preservation of things that ought not to be preserved. Still others maintain that he was no man at all but something older, something that had dwelt in the deep places beneath the Cairngorm massif since before the first men learned to draw vinculum from the earth, and that what walked abroad in the guise of a sorcerer-lord was merely the outermost expression of something vast and patient that had been waiting in the dark for a vessel through which to act.

What he did is not disputed.

In the spring of that year Mordreth broke the Compact. He did not break it by arms, nor by treachery in the common sense, but by a working of such scope and malice that the Warden’s Council had no framework within which to comprehend it. He turned men evil and wicked beyond all understanding. Not by temptation, not by persuasion, and not by the crude compulsions that hedge-sorcerers had employed since time out of memory to bend a weak will to their purpose. He bound them. He reached into the channel between flesh and vinculum — that intimate connection which is the foundation of all magical practice — and he seized it, and he twisted it, and he made it his own. The bond between a man and his own magical essence, which every practitioner since the first working has taken as sacred, inviolate, and as fundamental as the bond between blood and bone, Mordreth learned to sever and remake it in his own image.

The first of Mordreth’s bonded servitors appeared in the northern territories in early spring. They were not immediately recognised for what they were. A garrison commander at the border fort of Cragmoor reported to the Warden’s Council that three of his men had begun to behave strangely — that they no longer slept, that they responded to orders with a mechanical precision that lacked the usual complaints and delays that characterise the behaviour of soldiers, and that their eyes had changed, developing a flatness of expression that he compared, in his dispatch, to the eyes of fish lying upon the slab. The Council received the dispatch. The Council filed the dispatch. The Council’s existing threat-classification framework did not contain a category for men whose soul-bond had been externally seized, and what the framework could not classify, the Council could not act upon.

By midsummer there were hundreds. By autumn there were thousands.

The soul-bonded were not daemons. They were not undead raised from the soil. They were living men and women whose will had been severed from their bodies and replaced by the will of him who held their souls. They ate. They breathed. They bled when cut. But they did not speak unless spoken through, they did not sleep, they did not tire, and they could not be reasoned with, because there was no longer any mind remaining behind the eyes to whom reason might be addressed. They were, in the precise and terrible language of the Aldworth diagnostic that would later be developed to identify them, haematically restructured, their blood itself magically reworked to carry the signature of their dread master rather than the unique structure of their own selfhood. They were, in the plain speech of the people who suffered them, Y Gweigion, the empty ones. They walked and they fought and they served, and behind every pair of flat, dead eyes there was nothing but the will of Mordreth.

And they spread the curse of the binding. For this was the great horror of the First Rising, the terrible thing that made it unlike any threat the realm had faced: a bonded servitor could, by the shedding of its remade blood into the blood of another, extend the binding. This was not accomplished with the precision of Mordreth’s own insidious working, as the secondary bindings were cruder, weaker, and more easily broken by a skilled practitioner, but it held with sufficient force to overwhelm the spirit of an untrained man, and in a world where the vast majority of men and women had no training in the magical arts whatsoever, its force was more than sufficient.

The fall of Dunmore came in the autumn. The siege lasted — and on this point the sources are in genuine disagreement — either fourteen days or seventeen, the discrepancy arising from a dispute over whether the initial investment of the outer walls constitutes the beginning of a siege or merely a prelude to one, a question that Mr. Thurlow addressed in his monograph on the chronology of the siege, the binding of which has, by his own account, deteriorated. What is not disputed is that Dunmore fell, and that when it fell, the Warden’s Council fell with it, and that the members of that Council who were not killed in the fighting were taken and bound, and that the ward-network they had maintained, however imperfectly, fractiously, and with all the querulous jealousy of craftsmen who cannot agree upon a common method, ceased to function.

Twelve towns fell to Mordreth’s unholy forces that winter. The wards of the twelve towns, maintained by twelve separate wardens utilizing twelve separate frameworks joined by agreements of convenience rather than by any unified architecture, were broken by Mordreth’s wizards in the space of a single season. And as each town fell, more people were taken and bound, and the army of the empty ones grew, and the Dread King’s dominion spread across the land like a dark scum across the surface of a pond.