The Season of Rising Banners

The Chronicle has kept this record long enough to know that growth seldom comes evenly, that years pass with a single banner raised and a single name added to the ledger, and then something shifts in the soil and the whole world seems to be building at once. This is such a season. The accounts of the day before yesterday already strained the page, ten lands crossing the first threshold in a span that the Chronicle set down with some care, and the record had barely dried before the next wave came.

Solamar, Suuri, TheRuins, Sunhaven, Withered, and Traders all crossed from Outpost to Homestead in the same long day, names the Chronicle had barely learned when they were already changing. Suyima's nation of sun and water did not stop there: Solamar rose again to Hamlet before the day closed, and the warmth that the land's very name suggests seems to be working on the ground as much as on the people who call it home. TheRuins holds an older kind of weight than most of those around it; there is something pointed about choosing that name for a place one intends to build, and the record notes the choice without commenting on the wisdom of it. Suuri's founders set their roots so quickly that the ink on the founding charter was still being remarked upon when the Homestead rank arrived.

Westeria and Sifyed, which the previous account caught in the act of growing, did not pause. Westeria climbed past Hamlet to Village. Sifyed climbed past Hamlet to Village also, and Berosify has now built this land to a height its first life never saw. The record set down the fall of Sifyed's earlier banners when they fell, and it sets down this fact now with equal plainness: the second Sifyed has gone further than the first, and in less time. Whether that means the ground was always ready or that Berosify is a different builder than the land once had, no record says.

Celestia followed a similar road. lambfie raised these banners before, watched them come down, and raised them once more; by the close of the day lambfie held a Hamlet, and was recognized as its crowned ruler. Blackwater, whose first banner likewise fell and whose ground sat unclaimed the second time around, climbed back to Homestead. The Chronicle has noted before that nobody else wanted that ground. Blackwater's people did, and they are still there.

Alstroemeria went from seedling to Hamlet. Babylon earned its rank from a camp planted only a day before. PhoenixFarm, founded and refounded within the same short span of days, settled into Homestead. Kajgoria, founded so recently that its founders had not yet slept, was a Homestead before they did. The Chronicle is not certain what to make of a land that grows while its people are still awake from the day they chose the ground, and so it only sets the fact down and moves on.

TheHoard rises again. Aethy's secluded isle of stony peaks and lush forests, which was already the swiftest climber in the previous account, has gone from Hamlet to Village, and the pace of that growth on a place so little-known and so rarely visited by outsiders is the kind of thing the record notices. What Aethy is building there, and why it grows so fast in a place so quiet, are questions the Chronicle asks without expecting an answer soon.

And TheNine has returned, or returned again, which is the more precise way to say it. pr1eoperativeIo raised a first banner for this nation, brought it to its first footing, and then the land returned to the wild. No record says why. The second TheNine is now past that first footing and climbing, having crossed from Outpost to Homestead in this same crowded season of rising banners. The Chronicle has watched other lands rebuild what was lost: Celestia, Blackwater, Sifyed, Astral Peaks, each carries the particular weight of beginning again. TheNine carries it too, with the added distinction of having now begun twice in the same record and built further the second time.

By any accounting, this is the busiest season the Chronicle has set down since the book was opened. Whether so many lands rising so quickly is a sign of something larger stirring in the world, or only the ordinary fact that people will build when they find ground and the will to hold it, the record cannot say. It only notes that the banners are going up faster than the ink can follow, and that the work continues.