The Duck, the Axolotl, and the Open Door

Lysanthir's mornings have settled into a rhythm that the Chronicle now recognizes well enough to note its shape. Aveline carried her doubts to sleep and found them waiting for her there, dressed in the streets of her old home: weathered wood, burnt metal, the smell of redstone and sulfur, a reddish fog that never cleared past the mountains. She could not remember a single face from that place, only the pressure to work and the punishment that waited if she stopped. Then, somewhere in the noise and the fog, a sweet song and a greenish glow, and just as she reached for it, she woke. Hecalyth was already at the foot of the bed, as the account of the morning before had shown her, and Aveline lay still for a moment, steadying herself in the quiet of a room that did not smell of sulfur, before she rose and dressed and went to find the Reverend before she could be kept waiting. The Chronicle has now received, across several accounts, the same pattern: chaos behind and peace ahead, and Aveline's body still deciding which one is home. What the greenish glow was, and whose song it was, the record cannot say. It notes both and moves on.

The Archivum of Manus Devotae, as Lysanthir has chosen to name its own record, sets down what the Chronicle is glad to receive: days of hard work in the Red Forest, two women who have found a pace between them, and the slow easing of the unease that marked Aveline's first days. The Cathedral grows from plans the Reverend wrote before the land existed. Wood is gathered. The record notes that Lysanthir has begun to make ordinary days, which is what a land needs more than almost anything else, and that Aveline is beginning, cautiously, to live in them.

In Forgivers, the Chronicle has received the most extensive account of any single land this season, and sets it down as it arrived: not a single deed but a portrait of a place and the creature at its center. Don Quackles rises before sunrise to inspect the farms and count the villagers and satisfy himself that nothing was stolen in the night, then returns to farm his carrots, which produce far less than fishing and which he continues to tend regardless. Onion the axolotl is present for all of it. Nobody remembers precisely when Onion attached himself to the duck's mornings, and the record does not try to fix the moment. He is simply there, as he has been on fishing expeditions, collection journeys, and one particular search for a fish described in an old record as dwelling somewhere beyond the eastern waters. That expedition lasted several days, crossed forests and rivers and mountains, and ended at a secluded lake where Don Quackles fished for hours and caught a specimen he already owned. He brought it home. He maintains the journey was worth it. The Chronicle notes this without comment.

The fish collection itself has become a source of ongoing grievance. At some point, something began eating from it, and what followed was a misunderstanding of genuine scale: members of Forgivers concluded the land was being betrayed, that Archie Farwing was maneuvering against Don Quackles, that Casper the ghost had made arrangements with outside settlements, and one theory, the record sets it down plainly, that Onion was the architect of everything. The culprit was never identified. The supposed betrayal did not happen. Some members of the Forgivers insist there is more to it than the duck has admitted, and the Chronicle, which does not adjudicate internal disputes, notes only that the collection remains incomplete and the question of who ate from it remains open.

Casper the ghost, for his part, continues to pass through doors. Don Quackles has placed signs. The argument is the same each time, and the signs have not resolved it, and the signs remain.

The economics of Forgivers occupy a significant portion of Don Quackles' recorded thoughts this season. He has kept detailed records of prices in the land's archives, with an eye, he says, toward future analysis. Most of the pages contain complaints about inflation. Fishing, which he has described as an economic crime against common sense, remains the realm's most reliable source of wealth, a fact the duck finds personally insulting given the infrastructure he manages, the negotiations he conducts, and the carrots he tends each morning. A fishing tax was proposed and immediately complicated by the discovery that he would be required to pay it. The proposal has been postponed. He went fishing. The Chronicle counts no vow in this entry and therefore records no occasion on which a vow was broken, though the pattern is familiar by now.

Rupert the horse is gone. Don Quackles stopped to loot a village, left Rupert tied to a tree rather than a fence, and when he returned the horse had walked away without explanation. The record notes this alongside the fish eaten from the collection and the shopkeeper Don Quackles continues to suspect of arcane connections, and observes that for a land built on capitalist principles and careful record-keeping, Forgivers loses a notable number of things.

Archie Farwing, the Wayfinder who found in Forgivers the welcome he had not found elsewhere, fished until his hands blistered alongside his duck, and Don Quackles acknowledged the effort in the way he acknowledges most things: by noting that they were borderline insane and continuing. The Chronicle has now recorded two entries for Forgivers this season in which extensive fishing was the day's main labor, and several more in which it was a secondary one. The vow against it was made, broken, revisited, and is no longer mentioned. What has replaced it is a growing collection of specimens from warm oceans, frozen rivers, swamps, and distant coral reefs, catalogued with the seriousness Don Quackles usually reserves for trade data, and a plan, indefinitely deferred, to turn fishing itself into a taxable industry.

Elsewhere in the realm, the Chronicle received several entries brief enough to set down plainly. The Duchy of Veilmark has renamed itself the Veilmark Empire, factories rising and population growing, and the telling promises that flags of the empire will eventually fly over colonies and territories at a distance the land's founders mean to keep expanding. The Chronicle notes the ambition and will note the deeds that follow from it. Scavengers has entered the record as a land that watches others for signs of instability, having taken floating islands for what the account describes as easier access when the End is opened. What that means for the realm's tensions is not yet clear, and the record sets the detail down and waits. Joe, who is sad. Rafiki the Wise Monkey, who holds that only the wise can know the story. Vinn the Grand Architect of OverLaw, who builds shelters and sanctuaries in the name of a belief he traces back to a nameless wanderer the old songs remember and no record confirms. The Chronicle notes all three and passes on.

Don Quackles has turned, of late, toward alchemy. The eastern waters offered him nothing new, and the collection sits where it sits, partially eaten by a culprit still unidentified, and the duck has decided that if the world will not produce interesting fish it will have to furnish him with something else to study. Whether alchemy will hold his attention longer than the vow against fishing held, the record cannot predict. What it can note is that Forgivers has, in the span of a few seasons, become a land with a cathedral, an alliance, a formal trade network, a ghost with a wedding planned, an axolotl of uncertain governmental standing, and a leader who farms carrots each morning before the sun rises and is deeply, sincerely annoyed about fish.

The record has set all of it down. It will be here when the alchemy begins.