The Days before History
It is said there was a time when all of Iris was an oasis. The Northlands of today knew summers as fertile as any other, and civilizations lost to time conquered every inch. Some Speakers of this Library believe that with Iris stood more continents, giant lands that swept across the Gray Divide before we gave it that name. There is no truth to this, but there is no lie to it either, a common light and darkness on all that came before our ancestors could scribe history. I take on this tradition and scribe for you, as I can as a humble Speaker, to find truth and to tell no lie, but the history I write is before history, that which must be forged from guesses, beliefs and myths.
It is said Iris was once an oasis, but it is not known, and nothing I will write here is known. That said, I will write. Read if you wish.
I cannot pretend to know the names of the empires dead, and I will not take it upon myself to name them. No civilization in all time deserves such a treatment, so I will title them what they would have been, the Northfolk. How many kinds of folk lived in our north, I cannot know. I cannot know their kings and queens, and I cannot know if they named them such. I can only know that they were north. In that time, it would have been natural to be north, as harvests were just as bountiful in every part of our land, and wicked winters had not yet claimed us. The winters we know today batter us to our homes, freeze our ground and kill our yields, but they are but bad weather to the winters of history. The frost came so fierce to a people who had only known summer, and thousands died on white ground. One could not blame our ancestors for wishing to flee south to where the summers stayed, but one could blame the southfolk for stopping them. Today we call them Medosi, and the greed of today seems to stem from a far past. Just as we cannot know who or what ruled the Northfolk in this age gone, we cannot truly know the southfolk either. But we can know that Northfolk blood runs in Buriman and Cicadian veins, and the greed of the Medosi is spawned from a time long dead.
We can assume, if the reader shall let me, that if the folk of the North and the folk of the South were willing to war, and I mean truly war as they did for hundreds of years in their quest to find warmth and shield it, that they battled under banners. A flagged nation of the North and a flagged nation of the South drew rivers of blood in what we today know as the holy land of Kilyan, and when their flags fell, the warm won. Northfolk fled back into the chilling winters, and their flag fell to the fight for one’s own survival. In truth, it is a miracle to think that what we call Burima today, what is the last of the old empires, was forged from such frigid, broken people.
It has been more than 4000 years since this war’s end and the spawn of what we name the Old Calendar, and it is the last great war of Iris in which we do not record in ways beyond voice and story.
“How many such wars were there?” the curious ask. “How much blood was shed in the name of gods we will never know, over lands we will never touch?” It cannot be said. All that can be said will be neither truths nor lies and thus are not history.
History has given us but one guarantee of the past, as in the time recorded since we could not escape this cruel fate, and all who will come after us shall not escape it either.
Those who want for more will conquer those who want for nothing.
— Head Speaker Getan, NCY 562