The Clockwork that Counts Aeons

Prelude:

Looking back, from the vantage point of long years I never believed that I would live, it seems that my life was always touched by the strange.

Or perhaps I am growing more egotistical in my unexpected old age.

At any rate, if I could categorize my life, and the unusual aspects of it, as being part and parcel of the role I played, everything that happened in the Domain of Nitaru more or less convinced me that my life was to be extraordinarily unusual. Even if that began as part of my duties, practically from the start I knew something, well, odd was going on. From that point on, the things that shaped me in Gilead were of secondary importance to what shaped me as part of the wider world.

As I look back across the decades, the first thing that strikes me, perhaps more so than how young I was, how little I knew despite the power I already possessed, is how chaotic a world I lived in. Nor ‘Am, then, was still under the control of the Domains, the realms built by users of the Art around points of power that had been raised during the long ago war against Ultima Thule. There were, at this time, over two hundred Domains were scattered across the west and south of Nor ‘Am, and the best word to describe their government was anarchy. The Domains were constantly struggling against each other, but rarely in terms of war, or even using the Art against each other; they squabbled diplomatically, setting up alliances that sometimes dissolved in a heartbeat, Artists turning on their supposed dearest friends over the pettiest of disputes. Of all the Domains on the mainland of Nor ‘Am, the most stable and secure was Jumi, on the Great River Serendipity, the site of the fortress that had been home to the armies that had waged the War against Ultima Thule. Jumi’s alliances were strong, though not as strong as they had been even in my lifetime, and the rulers of Jumi, the Lumineux, still recalled the traditions of old. They recalled the Covenant that had been joined against Ultima Thule…and they honored their treaties of old with Gilead.

Nitaru was a Domain, a place of power, but like few others in and around Nor ‘Am. First of all, it was on an island, situated some four hundred miles to the west of my home, which itself was seven hundred miles to the west of Nor ‘Am. It was the furthest west a Domain was in the network of power that had been created during the War, and at one point in time had been a colony of Nihon. For long centuries, Nitaru had been a dormant Domain, the power point waiting for someone to just claim it. Perhaps we should have claimed it as our own, but we chose not to. Some fifty years before this time, Nitaru was claimed, not by an individual, but by a collective. Sick of how things were in the Domains at that time, several Artists from Nor ‘Am, along with Artists from Nihon and Miifan in the Far East, settled there with a purpose. Nitaru (which, I was told, meant "unreal" in one of the languages of Nihon) was not to be a Domain built around the acquisition of power. Rather, it was founded on principles of equality, that any one who used the Art was welcome there, to share knowledge with each other, and above all to never seek control over others. Nitaru was part school, part collective, and utterly divorced from most of the quarreling that fractured the Domains. And for fifty years, it knew peace, its only neighbors Gilead and a near by chain of islands that had once been settled before the War with Ultima Thule. Across the islands were ruins, for it had been said that, during the War, that storehouses had been built there to hide knowledge of magic that the Covenant wished to hide from Ultima Thule. Nitaru abided, alone, for half a century.