The First Page of a New History
Writing the first page of what comes next
In the grey morning after the fire, Kaelen sat among the ruins of everything he knew.
The great white towers were gone, and smoke still rose from the fallen palace.
Yet the machines in the slums were turning, and the people were already at work.
It is not the strong that survive great change, but those who are willing to learn.
Sera cleared a table in her workshop and set before him a fresh, book.
"Someone will have to write what happened here," she said, "or it will be forgotten."
It is memory, Kaelen knew, that decides whether an age truly begins or merely repeats itself.
He opened the book, and for a long moment the blank page frightened him.
This new history will not be the story of emperors, he thought, but of ordinary hands.
It is the engineer in her workshop, not the priest in his hall, who now shapes the world.
He wrote of the thousand years of the Art, hiding neither its beauty nor its lie.
He wrote of the darkness, the failing stones, and the night the palace burned.
It is , he had learned, that separates a record from a story.
The Empire will from living memory, he wrote, but its lessons must not with it.
Children not yet born will read these pages and wonder how men once feared a wheel.
It is not magic and not iron that will save them, but the to choose.
Whoever governs next will be tempted, as the emperors were, to bury what they fear.
It is against that , above all, that Kaelen now set down the truth.
He placed the grey book and the torn ledger beside his own new chronicle.
Two worlds, the old and the new, would share the same honest page at last.
Outside, the first machines of a free city hissed and clattered toward the future.
It is beginnings, not endings, that ask the most of those who live them.
Kaelen dipped his pen and wrote the title he had carried through the fire.
"The First Page of a New History," it read, and beneath it he signed his name.
The age of the Art was over, and the age of the engine had begun.
What men would build upon this first honest page, not even Kaelen could yet know.