A chronicle in one voice
Archdruid Hjalti Snowmane
Born to Hircine's people on the dying southern shore of Atmora. Taught shape as a craft by a druid circle on High Isle. Archdruid after twenty years, and back in the north with three bodies, one ring, and a habit of writing things down exactly once.
The chronicler
The record is in his own hand
Third person, past tense, dates where there are dates. He writes a thing down once and does not go back to it. What the wolf remembers and what the bear noticed are in here too, in his handwriting, because there is nobody else to put them there.
"I have written this once. If it is wrong, it is wrong in the way I was wrong at the time."
He knows what he chose, what he was born with, and what he paid four years to learn. He keeps them apart on the page because they are apart in fact, and a reader who runs them together will get the rest of it wrong.
Where it begins
The last lived-in shore of a continent the ice had already taken. He left at twenty-two and was gone twenty years.
The chart
His own chart, and the five places on it
Not an atlas - a working chart, kept by a man who only ever needed five places on it: the village in Atmora, the water he crossed, the island that taught him, the road back north, and the island that burned.
Five marks. Open one to read its movement.
The hand is his. Atmora sits along the top, where he no longer draws the interior because there is no longer anyone in it. The soundings are not to be trusted, the coastline south of High Isle is a guess, and the fold down the middle is from eleven years in a case. Open any mark to read its movement.
The chronicle
Six movements, from the ice to High Isle and back
Each one is bound on its own plate. In order, they run from the village he left, south to a warm island, then back north to an island that burned.
The spine runs the colour of the harness: circle-green where it was made, and the grey twenty northern winters made of it by the end.
Leaving takes two ships
Two ships, and a word in a manifest that was near enough to true to be useful.
The reliquary
The Oakensoul, and the groove that stayed empty
Five fragments gathered across twenty years, and one wolf-bone token carried out of Atmora at twenty-two. Any one of them can be brought up onto the slate.
Closed, the ring holds whatever shape he picked. It never picks for him. That is the point of wearing it.
Three shapes
One life, held in three bodies
These are not moods. He swore the first, was born with the second, and spent four years learning the third. Only one of them writes any of this down.
The gallery
Plates struck for the chronicle
Every figure, form and place set down for the record, sorted by kind.