Welcome, Reader, to the Tome
You have come to the library, and so I will tell you what we keep here. My name matters less than my office: I am a Lorekeeper, one of a long line of us, and what you hold is the work of all our hands — everything we have managed to set down before the world could forget it.
Call it a glossary if you wish — that is how it began, in the hands of a Lorekeeper long dead, who only meant to fix the meanings of a few hard words. But words led to the things they named, and the things to their histories, and the histories to one another, until what we had was no longer a list but a world set down in ink. Here are the places of the Reach and the roads between them; the factions that quarrel over what the Reach should become; the men and women who bent its history; the beasts that keep its wild corners; and the names we have given to powers far older than any throne. It is an encyclopedia of one island. Like the island, it is unfinished, and quarreled over, and still being written by the likes of me.
What you will find here
Whatever the Reach has come to know of itself, I have tried to keep. The old catastrophe that broke the world, and the scar it left across the heart of the land; the three faiths that look up at the same troubled sky and cannot agree what it asks of them; the seven sought-after things, and the price a soul pays for carrying them; and a long account of the creatures that have outlived the ones who made them. Read one entry and you will see others named at its foot, marked Related. Follow them. That is how the Tome is meant to be read — one thread drawn until the whole weave shows itself.
How to make use of me
To your left is the index. Browse it by kind — places, factions, people, terms, and the rest — or open the full listing and take in everything at once. Choose any entry and it will open to its own page, where I have set down what I know and pointed you onward to what touches it. There is no proper order to any of this. Begin wherever your curiosity takes you; the knowledge of centuries is patient, and will not mind being read out of turn.
A word on the sealed pages
You will come upon pages I have sealed, and I will not pretend otherwise. A Lorekeeper sets down only what may be known; where my knowledge ends, or where the truth is not yet a reader's to hold, I close the page rather than fill it with guesses or do harm by telling too soon. These are not gaps in the work. They are its honest edges — and they open, in time, to those who have earned the seeing of them.
Now — the shelves are open to you. Begin where you like.