Change is Coming

Small Change 

A history of the world part 3

A Vintish gold noble led us here but that's a lot of money to make change for out in the sticks as the two army deserters discovered and smalltown folk conduct their daily life around smaller coinage. Change is coming tho so it’s about time we started playing about with the lower denominations as well.

Three pennies for wishing

Kvothe deals with a traditional tinker on his way to the Eld and the deal was sealed in the traditional way of doing deals.

‘I’ll give you a an iron penny, a copper penny and a silver penny.’

It was a pittance but that’s what tinkers in stories ask for when they trade some fabulous piece of magic to an unsuspecting widow’s son.

This tradition is as old as the hills and universally recognised wherever tinkers travel. Even Taborlin used this method of payment for his magic amulet, if you believe the tales of Old Cob. Judging from the 10æ notes on currency that we are given, the only place where such a transaction could be covered by pennies of just one country of origin is in the Commonwealth, which seems odd since they are a relatively new addition to the shape of the world. Perhaps the word ‘penny’ is just a general folk translation and we are talking about folk bartering three metal shims here, different pieces of three basic metals, Iron, Copper and Silver given to traditional tinkers in order to strike a deal. That’s an idea for later, but for now we shall just look at how Kvothe paid his traditional tinker more closely.

‘…an iron drab, two Vintish half pennies, and an Aturan hard penny.’

Three currancies are going on here hail from Ceald, Vintas and Atur and Kvothe says he did rather well on the exchange rates for the silver coinage. The copper is therefore the Vintish contribution to the mix, something confirmed by Dedan when he laughs at the though of Taborlin having a copper sword joking that it would be like hitting someone with a big penny. Now, Vintish big pennies come with a deep groove across them so that they can be broken into two halfpenniess which is just as they are designed to be and is actually a very symbolic way of designing something. This coin is meant to be broken and that is it’s fate in life, to become two seperate pieces of the same thing, just as man is born to die, a penny is born to divide and once divided unlikely to ever find their other half again. Sympathy for the devil. There is even an old Vintish custon that states that whover cuts the coin offers the choice of pieces to the other. We can't tell from the picture of one in the 10AE but we will just have to assume that it fits the standard design for coinage of having a heads and tails design. The 'heads' side of a coin will naturally depict whoever was the reigning monarch of the day indeed Threpe tells us Maer can mint his own currency which would naturally feature his own portrait. Of course the fate of this heads image will also be to become split down the middle which sounds quite an anarchic thing to me, possibly treasonous defacing a picture of the king. I suppose there might be a penny heads design that features a two faced Lord or Lady, or perhaps one of each, Facing each other across the divide whilst whole but dreading the chisel of doom that will surely come to separate them for ever. 

You can purchase assorted kkc coinage from Pat's gift shop and I have seen a couple of cleverly crafted designs but the coin we see in the 10Æ only shows tails. This 'tails' image that we see stamped onto this whole penny is quite hard to identify at first but when broken along the groove it is much more obvious that here is actually a picture of a sailing ship, giving us a whole penny design of two ships sailing back to back, one on either side of the line of division. This image is nicely summed up by a line from the play Felwards Falling, which, much like Daeonica, is an old play that not many people know.

‘So, we were ill-lit ships at night…’ I quothed

‘Passing close but all unknown to one another.’ Denna finished.

“Felward’s Falling” I said with something that touched the outwards boundary of respect (*amazed respect* in ademic)

Not many people know that play.

‘I am not many people.’

The truth is out there.

Given pat’s approval of all these images tells us that we can put some trust in them. This coin is a truth, it nods at an old truth about how some things begun life together as one but that being separated was always going to be their future. Truth has historically been buried by changes in beliefs caused by changes in rulers and borders, usually by Atur, whose modus operandi seems to involve relegating truth to become myth and promoting the invading Aturan Empire's church version of events instead. True ancient history has thus been split and seperated from the mysteries of the past, becoming itself a newer history of more secondary change but still in some small places harking back to the earlier days when Vintas was a freshly broken land ripe for settling by the strongest survivers. Indeed there is one line in which (Tar)Vintas was described as ‘little more than a bunch of squabbling sea kings’ which nods nicely at our sailing boats theme, too.

Broken Land

Words and images cannot really be trusted to tell the whole story alone but geography is far harder to hide. The shape of the world is much changed since the time of Ergen, and the recording of anything related to that time has been actively removed by time and by design over all the long ages ever since.

‘Even history books which mentioned them as doubtful rumour have long since crumbled into dust.’

Any first hand knowledge regarding of the time before Tehlu Day would have naturally had to be recorded in the languages of the survivors, and the oldest language in the world is apparently Yllish who would have woven their stories into the earliest form of writing, the Yllish story knots. If you could read the secret stories which they told them these would be very old stories indeed, perhaps stories about days best forgotten, and Yll is where Denna went looking for old stories that mentionedvLanre. But the Aturans have since done a pretty good job in stomping Yll under their iron boots, I wonder why? 

The folk who lived around the Eld at the time spoke Eld Vintic and whilst that language is younger than Yllish it is still pretty old having only been stamped out by Atur some 3-4 hundred years ago.

My  suggestion for the site of Caluptena is Tinüe which the church burned to the ground to hide whatever was recorded within its walls.

Free 4 All

This third age that began on atehlu day ended a nightmare time for all the denizens of this broken land but now God had killed the devil and everyone was free to start their lives over again 'from this day forth.'

Broke land

And god said break and the land broke

Grey area

Vintas is full of clues if you look carefully. The Cealdish ingots are unadorned and all the Aturan money looks very Tehlin Church inspired to me but Vintish coinage has it’s own stories stamped upon it. All money spends though, even in Adem where the mercenaries are hired from. They don’t mint their own coins but earn their pay abroad and send back their earnings in both gold and silver but Vintish copper half-pennies make a very strange appearnace in one of their holiest rites, which probably means it’s a rather bloody important clue. Beneath the sword tree are many important and symbolic pieces of Adem culture including, for a very strange reason, a tarnished Vintish halfpenny.

There really is no good reason for it to be there. The valuable but awkward block of gold is well considered as to it’s inclusion in this sacred ceremony but he ignored the insignificant little piece of foreign copper coinage, a broken piece too, one deliberate part of the whole, something that has been deliberately broken as is it’s fate. That must surely be symbolic of something important. It is unlikely to be another personal dig at Kvothe in addition to his lute’s presence, the musical clue is more than enough to insult him on it’s own, so what could this foreign coin mean?

Worthless? Possibly, but not strictly true, it’s worth 6 ½ iron shims which will still buy a man a beer or two in the Waystone Inn.

Smallest denomination? True. in that it has been already broken down into it’s smallest size,hmmm

Tarnished? Yes, and copper tarnishes with a colourful display of verdigris which is implying that age and decay are important to the shape of this clue. It is one part of a Vintish whole which was designed to be broken in two.  Some classical allusion to Four Corners history seems likely, but would that be Vintish history or Ademic Mystery? Or both! It’s all going to be guess work from here but it’s fun to speculate.

Magical Hystery Tour

I can think of something else in Vintas which is definitely broken, the Broken Sea, and then there is Severen, broken into Upper and Lower, just like our broken penny. In other coinage, Eight bits can be broken from a royal, and royalty is divided up much like the whole of fractious Vintish society in general. Renere is called the three part city. The bloodless rebellion cut the free city of Tinuë free from it’s control by the Lackless earldom. The Loeclos family name has been broken into various disparate parts and scattered to the four corners, All through Vintish society is evidence of breaking things apart, even the broken road led us to Tinuë before the moon broke…everything is broken.

The Adem have an old and secret tale that tells us of the moon and the fall of the Ergen Empire

‘and since that time the land has broken and the sky has changed.’ and also that ‘Seven names have been carried through the crumbling of empire,through the broken land and changing sky.’

That is describing a cataclysm of epic proportions and yet the rest of the world never mentions it. This Adem is a forbidden fact that must have been very hard to cover up even in stories (noah?)  it would have affected everyone and everywhere but no records nor rumours of it are heard in the four corners, no matter how small and obscure. 

Something that changed the sky is almost certainly going to be the moon  and will probably coincide with her being once always full and round but then changing and doing her waxing waning thing instead,  Since the moon influences the tides and the tides dictate the shoreline that will qualify as being a broken land so if we are looking for some physical evidence of lunar change then The Broken Sea is the biggest clue on the map although The Reft might have it’s own deluge story to tell. Perhaps they both broke at the same time.

Don’t ask me exactly what happened on the day the world broke but I'm going with it being caused by the wrath of God giving us a most likely date for the cataclysm of Tehlu Day and I think that the geography of central Vintas bore the brunt of the change.  In Piracy we worked out a tinfoil map of Severen High and Sevren Low. It is a two part city, much like Pat mentions that Renere is also know as the three-part city, but in Severen the break is as obviously marked as the dividing line on a copper penny is. There is a bloody great cliff between the two half-cities stopping them from being one. Something long ago caused the sheer to exist, something earth shattering in it’s action but also very clean cut and likely very quick. This was clearly a very long time ago as only since that time has an entire twin city arisen around this physical Sever in the land, whether one side rose or the other side fell is anyone’s guess, but most things fall down easier than fall up so I’m going with that.

Of course the broken sea would be regarded as sea-level in vintish topograhy but there is a good chance that the whole thing is actually a very big lake in a newly filled basin in an area of land that was lower than the Centhe sea-level standard. Water flows down into it via the deepen falls and the strange backwards nature of a certain river to the south of the land. If the weight of water is anything to go by, a sudden rebalancing of the oceans in response to cosmic changes in the gravitational pulling power of the moon physically changing, literally, overnight would suggest a very likely cause and effect for reciprocal action between land and sky. This is all speculation of course but it makes some kind of sense when we are scratching around for elementary ideas.

If the sky changed and the land broke both the same time then that would imply a connection between them. The moon does indeed have a physical connection to the sea as it is tidal and so the day the moon was actually stolen will be one possible date and that would be Lanre Day.  But an equally possible date for the destruction would be on the day she came back again. It was certainly an era defingbday and with the fall of the old came the rise of the new. Either Ergen moving into the Demon Days  or the Demon Days moving into 4Corners time. It all points at the day the world changed according to Aleph’s edict ‘from this day forth’

Luckless

Modern Vintas didn’t even exist on that day and the eld-est records of such things were lost when Caluptena burnt, but this doesn’t detract the most recent records showing that the Lockless family (under various names) were always the big names in this part of the world and that everyone else came along later. Indeed the Lockless lands once covered much of Vintas and also stretched (at least) all the way to the small kingdoms, Modeg and the Eld, in fact it would be a good line of thinking to suggest that Southern Vintas was where the land was physically broken asunder by some unknown catastrophe which swept clean the old land but for some lucky reason spared the Lockless ancestral lands. Which rather goes against their detractors calling them the luckless.

Bit of a bummer for all those that Tehlu had just saved who lived down south having lived through the demon days only to see a bloody great tsunami coming down on them. Fortunately for the Northern folk, mountainous Tinuë is a long way from any seawater and is also classically speaking the oldest city in the world. If Lord Tehlu told everyone to go there until it was over then Tinüe would become the place where all roads lead. I will bet you a jot he actually sent them to his mother's house. It easy to find, just head to the Old Stone Road using old roads, safe roads… roads to safe places. [Arliden ell quote?]  Perhaps everyone Tehlu saved as he walked the world offering his choice of path warned them what was coming  travel to the safety of Tinuë to survive the coming flood. After the upheaval, or downheaval, or moonheaval or whatever and when the dust of Tehlu Day had settled on a new age, Tinuë would be the place where everything 4Corners will have started from again and now all the old roads will become new roads into the new land of the free which led from Tinuë instead as the Four Corners was quartered up by hordes of new nomadic pioneers setting out to claim their fortune. 

So a land of the free beckoned, the Gold rush began. Some peoples with skills, like Blacksmiths, flexed their black muscles to take advantage of this free new lands bounty, they forged out a new life among the iron hills and took their old stories with them ever burning lamps died with Tehlu. It is quite possible their first leader was Lord Rengan who Tehlu named the forger of the path. Those who would become Modegans sought the quiet corners of the Eld forests for their land. Common folk followed the main road to its terminus and there founded the commonwealth whilst the Reft had turned mountainous Yll into islands. Up in Atur a new Order was making plans for world domination, a future with them at the wheel since Tehlu had left the new world in their bloody hands and a new world order was beginning. But on this day of new beginnings and with Lord Tehlu burned to ash,  we have to ask the question ‘what happened to his Mum?’   fin.

 The Adem with their own ancient stories now keep their secrets hidden away from the world that doesn't want them. They were declared outcast wherever they settled, which also fits in with the theme we are seeing of a definite plan to deliberately bury the past. 

Lord Illian of Ergen* and The Edema Ruh roamed the land freely learning and eternally re-telling all the oldest stories, singing olden songs and performing the old plays, subconciously depicting subtle clues and hidden twists in the plot which are some small ways of them giving voice to subtly preserved secret information. Costumes and props are clues to the past and live on eternally on stage. If accurate portrayals of sensitive events from the forgotten past were deemed dangerous to the plans of important people then no wonder the Ruh are on the list of folk who deserve to be silenced ‘for the greater good’. This is exactly what happened to Skarpi.

Vintas got it's Atur visit eventually but that invasion didn't happen overnight and fizzled out with the fall of empire. When the book of the path did arrive they found a civilization of superstitious peasants with ingrained beliefs and a tangle of lords and ladies squabbling over their pedigrees. House Lockless is the eldest of them though House Calanthis won the argument and house Alveron of Vint came second.

Modeg never got invaded and so a Modegan story would be an original story. Daeonica is Modegan.??

Over time, things were more and more accepted by society as being just like the old church records told you they were and so it was that the past was quietly buried and some things were simply stories, not history and obviously never really happened as far as the man in the street cared, life’s too short to worry about faerie tales.

So nobody today looks at some of the small things in life and puts two and two together any more to ask questions as to why broken things were customarily designed to be broken in the first place. What is the tale behind this symbolic practice ? involves poking about down in the depths of local custom where the clues lie hidden by those who understand the shape of the world. The old buried underneath the weight of the new. But I do.