When the world was still young and the stars had not yet learned their names, the Light sang across the Void. And from its radiant chord was born our world—Elarion, the Flame-Borne Sphere, the cradle of all known life. It is not merely a place of earth and water, of winds and stone, but a vessel of song. A verse in the great Celestial Choir. Every mountain, every tide, every flicker of fire beneath the hearth is a continuation of that First Harmony.

Elarion is not the only world to spin beneath the heavens, or so the wandering scholars of the outer courts often whisper. But it is the only one touched by the Threefold Flame—that sacred triune gift of Creation, Memory, and Will. From the mountain-etched holds of Kar Doram to the whispering leaves of the Larethian Wilds, from the stained-glass spires of Kingswatch to the lost ruins beneath the Barrows, the light of the Three burns ever in some form. It is the quiet warmth in a midwife’s palm, the fevered glow in a smith’s forge, the final flicker in a dying seer’s eyes.

To those who seek knowledge of this world’s origins, and of the divine Fire that breathes meaning into its many lands, I bid you welcome. For knowledge, you see, is not inert. It is kindled. And where it is kindled, it must be tended.

Beneath the citadel of the Temple of the Threefold Flame lies the Archive—Vaultum Lux, as the old tongues called it. It is no mere library. The Archive is sacred ground. Stone corridors spiral deep into the living rock, lit not by torch but by emberglass—crystalline lanterns that burn with captured starlight, harvested from the towers above during the Equinox rites. Here lie the original vellums of the Fire-Scriptures, the shattered Tablets of the Fourth Flame, and the unbroken Songlines carved into living obsidian by the earliest Choir-Scribes.

The Archive is watched over by my Order, the Ashbinders—scribes, singers, and flame-tenders all. We do not merely transcribe history. We shape it through remembrance. We sing the Old Words aloud at dawn and dusk, that the Light may remember itself in us. We seal blasphemies in iron caskets, speak truth to kings, and sit vigil over the Dead Lanterns—records so ancient their ink has turned to soot and yet still hum when held close to flame.

I, Elen Qirell, was named High Archivist on the Night of Second Ember, in the 871st Cycle of the Concord Flame. I write now not for those who already believe—but for those who wonder. For those who feel, in their dreams or moments of stillness, that the world breathes with something older than time.

May this archive be your lantern in the dark.

May the Flame guide your path.

And should the fire ever falter, know this:
The Song does not forget its singers.
Nor does the Flame forget its own.

— Elen Qirell
High Archivist of the Temple of the Threefold Flame

Vaultum Lux