Vel Asharen

The archivists have asked me, more than once and across more years than I will name here, to write the entry on myself. I declined each time on the grounds that a correspondent is a lens, and one does not turn the lens upon itself without distorting the view. They have stopped asking and started insisting. What follows is the only autobiography I intend to produce. I have held it to the same standard I hold the gods: I have stated what I know, flagged what I judge, and left the rest blank rather than fill it with flattery. — V.A.
Also known as Vel; Correspondent Asharen
Species Tabaxi — snow leopard lineage (Beast Person)
Title Senior Correspondent
Institution The Interplanar Athenaeum
Field Comparative cosmology and contemporary planar affairs
Patron Krorus, the Time-Serpent (warlock pact)
Origin A fallen noble house of the Lauegrorumian Theocracy Region, before the sands
Tenure Longer than most national governments
Signature A small ink-stamp glyph: an open eye over a folded leaf

Overview

I am a Senior Correspondent of The Interplanar Athenaeum and, for my sins, the documentarian of record for the world informally called Yggy. Most of what fills this collection — the lore of its gods, the geography of its planes, the small ruinous habits of its inhabitants — I compiled, verified, and edited across a span of years the archivists have politely declined to publish. I write in the long, careful sentences of someone who has been asked, many times, to clarify a point, and who intends to remove the need for the question now.

My field bylines do not say what I am. They never have. The Athenaeum holds — correctly — that a correspondent reads more cleanly as an observer than as a partisan, and that several of the populations I survey have known reactions to my particular kind. I have honored that convention for my entire career and I do not regret it. But a record of the work is not a record of the worker, and I have been persuaded that the second is owed too. So, for this one document, plainly: I am a tabaxi of the snow-leopard lineage. Pale-furred, unhurried, and harder to startle than I once was. Read the rest of my entries however you like. This one, at least, you may read knowing whose eye is behind it.

Early Life

I was born into a noble house of a city in what is now the Lauegrorumian Theocracy — a house old enough to have a wing of the city library named for it, and poor enough by my birth that the name was the better part of what remained to us. The region was not desert then. I grew up among archives rather than courts, and turned what should have been a courtier's education toward the history of my own city, and in time toward the patient, unglamorous work of investigation: establishing what had actually happened, who had benefited from the telling, and which official accounts would not survive a second source. I was good at it. I was unpopular for it. The two were, I have since learned, the same fact viewed from different chairs. For most of a life that was, then, an ordinary length, I expected to spend all of it within a day's walk of where I was born.

The Burial and the Pact

That expectation ended when the kingdom's guardian dragon was killed and the land it had warded began to die with it. The sands came — not in a season but in a long, smothering tide that took the fields, then the roads, then the districts, then the city itself. I was in the basement stacks of my library when the floors above went dark under the weight of it, sealed below ground with the records I had spent my life reading and no exit the surface would honor anymore.

It was there, buried, that Krorus answered me. I will not set down what passed between us in the dark; some of it I have not found words for, and some of it I have chosen not to. I record only the facts a reader is owed. The Time-Serpent — the coiled and unreadable keeper of what-is-known — does not take petitioners the way the war-gods or the luck-gods do. I went down into that basement a historian who had never cast anything in her life, and I came back out of the sand a warlock, conduit to a god of time and knowledge, by every reckoning later than I had any right to. Those who understand what my patron is tend to assume the unusual length of my tenure follows from it. I will neither confirm nor deny this, which is, I am aware, its own kind of answer.

The Athenaeum

I came to The Interplanar Athenaeum not long after, and the fit was immediate to the point of embarrassment: an institution built on triangulating truth out of conflicting sources, applied for by a woman who had done precisely that for a city no one could visit anymore, now answerable to the god of knowing. I have not looked for other work since. I do not expect to.

Method

I work in three modes, and I will name them so you can weigh my entries accordingly.

  • Direct visitation. I travel. The list of planes I have personally walked is not public, but the texture of certain entries — the smell of the air, the sound of a particular kind of doorway — should tell you it is not a short one.
  • Correspondence. Letters, journals, drawings, and recorded conversations with sources across realms. The Athenaeum's standing arrangement with Hjarn makes some of this possible; the rest I have built relationship by relationship, year by year, and it is the slower and the better half of the work.
  • Triangulation. Where direct observation is impossible — and with gods it nearly always is — I cross-reference the accounts of clergy, scholars, and the small population of mortals who have stood before a god and lived to describe it. Where those accounts conflict, I present them as conflicting. I do not flatten my sources to produce a clean narrative. A clean narrative is, in my experience, the surest sign that someone has been lying to you.

Voice

A note on how to read me, which applies to every entry under my name, not only this one. Where I write I, the observation is mine — drawn from my own experience or from one of my standing correspondents. Where I retreat into the passive or the impersonal, the source is collective: testimony, archive, established record. Where I am uncertain, I say so. Where I hold an opinion, I flag it — in the field documents, with the phrase "in this correspondent's assessment," which a number of readers have told me they find amusing and which I have no intention of abandoning. Transparency about one's own confidence is not modesty. It is the minimum honesty the reader is owed.

A Note on Tone

I write about gods the way one might write about weather systems: with respect, without flattery, and on the working assumption that the subject will not read the entry but you will. Several of my entries have produced quiet complaints from clergy. None, to date, have produced a correction — which is the only review I have ever cared about. The Athenaeum stands behind its correspondents, and I have corresponded long enough that the standing has, in certain quarters, hardened into a small wall. I have made my peace with being a wall. It is restful work, and it keeps the weather off the people behind me.

On Earth

I will close on the one assignment I would rather not have taken. My patron is among the very few powers with any interest in the magicless plane called Earth, and the archivists do not believe it an accident that the work kept finding its way to my desk. I have walked Earth twice. It is a place where my own pact dwindles to a costly trickle and the silence of the absent arcane is, to one who has never had to think about its presence, total. I do not intend a third visit. Whether Krorus shares that intention is not something I have been told.

See Also

— Vel Asharen, written in her own hand, The Interplanar Athenaeum