Aurum

They built a city at the center of the written world, on the first stone itself, and they called it Aurum, for the color the Script made when it caught the light.

At its heart they raised a tower to hold the city's every rule, every rune, every working, bound together in one great body of stone. Before the Oath, the Wrights would likely have built many small towers, each doing one thing. But the Oath had made them careful in a new way. If nothing could ever be removed, then everything had better be kept in one place, where it could be watched. So they built one tower and called it the Monolith, and they were proud of it, and for a long time they were right to be.

For an age, Aurum was the wonder of the world. Roads ran out of its gates in every direction, and the roads were Script too, carrying the city's workings to the farthest corners of the waking lands: a mill that turned without water here, a lamp that never needed oil there, a bridge that knew how much weight was on it and quietly made itself stronger. People came from the edges of the world to live in Aurum's light. They had children. The children learned the Script. Some of them became Wrights in their turn, lesser than the Twelve but far more numerous, and every one of them wanted to add a stone to the Monolith.

The Twelve grew tired.

Holding a world against the Undertow is not a thing even the first minds can do forever. And the Monolith had grown heavy, heavier than the first stone had been written to bear, because under the Oath it could only grow. In the six hundredth year of the city, the foundations began to groan.

The Twelve met for the last time, in the great round vault at the root of the tower, and made their final decision. This time there was no counting. Even Halvor agreed.

They would become the foundation.

One by one, the Twelve wrote themselves into the stone. Each became a pillar, vast and still, their faces carved in calm, golden runes running across their robes like veins of ore. Their workings did not stop when they did. They went on humming in the dark, holding up the Monolith, older and deeper and more intricate than anything the lesser Wrights above could ever have written. The mortals who watched from the vault's gallery said the Twelve looked, at the very end, as if they were only falling asleep.

Ilyth was the last. Before her light settled into stone, she carved one instruction over the door of the vault, for those who would come after:

Understand what you build on.

The mortals of Aurum read those words every day for the first century. They read them on feast days for the second. By the fourth century they were a decoration, and by the sixth no one living could read the oldest Script in which they had been carved.

Without the Twelve, Aurum needed a new order to keep the tower whole. So the lesser Wrights founded the Architects.

The Architects did not add to the Monolith. Their duty was to understand it: to walk the tower from crown to root and keep in their heads a picture of the whole. Every working, every wing, every rune, why it was there, what it held up, what would happen if it failed. In the early ages there were hundreds of them, and Aurum was the better for it.

But the Oath had not changed, and so the Monolith only grew.

A wing was added to hold the new granaries, and when the granaries moved, the wing remained, because something might rely on it. A bridge was raised between two spires, then a second bridge beside it that did the same work slightly better, and both stood, because something might rely on them. A rule was written, and then an exception to the rule, and then an exception to the exception, and all three were kept. Stairways led to doors that opened onto walls. Bells rang for festivals no one remembered. Workings were written to keep other workings from interfering with workings that no longer did anything at all. And whatever could not fit in the tower went beneath it, into the Undercroft, a vast archive where Aurum kept everything it no longer used but had sworn never to destroy.

The people of Aurum loved the Monolith the way you love an old relative whose habits you have stopped questioning. It was enormous. It was magnificent. It was very slightly wrong in ten thousand places, and no one could say where all those places were.

And far below it all, in the Vault of Foundations, the Twelve slept on. Their workings hummed. They held up more every year, things they had never been written to hold, and above them the city forgot, slowly and completely, that the pillars had ever had faces.