By singing the song of memory, we find in the world that them yet live (or exist at least, for I reckon many of them that remember it are Undying) who saw the Council’s genesis. For it is untrue that the Council’s history and the history of the Diamond Isle are one and the same; the Diamond Isle predates the Council as surely as it does the Academy. May be none now in the world remember the Academy’s founding, but the Council, that they recall.

For there is no thing that the song of memory tells us, but that someone remembers it — be they Undying lord, long-sleeping drake, or quartz-crystal stored. This is the truth of the memory, and akashics who deny it are akashics who lie, and an akashic who lies is no akashic.

Pol-Tandem, master of the seven locks of opal, Undying but seen no more in the world since his destruction in the Five Men War, Pol-Tandem founded the Council. An advisory body, he called it — a group to suggest policy to the ears of the powerful, not to wield the implements of power directly. He gathered together all the greatest of his race, those mightiest in the ways of the Dark and those who knew the runes, and in one place he summoned them and called them the Council of War. They were all Academy graduates, for in those days the Academy was less selective and more prestigious.

In those days — maybe sixty years since living memory begins, and a scant three hundred since the founding Ka-Rone the Eternal — there was no unity among the mighty, and they squabbled among themselves and the Diamond Isle was made weak. Her enemies, chief among them the Habadad in the east, pounced on her weakness and the greatest of nations, proclaimed glorious by the Red Hand — was humbled. This Pol-Tandem would avenge.

We remember the gathering then, of the first Undying and those who had not yet made that first and final leap forward into the arms of the Dark: Terrible Burning of Chaff, Hi-Brisstle, Lonman Tulouse, and the rest. Them Pol-Tandem united under his banner, offering them servitude and honor or else destruction and inglorious exile. Them Pol-Tandem led into the Tower of Tongues, there to meet with the Highness. Them the first Council of War.

After Habadad’s razing, the Council suspended, active again (with slightly different membership) during the Crisis, the Five Men War, the Invasion of Time, and of course the Last War. Since then, Council sat out the Spice Wars — Council lost their taste for violence during the Last War, when so many members fell to fire or noise. But we remember the time when their magic shook the world. We remember the time when they ate of baetyls and grappled with the very devils of heaven in their majesty, tearing asunder the lands of the enemies of the Diamond Isle and the Mother Countries. We remember because they remember. For so long as even one remembers, we find it within the song of memory.

— Rillian Hedminder Quallsome, loresong and akashic master of lore

SEE ALSO: The Academy of Recognized Truth, Baetyl Events, The Five Men War