Nine Voices on Nine Territories — a compilation, Aurum Roma, in the year of Our Lord 1890
Historical context
1890. Tenth canonical year of the Age of Stagnation. The Pontiff Lumen I, two years on the throne, commissioned from the Compilator Aurum — newly celebrated for his Chronicle of the Five Eras — a second, complementary manuscript: no longer history but geography. No longer time but space. No longer what happened but what exists, now, on every span of continent the Order governs, watches, tolerates or fights.
The declared canonical motive sits in an introductory paragraph of the pontifical decree itself, in ecclesial Latin: "that the reader of this continent, shut inside his own bloc, may know by seven roads what passes in the other eight; that the cardinal of Aurum Roma may not forget the shepherd of Limes Orientalis; that the captain of Velinia may understand the boyar of Vykhradia; that the worker of Manchaster may hear the pact-bound of Karzhar even if only in testimony under exorcism. Let what is governed be known, and let what cannot be governed be known also."
In its final form the Atlas covers nine political and geographic regions dividing the three hundred million inhabitants of Cross. Each region receives its own canonical narrator, chosen by the Compilator Aurum in consultation with the Curia — in every case but one.
