From the World Before to the Stagnant Present — a compilation, Aurum Roma, in the year of Our Lord 1890
Historical context
In 1890, as the tenth canonical year of the Age of Stagnation closed, the Curia of Pontiff Lumen I authorised, for the first time since the Aurean Canons of Saint Aurelianus, the compilation of a Chronicle of the Eras — an official manuscript gathering, in attributed fragments, the continental memory of the hundred and ten years since the Cataclysm of the Seals of 1780. The work was given to an anonymous chronicler, recorded in the pontifical archives only as Compilator Aurum, and produced over eighteen months with direct access to seven primary sources — one for each portion of the history — selected for contrast of voice, of social position, and of relation to the Clerical Order.
The Chronicle's declared purpose is didactic: the generations born after 1860 have known nothing but the Stagnation, and the Curia feared, by decree of Lumen I himself, "that faith should seem stalled because history seems stalled too." Its tacit purpose is political: to fix a canonical version of public memory at a moment when the Dawn of the Hashmal, the Watcher Nihilism and the heretical pamphlets of the Pact Heptarchy were each disputing, in their own way, the reading of the same events.
The seven narrators chosen by the Compilator Aurum are not neutral. They were chosen precisely because they are not. The official voice of the Curia, the mystical voice of the Vigil, the aristocratic voice in exile, the hard inquisitorial voice, the enthusiastic technical voice, the imperial military voice, the decadent baroque voice — seven prisms through which the same century passed.
