I'm independent of the Houses and the Registry both, and I pay for this work myself. Everything in these pages is something I went and looked at, and the few places where I had to take someone's word for it are marked. I've been wrong plenty of times, and I've left the corrections in.

Who is writing

I'd rather keep my name to myself, and it wouldn't mean much to you anyway.

I belong to no House. The Registry has offered me work twice, good work too, I'll give them that, and I turned it down both times. I'm no Lorekeeper either, whatever the Lorekeepers like to say about me at their end.

The reason any of this matters is that it tells you how to read me. Ask a Vaulin tender about awakening and you'll get the truth as Vaulin keeps it, which is real as far as it goes, while an Ironvale Blademaster will give you a different truth that is every bit as real, and the pair of them could happily argue it for an hour with neither one lying. I'm outside all of that. What I have instead is four years of putting the same six questions to all five Houses and writing down the exact point where their answers stopped agreeing.

What this is

The journals after this cover four years. I've been at it a good while longer, but the earlier work lives in worse notebooks and I'd be embarrassed to hand it over, so four years is what I'll stand behind, because that's the part I went back and checked.

I wrote this front section for someone starting from scratch, since that's who kept turning up. Practitioners will know most of it already and can skip ahead. Everyone else has been piecing it together from whatever they heard growing up, which in most villages seems to come down to one uncle's story about a woman who fixed a wellhead in 833.

What I have actually done

Mostly I went and asked people, and it took far longer than it should have.

I've sat down with members of all five Houses and with a great many people who belong to none of them. I've read the public registers at frontier posts until my hands were too cold to hold a pen. I once spent a whole season in a village of a hundred and forty people, carefully establishing that absolutely nothing was going on there, and of the four years that season taught me the most, though I'd have laughed at you for saying so while I was in it.

Where I came away empty-handed I've written exactly that, and you'll find it a lot.

Where I have been wrong

Often, and the mistakes are still on the page.

For the best part of a year I was sure that a practitioner's three innate workings divided neatly into body, mind and soul. I drew up a table and I was very pleased with it. The trouble was that the table came out of my own head. I'd built it from my notes and then gone hunting for it in everybody else's, which is about the oldest way going of fooling yourself, and naturally I found it everywhere I looked, right up until I asked a tender who had never heard of any such division.

The error is still in the journals, where it happened.

Why I do this at all

I like knowing things, and a great deal of what goes on in the Heartlands has never been written down by anybody.

People tend to want a grander reason from someone who has spent most of a decade on it, and I can see them deciding I'm holding something back. I'm afraid that's all of it. Somewhere around nineteen I worked out that I would rather understand a thing than own it, and I've arranged my life around that ever since, sometimes sensibly.

What I keep running into are people who know their own corner of this world extraordinarily well and have simply had no cause to compare notes with anyone outside it. A tender in a grove and a picker on the crystal pack are both describing the same world, and I suspect neither would recognise it from the other's account. Somebody ought to sit between them and write both versions down, and as far as I could tell that job was going spare, so I took it.

Read these in whatever order suits you. They stand alone, though the chapter on what a practitioner earns is easier going after the one on how few of them there are.