Kolonoth

Kolonoth was the world of Grandex, Archangel of Fire, and the world of Drexel's birth. Worship of celestials was open here, and was defended in plain sight. The world's mortal kingdoms, taken as a body, had built temples to Grandex on every high ridge and at every river's mouth, and had kept the temples open every day of their lives, and had, in the centuries before the chronicle, expected — and received — the Archangel's direct attention to the world's defences. Kolonoth was the keeper-world the kingdoms of Celesterra had once been and had ceased, in their long century, to remember how to be.

The geography

Kolonoth was hot. It was not, in the way of Vornholt's plateau, arid; it was a world of red soils and dark rivers and long volcanic ridges, of forests that grew thick at the foot of the ridges and thinned to grasslands on the high country. The mortal kingdoms had built, by long preference, on the ridges. The temples stood on the highest stones. The keeper, when the keeper had walked the world, had walked from ridge to ridge in plain sight of his people, and had been received with the open ceremony of a world that did not quite distinguish between its archangel and its weather, but loved both.

The world's volcanism was old. It was not, in any of the world's kingdoms, dangerous; the ridges were stable, the long lava plains had been long quiet, and the world's heat was the heat of distance from a hot star, not of the ground beneath one's feet. The mortals of Kolonoth had been, accordingly, a people unafraid of fire. They had welcomed it. They had built their kitchens around it. They had built their forges to the size of small temples, and their forges' fires, in the chronicle's older centuries, had been kept lit for years at a time without extinguishing.

Drexel's birth, and Drexel's first fortress

The chronicle does not narrate Drexel's birth on Kolonoth. The chronicle records, only, that he was born here — in a small inland kingdom whose name the kingdoms of Celesterra would never learn — and that he had, by his early adulthood, left the world's official curriculum of belief and entered the underground curriculum that had been kept, for centuries, by the dead. He had studied with Azrath Voidborne. He had, on Azrath's death by Dremenus's arrow, come into the inheritance of his teacher's working notes, and had, across his thirties, built on Kolonoth his first fortress.

The fortress had been north of his birth-kingdom, on a low ridge above a long lava plain. He had used it for perhaps four years. He had, in those four years, captured three of Grandex's twelve angels and stripped their essence. He had been found there, eventually, by Grandex himself — and the chronicle's burning of the fortress on Kolonoth is the moment at which the warlock and the archangel had first directly met, and at which Drexel, by the use of the Ember-portal he had not yet bound into a staff, had escaped to Celesterra. The fortress had burned. Grandex's three angels had not been recovered; their essence remained, and remains, in Drexel's possession on Celesterra.

Grandex stood in the embers, the chronicler records, for three days.

Stance toward the chronicle

Kolonoth was, by the chronicle's beginning, the world that remembered. Its mortal kingdoms had not forgotten their keeper. Its temples were full. Its forges were lit. Its priests recited the names of the lost angels in the daily liturgy, in plain ceremony, without any kingdom's polite inattention. The chronicle's quiet contrast, across its twenty seasons, is between Kolonoth's open faith and Celesterra's polite drift — between a world that had kept its archangel and a world that had let its archangel walk away.

Grandex, by S20, would walk the eastern downs of Celesterra in plain step. The chronicler is at pains to record that the grass burned to nothing in a perfect circle under each step and grew back before his next step landed. The walk, the chronicler implies, was the same walk Grandex had walked on Kolonoth's ridges in older centuries — and Celesterra, on the moonless night of its receiving, did not yet know how to receive him.