KEY: **Heading** *Subheading, poem title* **Patrol Manual for the Accursed Forest** *c.200A.F.* … a Lancer company captain cannot halt breaches in the ward-wall, nor can he prevent the inimical creatures of the Accursed Forest from escaping such breaches, but he must do all within his power to ensure such creatures are destroyed before leaving the deadland barrier and before they can inflict damage upon the people of Cyad or upon their livestock and lands. A wise captain will manage his deployments in such fashion so as to assure that his lancers are exposed to no unnecessary danger and so that casualties are minimized while making sure that as many creatures as practicably possible are destroyed before they can create harm …. (Magi’i of Cyador 335-336) *Maintenance Manual [Revised] * *Cyad, 15 A.F.* The core of a fully functioning tower maintains an isochronic/isotemporal barrier of approximately nine hundred nanoseconds. This temporal "dislocation" effectively provides the points of energy polarity which generate the raw power fed to the converter system … The dislocation also provides a barrier against the operating impingement of the physical energy transfer/generation/ entropy laws of the spatio-temporal coordinates of the systems hereafter described … This impingement effect is illustrated by more than ten local years of observation. No tower in which the isochronic/isotemporal barrier has failed [failure being defined as a barrier separation of less than 150 nanoseconds, with an error margin of three percent] has ever functioned again in the spatio-temporal coordinates in which this world is currently situated …. Tower cores have been run continuously without shutdown for the operating life of a Mirror Ship. The longest known continuous operation documented prior to the space-time shift translocating the colonizing/planoforming expedition … was eighty-seven elapsed standard Anglo-Rationalist years. Given that a standard storage cell [model CD-3A] discharges power at the same amplitude as before the trans-spatio-temporal shift, but for more than quadruple the previous duration, and that power amplitude requirements/ discharges from various powered end-use equipment [i.e., electrocell carriers, motor/dynamos, laselectroburst rifles, antipersonnel electrolasers] varies by user, locale, and even spatio-temporal planetary locales, accurate determination of tower core life is unlikely. Consequently, despite considerable depletion of technical personnel and transport equipment, in the interests of pragmatism and maintaining a viable colonial structure with the infrastructure necessary to adapt to the local parameters and paradigms, as described in Section IV, the remaining tower cores have been located in physical circumstances that would appear as most conducive to their continued and uninterrupted operation . . . Maintenance can be accomplished on the secondary systems [see Section V], as well as the energy transfer and conversion systems, since these are located outside the core, and the power transfers are accomplished by field manipulations and impingements. Such maintenance should be held to an absolute minimum, however, since macular cellular degeneration has already been observed among personnel with high exposure within the operating confines of the basic system, in contravention of previously established principles and tolerances … [Overview] (Magi’i of Cyador 41-42) **Paradox of Empire** *by Bern'elth, Magus First - Cyad, 157 A.F.* Even the Emperors of the Land of Eternal Light embody the elements of paradox that infuse and suffuse Cyador …. Most paradoxical is the treatment of the memory of the Emperor Alyiakal. Despite his many successes in establishing the current borders of modern Cyador, and his formalization of the balanced power structure that has come to govern Cyador, he has become the "One Never to be Mentioned" among the Magi'i and Mirror Lancers of Cyad. The Magi'i wish to forget him because he was a stronger magus than the First Magus and turned his back on what he saw as the ever-narrowing traditions and inbreeding of the Magi'i, then became a Mirror Lancer officer who used his magely abilities to lead the northern Mirror Lancers in the devastation of Cerlyn and the establishment of the northeastern cuprite mines. By doing so, he assured peace with the northern barbarians for more than a generation, and a continued supply of cuprite ore for the continued formulation of cupridium. When he used those same lancers to become Emperor, he insisted that the chaos energies be diverted from mere experimentation to power chaos-cells for stonecutting and thus the building of the Great Highways of Cyador, the completion of the Palace of Eternal Light and the strengthening and lengthening of the Great Canal …. Yet for all this, for which he and his memory should be revered, the paradox is that he remains the magus of whom the Magi'i will never speak. The Mirror Lancers avoid his name because it reminds them all too clearly of their deficiencies in arms and other skills and because his success continues to imply that merely being a Mirror Lancer is less than sufficient to be a successful or great holder of the Malachite Throne …. The simple fact that no Lancer commander has since matched his feats makes the comparison even more odious … and, again, the paradox is maintained: the greatest Mirror Lancer officer in the history of Cyador is the least known as such. Even the merchanters dislike the image of Alyiakal, for they have none of the talents that he embodied, and, therefore, they cannot aspire to place one of their own, truly their own, upon the Malachite Throne, yet it was largely the result of his policies as Emperor through which they came to prosper …. (Magi’i of Cyador 56-57) **Meditations on the Land of Light** *by Kiedral Daloren, Vice Marshal, Anglorian Unity* *Dedication* To those of the Towers, to those of the Land, and to those who endured. *Should I Recall The Rational Stars* There I had a tower for the skies, where the rooms were clear, and the music filled the walls. The light clothed the halls, and the days were long. The nights were song. Should I recall the Rational Stars? Or hold my ruin on this hill where new-raised walls are still, Perfect granite set jagged on the dawn, with striped awnings spread across the lawn. Then, gold was known as gold, and long slow stories could be told. White flowers filled the darkest room, flowers that never lost their bloom. Should I recall the Rational Stars? And should I raise anew old chaos-towers in the darkest wood, leaving nothing where the forest stood, turning the dark of day to sunlit pride, to see frail windows throw the rainbow wide, with passages and courts in bloom and white flowers in the darkest room? Should I recall the Rational Stars? I had a tower once, across heavens from here, with alabaster edges and silver domes. Raised above the fields and homes, it flagged my fires, flew my fear. Oh … take these new lake isles and green green seas; take these sylvan ponds and soaring trees; take these desert dunes and sunswept sands, and pour them through your empty hands. (Magi’i of Cyador 51-52 425 [fragment]) Although the old lands are in my heart, in towers that anchored life with certain art, in eyes that will not again see bold the hills of Angloria or surf at Winterhold, I greet the coming evening, and the night, proud purple from the strange and setting sun and the towered ragged course that I have run, towers yet that hold the chaos of life, and struggle with order's unending strife, for endless may they hold our light against the long and coming night. Worlds change, I'm told, mirror silver to heavy gold, and the new becomes the old, with the way the story's told. (Magi’i of Cyador 121) Do not ask me which carillon has rung or if the Forest's silent god has sung. Best you watch white granite towers, raised in pride, doze in the dusky sun until the altered green-bloody rivers run down to the coming night where chaos cowers. (Magi’i of Cyador 187) Smiles are so fragile, like images on the pond of being, reflections only made possible by the black depths beneath. (Magi’i of Cyador 187) *Ripening* Like a dusk without a cloud, a leaf without a tree, a shell without a sea … the greening of the pear slips by. Sly tree, you know how … where … So could we with reason, to follow, leaf by leaf by green, each second of the season, to hold the sun-hazed days, and wait for pears and praise … and wait for pears and praise. (Magi’i of Cyador 284 446 [fragment]) An ornamented garden, filled with flowers, statues surrounding lovers' bowers, these we will not find in granite walls, nor in the heights of Palace halls, vain images of a world long lost in space that none can bear to view or to replace. Love you I will these last days we hold, loving till we are ash and order cold, for ancient images are not for keeping, nor Palace walls and second falls for weeping. (Magi’i of Cyador 494-495) Virtues of old hold fast. Morning's blaze cannot last; and rose petals soon part. Not so a steadfast heart. [Fragment of a longer piece] (Magi’i of Cyador 494)