📜 CODEX ENTRY: The Accord of Ash and Blood

Filed Under: #CodexEntry #PostDemonicAge #FoundingEra #DreamersRidge

Date of Signing: 2 A.A.Author: Unknown – reconstructed by surviving war scribes and sanctioned memory-bearers

Preservation Class: Oral Relic | Memory-Bound | Fragile Continuity

“We did not swear to stand as one.We swore not to fall alone again.”

🩸 In the Ashes of Survival

The Accord of Ash and Blood was not a triumph. It was not peace. It was not even truly an accord. It was a reckoning—whispered, signed, and sealed not by kings or conquerors, but by those who remained.

The war was over.The demon lords had fallen.But the fire had not stopped burning.

Twelve Orcish factions, each a survivor of ruin, gathered on a broken hilltop later named Dreamer’s Ridge. No banners were raised. No horns were sounded. There were no scribes, only memory-bearers—some with fresh wounds still weeping beneath their cloaks.

The war had scattered language, lineage, and leadership. The age of demon rule had ended, but the age of uncertainty had only begun.

⚖️ What the Accord Was—and Was Not

The Accord did not name a nation.It made no proclamations of glory.It made no attempt to unify beyond the minimum needed to survive.

Some call it a treaty.It was not.It was a surrender to necessity.

Each faction placed a mark—or a name, if any still remembered how to write—upon a scroll blackened by ash and mingled with fresh blood. The basin used to ink the quills was said to contain the soot of pyres burned atop the Ridge. Others claim it was filled with the ashes of broken oaths, pages burned by the wind of war.

Either way, each mark made a silent promise:

Never again would the Orcish people fall to darkness alone.

🛡️ The Terms That Were Never Spoken

The Accord promised:

• Order, but not unity.

• Cooperation, but not trust.

• Memory, but not permanence.

It laid the groundwork for what would one day become Hasgram—but that name does not appear anywhere in the text. It seeded the foundations of the Guild of Seers, yet makes no mention of prophecy.

What it did give was space: for factions to hold to their traditions, to retain language, to keep identity while agreeing to share a future.

The price was silence.The signature was blood.The record was memory.

🕯️ A Fragile Flame

The original scroll—if it ever existed—is lost.

What remains are fragments: recited phrases preserved by memory-bearers, runes etched into stone and buried in sealed crypts, and the fading recollections of elders who still speak of that day with reverence and fear.

“It was not faith that bound us.It was the fear of what waited if we stood apart.”— Attributed to the last Speaker of Dreamer’s Ridge

Today, the Accord is not considered binding.It has no legal power.But it shaped Hasgram more deeply than any law ever carved in stone.

It endures not because it was written.It endures because it was remembered.And memory, as all Seers know, is the first thing tyrants seek to erase.

📘 See Also:

• 📜 The Demon War: Xelidan’s Fall

• 📜 The Guild of Seers: Origins and Oversight

• 📜 Hasgram: Nation of Oaths

• 📜 Dreamer’s Ridge: Site of the Last Silence

• 📜 The Doctrine of Measured Flame