Main > Compendia > History > Dark Age > The Concordance

Overview

The Concordance (Commontongue), also Aontu Bri (Feyspeak \ˈaɪntu bri\ for essence union), was a profoundly powerfulm, magical mishap in the Fey Courts of Arcadia in the middle Dark Age. It caused eight of the eighteen Midnight Courts to merge together into the four Concordant Courts.

Timeline

c. 1400: The Cartographer Queen begins to consider ways to protect her Court against philosophical violence, such as Denial and Erasure, seen in The War of Erasure.
c. 1450: The Hearth King voices similar concerns and joins The Cartographer Queen in researching a form of philosophical protection.
c. 1500: The two discover a Strange magical ritual, most likely with the help of The Court of Three, that would, in theory, allow them to build relationships between their philosophies that would allow each to reinforce the other during philosophical attack. But the ritual would need a total of four Courts with the same inflection to succeed.
c. 1550: The King and Queen convince The Candy King to join their cause, and The Candy King persuades The Cake Queen in turn, creating the fellowship of four Bright Courts to perform the ritual.
c. 1700: After 150 years of quests, research, and preparation, the ritual is performed, and the four Bright Courts and four Bleak Courts exploring the Strange Essence of Location, Relation, Substance, and Time were fused together into the four Concordant Courts.

Causes

The primary factor motivating The Cake Queen, The Candy King, The Cartographer Queen, and The Hearth King to pursue The Concordance was fear. These four Bright survivors of The War of Erasure were worried that similar philosophical violence could happen again. They thought that if they made their philosophies reliant on each other, then Denial and Erasure might not be effective against them. It is possible they were correct, though untested.

Consequences

The four Bright Courts participating in the ritual, The Sugar Court, The Greater Court, The Upper Court, and The Court of Yesterday fused in a pairwise fashion.

The Sugar Court fused with The Greater Court, resulting in The Greater Sugar Court.
The Upper Court fused with The Court of Yesterday, resulting in The Upper Court of Yesterday.

More fascinatingly, their opposing Bleak Courts, which were not part of the ritual at all, also fused in a pairwise faction, but pairing opposite Essences.

The Bone Court fused with The Lower Court, resulting in The Lower Bone Court.
The Half Court fused with The Court of Tomorrow, resulting in The Court of Half Tomorrows.

It is generally believed that the involuntary fusion of the Bleak Courts was the result of a previously unknown relationship between opposing Courts that share a Strange Essence, and only differ by their Bright/Bleak inflection. These Courts are related in a way that their philosophical existence is entangled, and can affect each other.

Furthermore, it is generally believed by Fey scholars that the asymmetry of this fusion has to do with the opposing nature of the inflection. Meaning if a Bright philosophy turns "left" in an abstract sense, the Bleak philosophy must turn "right".