I’ve studied what I could of the Niess and their culture. There isn’t much left, and I have to sift the truth from all the lies. But there was a…a practice among them. A vocation. People whose job it was to see that the truth got told. (The Stone Sky 213)
When we join the story, though the Sanzed Equatorial Affiliation has technically been abolished in favor of local control, “most comms still follow Imperial systems of governance, finance, education, and more” (The Fifth Season 412). This largely centralized power structure leaves Stillness society vulnerable to self-serving historical and scientific revisions and biases, such as the defunding of research which demonstrated the key role of orogenes in preventing seasons (sorry about that Yaetr). As discussed in our group blog post, “The Deeper Inspiration of Catastrophe,” archives can have a mediating effect, serving to “steady institutions against the sway of politics,” and helping to prevent the same mistakes from being repeated. Far older than the Old Sanze Empire are stone-eaters and lorists. While they can indeed be “folly made flesh” (end-of-chapter excerpt somewhere in The Fifth Season) stone-eaters such as Hoa, alive before Seasons began, are walking history books. When he tells us at the end of The Fifth Season, “This is how it began. Listen. Learn. This is how the world changed” (443), we then understand that the series itself is an archive.