Vaelthir

They Asked Me to Keep This Apolitical. I Find That Absurd.

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Edna Thatch

The new president of the Wexamour Archaeological Society, the librarian Edna Thatch, was asked to introduce herself with a few apolitical words about her hopes for the term. She refuses. In their place she delivers the Society’s formal condemnation of Operation MantiMouser, a demand that ORCM explain in full a program it has given a codename and a budget but no description, and an announcement that members will stand outside every ORCM station until it does. She calls on the office’s own clerks and wardens to strike and stand with them, and closes by standing openly with Luna and the column this paper blacklisted, in the same pages, the week before. The quiet resistance of the season steps into the daylight.

Vaelthir

Edna Thatch Will Lead the New Wexamour Archaeological Society

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Vaelthir University Archaeological Society

The newly opened Wexamour chapter of the Archaeological Society, the public sister to the one that has met at the University since its founding, has named Edna Thatch as its first president. A beloved fixture of the town library, offered here as the natural choice to lead a club for people who simply love to dig into the past. On its surface, an ordinary piece of community good news.

Vaelthir

Operation MantiMouser: The Name ORCM Wrote Into the Ledger, and the One It Left Out

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Merritt Vance, Staff Reporter

A Chronicle investigation into the Office of Resource and Civil Management’s standing order for serpent-mousers, the manticore breed lately in such demand, finds a commission appropriated in a committee session under the codename Operation MantiMouser and drawn from the Civil Compliance Initiative’s budget, breeders who describe a stock selected for night vision, scent, silent stalking, and a venom made for the Serpentes, and a supply line bound for secret sites and roving patrols along a corridor from the Faded Lands up to the southern Whispering Groves. The office calls the whole of it routine and precautionary, will name no threat, and has not yet begun a deployment still weeks off in training. Set against ORCM’s review of the strip’s serpent-folk farmers and this paper’s own retraction of a column that defended them, the pattern is harder to miss than the office would like.

Vaelthir

The Students Show Us Up Again: A Night at the Ourelle Art Gala

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Ron Rudson, Arts Critic

Ron Rudson reviews the Ourelle Art Gala, the University’s annual student exhibition in the Caldwell Wing, praising the young painters’ rawness and honesty against the varnished comfort of the establishment work he has grumbled about before. He singles out a luminous study and a gloriously silly sculpture, pans one self-serious piece, and notes, almost in passing, that one of the more striking works was gone from its hook by the second evening.

Vaelthir

The Archaeological Society Is Opening a New Wexamour Chapter

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Vaelthir University Archaeological Society

The Vaelthir University Archaeological Society announces a new sister chapter, the Wexamour Archaeological Society, open to everyone rather than the enrolled alone. On its face it is ordinary outreach from a society that loves to dig, record, and discuss history. Its invitation to ‘be counted among friends,’ and the sigil at its close, the same that ended Joey Vaelwick’s farewell, quietly mark it as something more than a lecture series.

Vaelthir

A Note from Joey Vaelwick

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Joey Vaelwick

Joey Vaelwick’s column ends without warning or explanation, a few flat sentences from a man who says only that he can no longer write for the paper, with thanks to the readers and colleagues who carried him while it lasted.

Vaelthir

The Phoenixes Have Left the Square

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Perrin Callow, Chronicle Science Desk

I recently wrote that the roosts, overdue and heavy and greying, would go up together in a single burning the city could not survive. I now realize that I may be wrong about how this would end. The phoenixes of the square lifted from their roosts and left. If you have not walked through the square lately, walk through it now. The iron stands along the walks stand cold and bare.

Vaelthir

Vaelthir's Phoenixes Have Not Burned

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Perrin Callow, Chronicle Science Desk

Everyone in Vaelthir knows the phoenixes. They sit in high roosts on the old bell towers and the university spires, and they have been part of the skyline for as long as anyone alive can remember. Across the city it is phoenixes, not lanterns, that light the streets, perched on iron stands at the corners and along the walks, though their great roosts cluster thickest in the University square, where they sit so close together that the dark never quite settles.

Vaelthir

Has Anyone Else Really Looked at the Phoenixes in the Square?

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Tamsin Reed

I am a second-year biology student, so take this for what it is, which is one person noticing a thing and then not being able to stop noticing it. I sit in the University square most mornings with my notes, under the phoenixes, the way half the University does. We all love them, for they are the first thing anyone shows a visitor. But a few weeks ago I was sketching one for a wildlife biology assignment, and I saw that it had a gray feather.

Vaelthir

Toepads Is in Grove Hospital, and For Once the Kitchen Was the One That Got Him

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·The Vaelthir Desk

The Vaelthir Desk reports that food critic Topaz Toepads has been hospitalised at Grove Hospital with a severe case of food poisoning after a meal he was reviewing, that he is recovering and in no danger, and that his column will pause until he is back on his feet. Even from the ward he has declined to name the establishment responsible, on the grounds that he has not finished thinking about it.

Vaelthir

Since Mr. Vaelwick Reviewed a Man He Never Met: The Record, Corrected, By the Only Person Qualified to Give It

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Cassian Swiggity

Actor Cassian Swiggity responds to Joey Vaelwick’s account of the On Record interview that never took place, disputing nearly every characterization in it, defending the contract terms Vaelwick quoted as matters of craft rather than fear, insisting the reports of his picture’s failure are exaggerated, and announcing that he is ending his relationship with the Chronicle before it can be said the Chronicle ended anything.

Vaelthir

The On Record I Cannot Give You: What Happened When I Sat Down With Cassian Swiggity

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Joey Vaelwick

Joey Vaelwick explains why his promised On Record with movie star Cassian Swiggity will not run: the interview never happened. In place of the actor, his people sent a four-page press release, so Vaelwick reports instead from sources close to the production and the studio, on the contract clauses that Swiggity must win every fight on screen and can never be the one who gets left, and on the superhero picture now playing to empty houses.

Vaelthir

Fenmore's Taco Club: The Best and Worst Hits, Ranked by a Man Who Ate the Whole Menu

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Topaz Toepads, Food Critic

Topaz Toepads finally answers the letters and reviews the whole Fenmore’s Taco Club menu, from the much-talked-about establishment on Newport Avenue: the Dragonfire Taco, the Grove Taco, the ten-gold Anomaly, the flame-kissed basilisk carnitas, and the slow-roasted wyvern brisket, ranked from the one you should order twice to the one you should not order at all.

Vaelthir

The Door That Only Opens One Way: What the Chronicle Found When It Went Looking for the Reverie's Missing

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Merritt Vance, Staff Reporter

A Chronicle investigation into The Reverie, the immersive attraction at the restored Misthollow lodge, finds a growing list of patrons who entered and never returned home, records that appear to be missing, and a proprietor who answers every question with a smile and nothing else. Among the unaccounted is the Chronicle’s own wellness correspondent, Marigold Fenn, who has filed nothing since the piece that praised the place.

Vaelthir

A Dish the Color of a Bad Week: Toepads Finally Reviews the Sanguine Curd

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Topaz Toepads, Food Critic

Topaz Toepads travels to Freeman’s Windward Bestiary to review the sanguine curd, the deep-red regional delicacy the historical pages keep name-dropping. He finds it genuinely, unsettlingly good, and cannot help noticing that Wexamour has developed an appetite for a blood-colored dish in the same season its neighbors keep turning up pale.

Vaelthir

The Vaelthir Hour: Stilver Lugrathe — The Man Behind the Office

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Sorin VanDenBerghe

Sorin VanDenBerghe sits down with long-form correspondent Joey Vaelwick to discuss his three-day On Record interview with ORCM Chair Stilver Lugrathe.

Vaelthir

The Cake That Took Over Wexamour: On Sweetness, Scarcity, and a Recipe We Could Not Leave Alone

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Topaz Toepads, Food Critic

Topaz Toepads traces the sudden, total dominance of Nana Ferrow’s honey cake over Wexamour’s tables, the run on Dorran honey and eggs it has touched off, and the uneasy question of what it means that a region frozen in spring has fallen so hard for a cake about spring returning.

Vaelthir

What Does When The Clocks Fell Silent Get Right and Wrong About the Silence?

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Ron Rudson, Arts Critic

The McGuire Group’s beloved When The Clocks Fell Silent returns to the Nascium Playhouse, and rather than review a production everyone already knows by heart, Ron Rudson turns his attention to the history it claims to retell.

Vaelthir

One Night Only: When The Clocks Fell Silent Returns to the Nascium Playhouse

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Vaelthir Arts Desk

The McGuire Group’s beloved When The Clocks Fell Silent returns to the Nascium Playhouse for one night only on Tuesday, the 23rd of June.

Vaelthir

The Art of the Silence: On Painting a Spring That Will Not Turn

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Ron Rudson, Arts Critic

Ron Rudson surveys the painting, music, and sculpture made since the Silence froze Wexamour in a single spring, and asks whether an endless season has made our art luminous, immobile, or some uneasy marriage of the two.