The Nortaq Codices
What follows is the text of the Nortaq Codices as currently reconstructed by the Department of Antiquities at the University of Rivermount. The codices were recovered in the year 847 of the Third Age from a sealed chamber deep within the eastern foundations of Ambers Call. The chamber appears to have been carved by a single hand, and the tool marks are consistent with dwarven stonework of the immediate post-war period. The codices themselves are older - significantly older. Their dating remains disputed, but the stone they are inscribed upon predates the founding of Nortaq itself.
The chamber was breached by a crew of dwarven miners extending a ventilation shaft. Their foreman, one Borin Ironhand, reported that the air that escaped when the wall was broken carried a scent none of them could identify - not decay, not dust, but something he described as "the smell of a room where someone has just finished speaking." The codices were found arranged in a circle of twelve stone chests, each sealed with runes of a kind not found in any known dwarven or elvish tradition. Eleven of the chests contained inscribed tablets. The twelfth was empty.
The texts were brought to Rivermount in the autumn of that year. They have been the subject of continuous study and considerable controversy ever since.
On Their Origin
The codices are attributed - though not without debate - to the hand of Thrain Deepdelve, a dwarven scholar and excavator who worked among the ruins of Nortaq in the decades following the First War. Thrain is a documented historical figure: his name appears in the guild records of the Stonewrights of Thorsheim, where he held the rank of Master Antiquarian.
What is known with certainty is this: Thrain led a licensed excavation of the Nortaq ruins approximately forty years after the Treaty was signed. His expedition was funded by the newly established University of Rivermount, which sought to recover documents and artifacts from the pre-war period. The expedition lasted fourteen months. When Thrain returned, he returned alone. His three companions are listed in university records as "lost to hazard of ruin," with no further detail.
Thrain delivered no report to the university. He submitted no artifacts. He resigned his commission and his guild rank on the same day, and traveled north to Ambers Call, where he lived the remaining forty-one years of his life as a common stonemason. He never spoke publicly about what he found at Nortaq.
The only account of his state of mind comes from a letter written by his cousin, the merchant Darva Ironforge, three months after his return:
He is not the Thrain I knew. Not mad - I want to be clear on that. His mind is sharp as ever, sharper perhaps. But there is something behind his eyes now that was not there before. He speaks of ordinary things - weather, stone quality, the price of iron - but he speaks of them the way a man speaks who has seen something that makes ordinary things extraordinary. I asked him what he found in the south. He looked at me for a long time and said: "Everything that was written before was written from the outside. I found what was written from the inside." He would say no more.
The prevailing theory at Rivermount is that Thrain discovered the codices in a sealed vault beneath the Nortaq ruins - a vault that predates the human settlement, possibly predates all known settlement of the region. He carried the stone chests north over a journey of several weeks, alone, through terrain that would challenge an unladen traveler. How a single dwarf transported twelve stone chests across that distance remains unexplained.
He then carved the chamber in Ambers Call with his own hands and sealed the codices within it. He spoke their contents to no one. He wrote nothing down. When asked, near the end of his life, why he had hidden rather than published texts of such obvious significance, he is reported to have said: "That which is written there was written once. It does not need to be written again. It needs to be found."
Whether Thrain transcribed, translated, or preserved texts he found intact is unknown. The voice of the codices is consistent throughout - a single teaching tradition, speaking with the authority of direct knowledge. Scholars have noted stylistic similarities to the oldest passages of the Rivermount Library, but also significant divergences in both content and cosmological emphasis. Several passages appear to contradict or complicate the received history. Others illuminate questions that the canonical texts leave unanswered.
The question of their authenticity remains open. What is not in question is their depth.
- Professor Meridia Ashworth, Chair of Ancient Studies, University of Rivermount