The Book of Records

Maybe in your mind's eye the Book of Records is a massive tome, binding together pages of the thinnest paper, scribbled full of names in the tiniest handwriting.

Or maybe you do a bit of math in your mind, and then conceive of the Book of Records as a stack of books as tall as a mountain. A myriad of volumes, for no single book could ever hold the records of the uncountable billions of Amarr alive today and of the uncountable billions more that lived before.

You would still be wrong.

The Book of Records is a building.

It is an ancient building, stone and gold, in the old district of Dam-Torsad. At first glance, it is not very remarkable. Tourists walk past its facade without realizing it was built thousands of years ago. It looks like a very modest building, somewhat out of place. It is dwarfed by the modern shining skyscrapers around it. It did not grow along with the other buildings, since by law, no part of the Book of Records can be torn down or remodeled.

In the last couple of millennia it grew roots and expanded underground. The venerable building that you see from the nearby Square of the Records is just the tip of an iceberg stretching over half a kilometer down and branching outwards several kilometers in a network of catacombs of books, deep below the city. It keeps on expanding: even when the Book of Records became digitized, the tradition of keeping the paper and ink records was not abandoned. Still today, an army of Record Keepers use their calligraphy to add names and information on pages and cross-reference cards. On our home-world alone, half a million babies are born every single day.

The parts above ground contain the oldest records, only accessible to high nobility and clergy. And these nobles cannot enter it without a Record Guide. The facade of the building is just the outer shell - it was constructed around a building older still, that also by law cannot be altered. That older building is built around one yet older than it, and so it goes on, so that the whole edifice is like an onion layered in time.

Since no walls or floors can ever be rebuilt or changed, you go from one layer to the next by crawling through windows in the walls separating the millennia. The stacks of records are dense in the old regions. No space is left unused as subsequent expansions by enclosure were always postponed until absolutely unavoidable. 

The walkways between the stacks and shelves are tight and labyrinthine. It is easy to get lost in the old parts. Sometimes just to reach the shelves on the other side of where you are, you have to climb a ladder and walk around through several rooms and climb back down somewhere else. You can't walk upright everywhere, in some places you have to squeeze in, in order to spare yourself a long detour in this three-dimensional maze. Retrieving a record from an ancient and not digitized age is like a caving expedition, one only restricted to Heirs and the Record Guides that specialize in specific parts of the building.

The innermost building in this layered structure can only be visited by the Emperor or Empress, and hasn't been so for as long as anyone can remember. The oldest part of the Book of Records, so claim the Record Guides, is a small church. That church contains no cards or books or scrolls. It is covered on the outside by stacked records from the second oldest layer, and you can only go in on hands and knees through a small entrance. As you enter, space opens up to an almost empty church interior, a relief after the claustrophobic inner layers. In the middle of this empty church stands a beech tree that died a very long time ago. 

In its bark three words are carved. They form the first line of the Book, and the oldest Amarr biographical record: "Dano loves Marie".