The Tower of Solmar
The Warm Pride and the Scattering of Nations
The Tower of Solmar is the great warm folly of the Age of Drifting (c. 2950 B.F.): after the Great Whiteout, the children of men, still of one speech, gathered on a warm plain and resolved to build a tower of fired brick to “reach the heavens and make us a name” — to climb to the White Horizon by their own heat and so need no Cold. It is the archetype of warm pride: salvation by human striving (compare the Self-Freezing Error in its reverse).
The Confusion and Scattering
The Cold came down, confused their one speech into many tongues, and scattered the builders abroad — the origin-story of the world’s many peoples and languages, and the deep background of the old liturgical tongue (the one cold speech of before). The unfinished tower stands in Frostian memory as a warning that “the warm tower always falls, but the cold road always arrives.” Its scattering is undone, in part, at the First Hollownight, when the apostles are understood in every tongue.