Afterword: Transmission of the Archives

So far as can be discovered, the 'hidden story' of the transmission of the Writings in the Archives has never been told all in one place. Herebelow, the present Curator will attempt to sketch in that much of the 'text' of the archives' history about which there is some certainty.

The Archives originated in the holdings (if this is the proper term) of the Author who calls himself the Last One, and whose work dates from the liminal period that spans the collapse of the civilization of the Ancients and its aftermath. In several of his Writings, he describes a Boy who kept him company in his final days, and it can only be presumed that it was this Boy who gathered these texts and passed them on (along with at least two of his own writings) through an unknown number of intermediaries, to the first true curator of the Archives, Egderus Scriptor.

Without question, it was Egderus who collected the Writings that form the core of the Archives, and, with the assistance of his young secretary (and successor as Curator) Markito, put them into the form of an anthology, so that they could then be transmitted as a whole.

There followed a dark period of many generations, after which, in a process that continues to resist definitive description, the Archives came into the possession of an unnamed Scholar, who attempted to find them a home in the confraternity of learning of which he was, at that point, but a very marginal member. This endeavor failed (ruinously, for the Scholar) and the Archives were nearly lost when they were confiscated and the Scholar was banished from the community in which he had so hoped to win a place of distinction — not only for himself, but for the Archives and their story.

However, in a weird, almost whimsical turn of events, a young person who had been a student at the time of the Scholar's obloquy later became the savior of the very documents that had destroyed him. This rescuer is by custom denominated with the setting of their brief accidental meeting, the Locust Grove adjoining the Temple of learning where the Scholar gave his presentation. We learn from the extensive Writings of this so-called Locust Grove Author that the Temple was itself destroyed in some kind of catastrophe — perhaps an earthquake or an act of war — that decimated the sodality of scholarship of which it was the spiritual as well as corporeal heart.

After the Archives left the possession of the Locust Grove Author, another gap intervenes in our knowledge of what happened to them; we can, however, infer some of their story from the form in which they exist today.

At some point, a later curator annotated certain passages in the Writings; this person has been called the Scholiast since the earliest discourse on the Archives, and ultimately the Scholia as a whole came to be regarded as a Writing in itself.

Whether the Scholiast also supplied the INVENTORY of Authors and their Writings is a matter as yet unsettled, but there is no doubt that this first finding aid is also of venerable age, and certainly much predates the collection of|Legomena (elucidations) that came to serve as its adjunct.

These helpful ancillaria may well be the last 'original' Writings to be added to the Archives prior to their being taken up by Bill Bly — the only other Curator since the time of Egderus who can be said to have a 'real' name.