Egderus' Last Writings

According to the Remnant, 'When you do not know where to turn, a step in any direction is progress.'

When I began, I hoped I would be able to continue these recollections at leisure; there are many people who cared for and inspired me, and I would like to do proper honor to their memory. But my time is short. I must press on and finish this testament.

My friend the Historian had been tortured for more than he knew, or let on that he knew. In his own mind, he was simply a braggart and a drunkard who had opened his mouth once too often. But even he must have wondered at the avidity of the Good Doctor's attentions — what evil did the Good Doctor believe he was rooting out?

Of course he never explained it to me, and the interrogation was cut short by the Historian's escape before the Good Doctor could get what he was after. But I have meditated on this mystery over the long years, and — putting this incident together with others that have taken place since — I have come to a provisional explanation.

I do not know what the Historian's actual convictions were concerning the Ancients, but the Good Doctor without question was convinced he was a heretic. Almost all of the clients of the Office of Inquiry were being held for some impious act or statement — and at the time the penalty for false belief was death, once the Examiner had persuaded the client to confess.

The Good Doctor would never himself have bothered with a simple case of impiety. And no one would have believed the Historian's assertion to be a childhood friend of the Golias, so it is doubtful that it was this claim that made him important to the Good Doctor. By the time the Good Doctor took over the interrogation, the issue had ceased to come up — the Historian attempted to invoke this alleged friendship early on, but apparently gave up, seeing that it had no effect.

There had been rumors about an unlawful Fellowship that preached an outrageous doctrine concerning the Ancients: that they were not gods at all, but rather plain human beings like us: people, not deities, who had mysteriously destroyed themselves, and that our puny towns and fortresses are built upon — indeed, fashioned from — the residuum of their unimaginably glorious but wholly mortal civilization. Reportedly the motto or creed of this apostate cult consisted of seven syllables in a strange language: sub-ob-scu-ram-er-at-lux, which was supposed to mean 'beneath darkness, there was light' or some such absurdity. No one I knew believed that there ever was such a Fellowship; the more cynical among the scriptores proposed that the whole story was concocted by the Examiners, as an embellishment on the cruelty that gave meaning to their lives.

Or so I thought at the time, and for long afterwards. In my youthful affections, the Good Doctor was simply evil, and my beautiful Historian his entirely innocent victim. I do not remember encountering the nonsense phrase in my readings of his previous sessions with other Examiners', but then I wasn't looking for it; most likely he never uttered it, because he had never heard of it. But I now believe that my master was convinced that the Historian was a bona fide apostle of this Fellowship, and the purpose of the interrogation was to get what the Good Doctor imagined was real information on its activities and the whereabouts of more false prophets like him.

I repeat that I do not know if the Historian was in fact a member of this Fellowship, if it existed at all. And the Good Doctor never found out, at least not from the Historian. Of my own convictions in the matter, I may say more later, if there is time.

The Good Doctor himself disappeared, under circumstances that remain unclear to me. I am fairly certain that my being returned to Mountain House was an indirect consequence of the purge which the Golias subsequently effected upon the Office of Inquiry. The Remnant say, 'The evil of today is tomorrow's good fortune,' and my life gives proof to the saying. And to its companion adage as well: 'Today's joy will break your heart tomorrow.' For my dear Historian repaid my helping him escape by getting himself killed coming back to me so many years later. And his death in my arms proved to be only the beginning of my heart's agony.

Why O why did he steal his benefactors' treasure? For what possible benefit could he hope to exchange it? Surely he must have known they would come after him to get it back? And that this would result in their utter extinction, after so many generations, these children of the Ancients themselves?

I cannot understand what he was thinking. What I am capable of understanding is that he may not have been thinking at all, that once he realized how precious the box was he simply snatched it and ran — he had no plan, not even a motive. That is how we are. I must believe that this is what happened: it simply happened. As the Remnant say, 'To question too deeply is to find the evil you fear'.

The carnage that ensued is completely documented in the annals of the Golias, and I am thankful that I need not recapitulate it here. But once again, the evil of that day became the good fortune of another: at Mountain House we tended the wounded and eased the dying out of this life; afterwards I persuaded the Golias to let me continue this service to the hopelessly afflicted from all places. It has provided a purpose for an otherwise empty life.

Yet I remain uneasy in spirit. My heart will never cease to grieve for those meaninglessly slain: my mentor the Superius Frater, my Historian, his benefactors, the soldiers of the Golias who were murdered for following their orders to murder. I was responsible for setting this evil in motion, though I cannot imagine doing other than I did, given what I knew, what I could not have known, what my own pride had not yet been sufficiently broken to permit me to learn. I accomplished my imagined revenge upon the Good Doctor, and weep when I remember Aric's attempt to warn me of its consequences.

Now my recompense is near. I open my arms to its cold embrace....