I am violating my oath

At least one argument has been put forth that this oath is not the Pledge of the Order at Mountain House that Egderus refers to a few lines later, but rather a secret oath to an unknown organization or fellowship that he joined near the end of his life. It is of course tempting to speculate that it might be the Fellowship Egderus dismissively mentions in his public memoirs, but there was no hard evidence to support its existence until much later — for example, in the Writing of the Unknown Scholastic...