Legomenon for AGE of the SCHOLAR

All the texts in this timeBand belong to contemporaries of the unnamed Scholar who rediscovered the Archives in the era between that of Egderus and our own. They draw an intimate portrait, from individual perspectives, of events surrounding the destruction of the Temple, a catastrophic event that, as numerous later scholars have argued, followed directly from the Scholar's disastrous attempt to present his discovery of the Archives to the authorities of his time.

Whether or not this hypothesis is valid, there is no doubt that the Temple's downfall crippled the civilization of which it was the beacon, and a kind of dark age followed that, in certain respects, continues to this day, though of late the progress in reconstructing the Archives has been paralleled in the outside world by vigorous growth and flourishing. We must hope that this recovery continues apace, without our somehow blundering into the same mistakes that brought to a violent end each of the three eras previous to our own: that of the Scholar, of Egderus, and of the Ancients.

In the Writings of the Scholar's time it is possible to establish some sequence in their composition. The most recent of these is the account of the unnamed Soldier who rescues two victims of his own company's savagery contains a hint that he also came to salvage the writings of another Author, the Exile, who had just left the group before the attack. The latter's works tell us he was being pursued for a cause we never learn, but it is difficult not to suspect he was involved (or was thought to be so) in the demolition of the Temple.

A little closer to that ruinous event is another single narrative, that of the Unknown Scholastic, who it seems did play a role in the conspiracy that brought the Temple down, and even though that role remains hazy, the Author's intent in furthering the plot is made very clear. A related group of personal stories, those of the so-called Voice from the Locust Grove — a close friend of the former Scholastic, give an extended account of the context and immediate aftermath of the event.

And finally there are the numerous Writings of the Scholar himself, who found and then lost the Archives, but who prepared the way for them to find us.