Legomenon for the founder of the Archives EGDERUS

Egderus is the hub around which wheels the constellation of Writings in the Archives, and his own Writings are more numerous and extensive than those of any other Author herein.

Until the advent of the Scholar, Egderus was known only as a minor official of the Golias, the king or ruling warlord of that era.

In the comparatively extensive Testament discovered (or, perhaps better said, revealed) by the Scholar, we learn that Egderus was also an archivist, and some of the artifacts he collected and transmitted belong to what is in effect an alien World, that of the Ancients, who in his day were universally believed to be the Deities responsible for Creation. But Egderus evidently came to regard the Ancients as mere mortals like ourselves, and concluded that it was their own actions that brought about the demise of their world; further, it was the Ancients whose descendants, ultimately, we are.

This is the so-called 'We Descend' heresy that was for so long so explosive, ostensibly the cause of the Scholar's expulsion from the Conference of his peers — and which also adumbrates a body of wisdom that had to be preserved and passed on in secret over the course of many generations.

Today we have little difficulty accepting that we are merely the latest in a long line of civilizations that arose from and fell back into the earth of our island home. But the lessons to be drawn from the transmission of these tales of our ancient forebears have yet to be fully realized...

Egderus' earliest Writings belong to his so-called Testament, a memoiric account of his early life, presumably written at a mature age, which come to us in three longish 'chapters'. The first such section of the Testament, for convenience titled {Egderus at Mountain House}, describes life in the remote eremitic community in which he grew up, focusing on a weird event — the death and dismemberment of the captain of the small garrison guarding the house, a terrifying man called Gig, and Egderus' possible implication in the murder, a question left unresolved at the end.

The next segment of the Testament, {Egderus and the Good Doctor}, takes up the narrative with its Author's employment in the Great City, as secretary to the former Prior of Mountain House, who liked to be called (for reasons unknown) the Good Doctor, and who oversees 'examinations' of heretics in the Office of Inquiry. While there, Egderus becomes enamored of one of the Good Doctor's 'clients', a man known only as the Historian, and finds a potential ally in Praetor Robenc, whom he also knew back at Mountain House.

A plan to help the Historian escape ripens in the third chapter of the Testament, {Rescue Plot}, in which Egderus joins with Robenc's Adjutant Aric in, along with other devices, preparing documents to discredit the Good Doctor.

The Testament concludes with {First Sermon of Egderus}, delivered to the community at his old home, Mountain House, after his banishment there for his part in the so-called Rescue Plot.

There follow some miscellaneous Writings, only one of which, {torrential}, can be dated with any certainty, to just after Egderus' return to Mountain House, a period of political upheaval, when his peaceful community is overrun by the wounded and the dead from an unidentified battle nearby.

Two further memoiric Writings, the anecdote {The scriptor and his beloved} and the fantastical {a dream of the Great City} may once have been part of the Testament, but if so their context has been lost. The first seems to date from the period of Egderus' employment with the Good Doctor, but at the same time hints at his working in secret on some kind of unspecified archive — and Egderus' authorship of this fragment has been challenged with some success. The second, a striking dream narrative, could have been composed at almost any time in Egderus' long life.

The affectionate reminiscence {New Year} presents a lively picture of life in Mountain House when Egderus was quite young, and introduces a happy lay brother, his helper and first companion, as well as an odd beggar who may well be the Old Poet, composer of {patteran}, or someone like him.

The final Writings collected here were written when Egderus was quite an old man. It is not known whether he survived the turmoil of his time, or was swept away along with so many of his friends and contemporaries in the Goliadic Wars, but we must believe that he met this last challenge with the courage and resourcefulness he had shown throughout his life — not least in contriving, in the midst of the total disintegration of his world, to collect and pass along to us the Archives that came to bear his name.

The order of composition of these so-called Last Writings is of course conjectural, but they are presented here is what feels to be their most edifying sequence.

Towards the end of his life, after taking on as his secretary the young mute Markito (whimsically described in {Markito Scriptor}), Egderus is surprised by the return of an old lover, the Historian, a meeting described in {Egderus and the Historian}, where the 'present' borne by the Historian, who is near death, hints at the source of at least part of what became the Archives under Egderus' curacy.

In what may be part of a sermon, {What can we do here?}, Egderus presents first thoughts on preparing his isolated refuge for the world catastrophe he feared would soon reach its door.

An apparent follow-up memorandum, possibly a fragment of the same sermon, {threefold mission}, more definitively lays out the framework of action partially foreseen in the previous Writing; then, after a lacuna, he turns his attention to understanding the state of mind of those from the other side, urging compassion coupled with a warning.

It is in the address {this work} that Egderus shows his character most fully, exhorting his followers (and us) to remember our place in the procession of all the generations of our kind.

A former curator provided the title {Egderus' Last Writings} to this composite document, and the distress impelling Egderus in these final texts is itself distressing, but its cause is impossible to determine.

The provenance of {Egderus' Secret} remains a secret.