Legomenon for the collective Author known as The REMNANT

The people known as the Remnant cannot be positively identified. Three possibilities have been advanced:

  1. The Remnant were an aboriginal people.
  2. The Remnant were the direct descendants of the Ancients.
  3. The Remnant are a figment of someone's imagination.

The first two interpretations overlap significantly, depending on how one identifies the Ancients:

  1. If the Ancients were deities, as was generally believed during Egderus' era, then the Remnant would be descendants of the First People, who were fashioned, along with the rest of Creation, by the Ancients. At some later point, then, the Remnant became isolated from their civilized cousins, our progenitors.
  2. But if the Ancients were mortals like ourselves, then the Remnant were their direct descendants, the survivors of the cataclysm that brought an end to the Ancients' magnificent civilization. This proposal is the foundation of the so-called 'We Descend' heresy.
  3. The third interpretation is considered by some to be the most attractive: the Remnant never did exist — except as a collective fictional character in a complex, multi-generational hoax that, despite many years of vigorous research, has never been entirely discredited.

Six Writings in the Archives are generally attributed to the Remnant.

The first, here titled {The Remnant Say...}, is also known as 'Proverbs of the Remnant'; however, it seems rather to be a poem (or part of one) on a single subject. Perhaps it is a segment of a longer work containing sayings on other subjects, but this is all that has survived. Notwithstanding vigorous advocacy from certain quarters, there is no certainty that Egderus composed it, however much the burden of the Writing is consistent with what many take to be his philosophy of life.

According to one conjecture, the peculiar symbols incribed at the head of certain stanzas of this fragment — '‡', '‡‡', '‡‡‡', and so on — seem to be patterans, marking as it were the stepping stones on the path formed by the five separate 'pages' (or perhaps pottery sherds) upon which this most ancient Writing was originally inscribed.

Although the second, {Rhapsody}, has been likewise ascribed to Egderus, there is no evidence to support doing so. However, there does seem to be a similarity of tone between this writing and the proverb-like {The Remnant Say...} — hence its provisional placement here.

However, the radical conjecture has also been made that both of these 'Rhapsodies of the Remnant' were actually composed by none other than the Good Doctor, who, after a violent conversion, came to be known as the Missionary to the Remnant. See also scholion {I may not be the first} from the Historian's Notebook.

Of the four remaining examples of sayings properly called, two — {secrets} and {no certainties, no truth} — could be variants on a theme, derived either from successive Authors or from the same Author at different times. Those remaining, — {which is at fault?} and {promises and trust} — seem to be general maxims unrelated to the other two. All four come from a heavily damaged document in which was transcribed an incomplete (or abandoned) collection of such apothegms.

Additionally, 'quotations' from the Remnant can be found in Writings from all eras encompassed by the Archives — a phenomenon easily appreciated by the most casual Reader, and which may have motivated the project of gathering them into a single volume.

In a sense, however, the diasporic pattern in which they have been transmitted to us is the provenance of The Remnant and their Sayings, or can at least so serve until the roiling waters of warring theories have somehow been conciliated.