Egderus is the hub around which wheels the constellation of Writings in the archives. Until the advent of the Scholar, Egderus was known only as a slave (or, more accurately, minor official) of the Golias, the king or ruling warlord of that era.

In the comparatively extensive Writings of Egderus that were discovered (or, perhaps better said, were revealed) by the Scholar, we find 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, resulting in 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 then 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...