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

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

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

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Of the four piquant examples of their sayings included here, two — {secrets} and {no certainties, no truth} — could be variants, derived either from successive Authors or from the same Author at different times. Those remaining, — {which is at fault?} and {promises & 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.