Holding V, Stars.
Last corrected Year 397. This question appears in the governance record more often than any other.
Where this comes from. Everything below about the surface of Rolara as it now stands was given to us at first hand by Ami of the Ground, across visits between Year 392 and Year 397. He is our only authority on that world and the only first-hand source on any inhabited ground in this Archive. Where he was unsure, this entry says so in his words.
We mean to come down.
The fortress is not the destination and was never entered as one. From the founding assembly onward our declared long purpose has been a permanent home on a ground, and the ground we hold likeliest is Rolara.
Why we need a ground at all
This is not preference. Holding III sets it out.
A body in the Astral does not age. It also does not conceive. Conception and carrying need a Material ground, without exception and without substitute.
So a people who mean to continue must arrange for ground, again and again, for every generation, forever. We arrange it by keeping up relations with settled peoples and by making voyages for the purpose, and the governance record treats those voyages as the most important routine business the Exemplars conduct.
The argument about what that costs us has recurred since Year 22 and is open now.
Why Rolara
Material, habitable, populous, and inside the sphere. It has a spelljamming tradition of its own, so it is reachable and used to arrivals. Its powers are many enough that no single one governs the whole, which the Exemplars counted an advantage: a people looking for a corner does better where there are many doors than where there is one.
Against it: our charts hold the Solanar Expanse marked at the widest margin in this Archive, and a settled population cannot hold the fortress dark and cannot lift.
The standing objection
Vesh Ilketh Openhand, Year 293, the clearest statement of the case against. Also cited in the register.
This Enclave survives on three conditions: it is small, it moves, and it is of no consequence to any power. A settlement satisfies none of them. A settled population cannot hold the fortress dark, cannot lift, and cannot be concealed, and it makes us a fixed position in a sphere where we have marked one region at the widest margin in our charts and cannot say what the power in it wants.
I do not move that the ground be abandoned. I move that no site be approached until this body has entered, in the record, which of the three conditions it intends to give up and what it holds in exchange.
No Exemplar answered that on its merits in the century since. The record shows the question deferred, on readiness, on resources, on timing, across eleven separate sessions.
Where it stands
No site chosen. No approach made to any Rolaran power. No survey of the surface ever commissioned, in four centuries, by any Exemplar.
What this holding has instead is what one arrival volunteered, unasked, across five visits.
The intention has stood four centuries and this Archive records no step taken toward it. The transit is three days.