A legend. We keep this because our people tell it, not because we have confirmed any of it.
Holding IV, Enclave.
Written Year 33. Tellings collected through Year 389. Annotated Year 400.
The story, in the form most often told here, runs like this.
When Remnar was unmade the flight did not go one way. Most lines scattered outward and were gathered up later, and their descendants founded this Enclave. But one company is said to have gone ahead instead of outward: a large body of Remnari who did not scatter and did not wait, who set course deliberately for a region they had reason to think would take them in.
They are said to have got there. They are said to have found something no chart showed and no navigator expected. And they are said to have stayed, unable to come back, and made a place for themselves out of whatever they found.
What the tellings actually say
Fourteen tellings, collected from eleven lines between Year 33 and Year 389. They agree on the departure and on very little after it.
| Detail | Agreement |
|---|---|
| A company went ahead on purpose | 14 of 14 |
| The leader’s name | Iyen Stellara Farhome in six. Iyen Farhome in three. Iyen’a Stellara in two. Unnamed in three. |
| How many went | Two hundred to forty thousand. The bigger numbers are in the later tellings. |
| They arrived somewhere | 12 of 14. Two say they never arrived. |
| They could not come back | 11 of 14 |
| They carry light in their hands | 4 of 14 |
| What became of them | Died in three. Prospered in eight. Not said in three. |
| Cities that shine | 5 of 14, every one recorded after Year 221 |
The keepers who collected the later tellings noted that shining cities are what every exile says of every lost kin, and entered them anyway.
The four
Four tellings, from three unrelated lines, say the company carries light in their hands. The recorders wrote the phrasings down as light held in the hand, fire that is not fire and does not burn the holder, the light that comes out of a person, and they did not need lamps.
Those four are why this entry carries an annotation from Year 400 instead of sitting untouched for a century. The annotation is at the foot of On Rolaraspace in Holding V. Its substance:
No Remnari carries light in the hand on a Material ground or in the Astral. Holding III is firm about that. So a telling that describes our kin doing it is either invention, or it is describing a place that is neither.
The keeper who entered it was clear that four out of fourteen is thin, that this is exactly the sort of detail a teller adds for effect, and that she was recording an observation rather than making a claim.
Why we hold it as legend
No account of the departure survives from anyone who watched it. Every version that reached us came through at least three tellers. The versions disagree on size, route, destination, and fate, and the disagreement has widened rather than narrowed with each generation, which is what a story does and not what a record does.
Our keepers have noted repeatedly that the story explains itself without being true. A scattered people will tell of kin who got somewhere safe.
What this has to do with the search
Our founding purpose is finding Remnari unaccounted for after the Separation. This legend is not the basis of that and should not be read as its justification. The search rests on a plain fact, agreed by all nineteen accounts in Holding VII: the lines of flight lost each other in the first days and many were never accounted for.
The keepers do record that the story is told most often by the people who work the charts, and that the charts of Rolaraspace are the most heavily worked we keep. Two keepers have argued in the margins that this is circular, that the chart-workers tell it because they want the search to be about something and the search continues because the story keeps being told. Neither could show it from the record and the record does not settle it.
What to take from this entry: four of the fourteen tellings say they carry light in their hands. If any of those four preserve something real, that detail can be tested against Holding III, and no other part of this story can be tested against anything.