In addition to being the putative author of "Historian's Notebook", the Historian appears as a character (or at least a referent) in numerous other Writings — by Egderus, Aric, the mysterious M[issionary], and the Scholar who curated most if not all of the others' Writings generations later.

This concomitant has made it possible to work out a more complete (if still speculative) chronology of the Historian's life than can be done for any other figure in the archives:

• As a young man, the Historian was (for a time, at least) the favorite of the (or a) son of the Golias who ruled in Egderus' youth, and it was during this period that he met and debated [the] M[issionary];
• Later, he somehow fell foul of the Office of Inquiry, and was imprisoned and tortured by the Good Doctor during the period when Egderus served as the latter's scriptor;
• Egderus, Aric, and Aric's commander, Robenc, conspired to free the Historian (each for a different reason) by bringing down the Good Doctor;
• In his flight from the city, the Historian took refuge in the mountains with a small group of aboriginal people, possibly members of the so-called Remnant, from whom he later carried off a box containing sacred artifacts. The theft set in motion a calamitous sequence of events that resulted not only in his own death, but in the total extermination of his erstwhile rescuers, as a consequence of their vengeful pursuit of him into the domain of the Golias;
• This box, along with the Notebook, was recovered by Egderus and his scriptor Markito.

The artifact from which the text of "Historian's Notebook" was originally extracted of course no longer exists, but it is described within its own pages as a kind of writing kit given him by his hosts, comprising stiff sheets of cured skin or bark upon which he scratched letters with a stylus fashioned from a sharpened stick or shard of bone.

Many commentators — the Scholar first among them — have found the Writing "Historian's Notebook" implausible enough to prompt skepticism about the archives as a whole, given the Notebook's complex (some would say overly convenient) intertwingling with so many other stories told therein.

But there is a countercurrent of opinion that regards this kind of pyrrhonism as mere literary snobbery, and admires the lyrical quality of the "Notebook's" portrait of an autochthonous people transmitting a deeper truth about the Remnant — and the entire culture of Egderus' time — than can necessarily be "proved" by mere evidentiary factuality.