Legomenon for

{"Peripatikos Soter"}

As with each of the "Romantic Impulse" Writings, this text may be an unfinished draft or collection of sketches never completed, or whose finished version has since been lost. It is included here because of the obvious importance of the tale it tells: whoever actually wrote it, it definitively proposes that the Author of {The Locust Grove}, {The Retreat House}, and most of {midnight_pain} later became one of the Curators of the archives — indeed, one of its Rescuers — who dug out of the ruins of the Temple the materials that were originally discovered and collected by the Scholar, which were then confiscated after his disastrous presentation to the Convention. Nowhere else in the archives is such direct evidence of transmission to be found: in all other cases, it must be hypothesized (or merely asserted) that such&such a person received the archives from such&such another.

Naturally, many questions arise, even if we accept this Writing as belonging to the Author known only as the Voice from the Locust Grove. When and how was the Temple destroyed? In what form did this Rescuer transmit the archives, after working on them for an unknown period and to an unknown extent — and to whom? The history and mechanism of the archives' transmission from this Author's era to our own is even more murky than that from Egderus' time to the Scholar's, because both Egderus and the Scholar give clues, however indistinct, as to what was retrieved and what was passed on.

And finally, what is the provenance of the bizarre Title of this Writing, and who is responsible for it? "Peripatikos"? "Soter"? No convincing etymology has been proposed for either word, as they are unique to the archives, and may represent a retrieval from an ancient (or secret) language as yet unknown to us. One suggestion has been to analogize it to Egderus Scriptor, so that "Soter" could be a cognomen, and here might mean Rescuer or Savior of the archives — if the whole Title of the Writing is the Author's denomination rather than a descriptor of the story it tells.

On the other hand, it has been suggested, on the basis of the kind of life this person leads, that "Peripatikos" — rather than being a given name such as "Egderus" or "Markito" — could denote "wanderer", "vagabond", or even "vagrant", someone without employment or position within civilized society — and further, in the instance of this particular person, someone who indeed shuns such a position as an odious entanglement, or in any case has little interest in [re]joining such a world. For a fuller treatment of this subject in a Writing sometimes also attributed to this unknown Author, see {The Land Where No Man Is}.