Egderus may be the central character in the saga of these archives, but it is the unnamed Scholar who made him so, rescuing them as he did from almost certain extinction. The specific means by which the Scholar came into possession of these documents has never been determined, though the traveler (sometimes called the Fellow) who appears briefly in the fragment {Scholar's Confessio} and the later {Scholar's Apology, redux} may provide a clue.

The Scholar attempted to present these materials for discussion at the triennial Convention of his peers, but instead of winning recognition for his work, he was censured, stripped of his membership in the Conference of his colleagues, and the archives themselves were confiscated by the ruling Council. This response was of a brutality that today is hard to credit, but it is possible that the inference to be drawn from his presentation — that the Ancients were not deities, but mere mortals like ourselves — would have been strongly anathematized at the time by the religious authorities governing the conduct of scholarly research, and the Scholar's perceived advocacy of the so-called "We Descend" heresy was punished with the utmost severity. According to one source, the Scholar was fortunate he was not arrested, tortured, and publicly executed.

Happily for us, none of that happened, and our Scholar continued, after this fatal blow to his career, to tell his story, which took an unexpected turn once he completely surrendered to his fate, and he was granted a Vision of ineffable beauty: that the World is itself a Writing, which expresses not only its entire history, but also contains — to quote a tragically tiny fragment from the Ancients, itself ineffably beautiful — "the seeds of an emergent life we cannot imagine and remain ourselves."