Learned [[Medio Hollystrak]], Thank you for allowing Learned Allenil to introduce us. My studies increasingly steer me towards [[Littleview]], and to learn that there is as illustrious cosmographer as yourself there fills me with hope! Allow me to properly introduce myself, I am Learned Thomas of Bendwaith. I studied under Learned Pendlake, who made the initial discovery of our greatest primary sources, which I will refer to shortly. I am a member in good standing of the College of Antiquity, in the Republic of Bendwaith. I have enclosed as accurate a map as I can provide showing the paths between Littleview and Bendwaith. My focus of studies is the Great Settled Empire, or as we usually just refer to it, The Empire. It is pursuant to these studies that I asked to be introduced to you. The Empire is of great antiquity, we estimate it collapsed between three to four millennia in the past. Until Pendlake discovered two key primary sources, the Empire was the study of folklorists rather than historians. Many tales in our local settlements talked about a past Golden Age where a figure, usually referred to as the Great King (though occasionally other titles, and occasionally names which are clearly later additions), built a settlement of such peace and sophistication it pushed back the Wild so far that the Empire fully engulfed dozens of complete settlements, and pushed the Wild to a distant frontier, as far as its residents were concerned.  Of course, historians have always mined folklore for clues to actual history, and seemingly every culture has tales of some past golden age of peace and order. Our local folklorists considered the Empire to be one such, though with the unique characteristic of fully enveloping subsidiary Settled lands into one great super-Settlement. None of the tales of valiant knights, rangers, or such guarding grand paths made it into these tales, which made it interesting to them. Locals had family heirlooms, sometimes magical, often claimed to be from the Empire, but all folks claim such things from antiquity and no one considered it particularly special. No one considered it special, at least, until Learned Pendlake came across two tomes discussing the internal laws of a previously unknown civilization from antiquity. That they were enchanted to survive from antiquity was wonderful, but they proved unusual in more ways than that. When we first asked the Magi for assistance translating them they believed them to be books of mathematics, as the language was that of pure logic and causality! We located a logician, and sought her insight into whether there was anything novel.  Months later, after she carefully pieced together the arguments she had a magnificent insight – while the works seemed to construct mathematics anew from first principles, differently than our logician had been taught, it was not constructing mathematics as we understand it, but laying out laws of behavior in a society as if they too obeyed the internal logic of ideal mathematics! For example, it painstakingly constructed the necessary truth that if someone was paid to construct a home, and the home collapsed killing its inhabitants, that the builder and all their first degree relations must also die as a direct effect of the chain of events. That sentence is phrased correctly – it was not that the builder and their family should be executed as a matter of law, but that they would inevitably die as a fundamental law of reality itself because of the collapse! With that insight we studied it initially as a work of societal philosophy. Learned Pendlake wrote it off as some Wizard’s fancy, but it piqued my interest. We know from studies such as yours that Settlements have varying degrees of stability, seemingly related to the stability of the civilization residing therein. Could not some structure of society with such a strong degree of order exist, and if it did might it be so anathema to the Wild that it could push it back in the manner of the folktales about the Empire? Examining that line of enquiry, I mapped out the implications of a society which operated under the logic of these tomes and engaged folklorists looking for commonality. The tomes lay out a different fundamental philosophy of behavior and societal expectations of behavior from most cultures local to Bendwaith, so we specifically looked for these implications in folklore. As is obvious, because I am writing this missive, we found enough correlation that we started treating it as History rather than Lore, and expanded our studies greatly. This roundabout tale leads to why I approach yourself, Learned Medio. We traced out the claimed artifacts, separated fables from likely truth, and mapped their dispersion across known Settlements. We began, too, looking for the societal fingerprints indicating unique aspects of the Empire which survive intact. A description of the “Law, Tradition, Clan, then Judgement” precedence of behavior from Littleview aligns very closely to a similar three-tier precedence model encoded in the tomes, which we translate as “Truth, Direction, then Family”. The Littleview addition of “judgment” has no corollary anywhere in the Empire tomes, however. There is, in fact, no implication that free will, which would require judgment, even existed! When I learned of this correlation I sought any information about Littleview and its environs, and was pleased to learn it was the home of an eminent cosmographer! I write this as an introduction, and I hope to visit Littleview in the near future. When I do, I hope you may make some of your time available to me – I would greatly like to understand the nature of the Wild around Littleview, in particular the nature of the Settlement of Littleview itself! Yours, Learned Thomas