The Lorekeeper's Tome

Matthias the First Keeper is the founder of the Lorekeeper order, and the man from whose grief the whole tradition grew. He lived in the raw and terrible years of the early Long Fall, when the Cataclysm was still living memory and the survivors were only beginning to understand the scale of what had been lost - not merely cities and lives, but knowledge itself, the whole shining record of the Builders' age carried off into silence. Where others mourned, Matthias resolved. He saw that the deepest wound of the Cataclysm was the forgetting, and that if nothing were done the survivors' own age would one day be lost in its turn, leaving some far-off people farming among ruins they could not read, as he farmed among the Builders'. So he began to write things down - the plain facts of the world as he found it - and he taught others to do the same, and to teach others after them. From that single stubborn act grew the order, the creed, and in time the great Athenaeum. Matthias set down the first rule that still governs every keeper: watch, and record, and do not presume to say what it means. Three thousand years of memory rest on the foundation he laid.