The Lorekeeper's Tome

Veshrin the Forsworn is the keeper the order remembers with shame, and his name is a name of reproach. Several hundred years ago he was a Lorekeeper like any other, reckoned neither great nor poor, who over the labor of a lifetime compiled a single great Tome - drawing together threads from across the long Athenaeum record and binding them into one volume of his own making. And then he did the unthinkable. He sealed the Tome shut, by some working or craft that none after him could undo, so that its pages would not open to any ordinary reading. And then he was gone - vanished from the Athenaeum, from Velmoryn, from the record itself, leaving no word of where he went or why. The order drew the only conclusion the plain facts allowed: that Veshrin had abandoned his post and broken the keeper's vow, locking away a lifetime's work out of madness or spite and deserting the watch he was sworn to keep. They named him the Forsworn for it - oath-breaker, the keeper who turned his back - and for a man whose whole life was the creed, there is no harsher judgment the order could pass. So he has been remembered ever since: a cautionary name, a keeper who failed his trust. Yet the sealed Tome remains, and a sealed thing is a question that has never been answered. For why would a keeper of a lifetime's discipline, in his final act, not destroy his work nor abandon it, but seal it - carefully, deliberately, so that it might be opened, but only in some way and at some time he chose? An abandoner burns his book or leaves it to rot. Veshrin did neither. He bound his watching shut against the wrong eyes, and went where no one could follow, and left the Tome to wait. The order calls him forsworn. The Tome, when at last it opens, may yet call him something else.