"Oh, I've always liked this one," Petra says. She reads:

"They say Nedhi was the first to try and chart the world. Her descendants would later number among the Gensym Scribes and the Corsairs of the salt glades, but in those early days Nedhi had one reigning obsession, which was to exhort the sixth tenet of the Awoken. To know and love the cosmos, she must find and name everything within her universe.

"Nedhi held a Sanguine faith in our own crystalline and enduring perfection, and in the nobility of the observer. To record the existence of the Other must, like a mirror, reflect the Self. And so, in naming all that comprised the world she would describe how best to be Awoken.

"She gave names to flora and fauna, to tectonic forces and tidal currents. To new, immortal terrors, and to the hidden purposes of unseen actions. In the end she cultivated great fame unto herself, and visitors began to make pilgrimages. Any indescribable emotion, Nedhi could make plain for you. Your problems, your fears, your maladies—in speaking them aloud, Nedhi made them bearable. Constrained by ontology."

Eido chitters eagerly. "But this is all metaphor," she guesses.

Petra shrugs, smiling. "Hard to tell, isn't it? How can we be sure, unless someone was there to write the truth?"