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Message: <blockquote data-quote="reason" data-source="post: 1975917" data-attributes="member: 6022">another couple...I like sages:<a href="http://www.principiainfecta.com/archives/2005/01/lost_amidst_unf.php" target="_blank">The Expected Smile on the Datarii</a> The Expected Smile - that most unusual of characters, an anonymous yet prolific sage - lived and wrote before the Vanishing, when Ammander folk still arrived in Port aboard Magi tradeships and Three Stones was but a village about the base of the Black Tower. The works of this hidden figure, a contemporary of The Denier, were fashionably popular for generations; widely copied, imitated, expanded and deconstructed. The Expected Smile has fallen out of favor in the present community of sages, but cultured folk are expected to show some knowledge of the more important works.On the subject of the Datarii, The Expected Smile wrote that "the strangers who come from under the mountains in dry summers are born and age in the manner of mortals, yet do not die in the manner of mortals. When they return to their vaults and halls beneath the peaks they call 'Great Home,' these strangers create wonders. This is their purpose, uncaringly hidden and uncaringly noble, to endlessly draw beauty and mystery from rock. The greatest stonemason in all the Ammand would throw down his tools in despair if he could but see the least of what the strangers call 'Unfinished Works.'"<a href="http://www.principiainfecta.com/archives/2004/12/the_greater_god_1.php" target="_blank">The Ebon and the Greater Power</a> The end is well known: in the last grim days of the Expansion, The Ebon brought the remaining sages of the Ammand to his black tower by the Unending Sea. The iron doors closed on them all, but only The Ebon emerged, bowed and aged under the weight of stolen knowledge. The Ebon, dying yet greater in aspect than any mortal Ammander, met the Greater Power; the wizardry of ink and quiet words to face the one who felled the Ammane. No one knows what passed between these two. The earth and sky cracked, screaming heat from below and cold from above; The Ebon and the Greater Power were extinguished utterly. With them died the last great wizardry of the Ammand and its people.<a href="http://www.principiainfecta.com/archives/2005/01/declarations_an.php" target="_blank">The Silent and the Refutation to end all Refutations</a> An Ammander merchant and his mules came uninvited one day in high summer, or so the story goes, determined to buy as much as he could. Many papers should mean a low price, after all. The Silent would have nothing to do with this trader, so there he stayed - shouting, singing, kicking up dried tinder and warming himself by a crackling fire as night fell. The mules brayed incessantly. The Silent could stand no more than a day and a night of this terrible fellow and his animals. She wrote a Refutation to end all Refutations, direct and puissant, scribed most carefully on the cheapest, poorest parchment. The sage emerged from her manse to thrust the Refutation upon the trader. His face paled upon the reading of it, and he ran as though the Powers themselves were chasing him - but in silence. For all we know, he is running still, Refutation clutched tightly in his hands, somewhere in the far reaches of the Ammand.The Silent, or so the storytellers would have us believe, dined well on salted mule for half a season.Reason</blockquote>

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