The Archive itself is pretty old by the sounds of it. Also that sounds like it’d be written in a language very different from the ones spoken on modern Aurora, do your scribes have to learn dozens of ancient languages just to transcribe the texts?
In secula seculorum…
Asera is supposedly younger than that, so obviously Erin is blindsided by how good of a system this is to pass down information (and probably a little envious)…
Also in a previous page, someone in the comments mentioned that the cat side of Falst was a lion. Is that canon or is it just guessing cuz I figured Falst was just an orange cat
@Indigo Toxin I think they updated the big chart 2 months ago on the wiki, but the Discord guys know some more about that probably.
Also yes it’s a Lion Ferin, Red confirmed it on twitter some time ago.
@Indigo Toxin
Nah, by all accounts she made all the letters when she made the alphabet, we just haven’t stumbled upon them all yet. I’m pretty sure we have almost all of them now.
BTW, the title on that book says “Teachings of the First Champion”.
Erin, you can doubt their interpretation of events, but don’t doubt their recording of it. Just because the explanation of the how seems suspect, doesn’t mean the what is.
I wonder if miss Paladin lady has something to do with the light dragon other than ya know, BEING a Paladin.
Either I’m analysing this wrong, there’s no meaning in it or the White and Black in the bg are sort of signifying Voidy and Miss Light dragon lady. Who knows, though. Not me.
@Aodh
Maybe they just learn dozens of alphabets. The books are transcribed ‘letter by letter,’ not word for word. If you have good handwriting you don’t necessarily need to *understand* what is being transcribed. But yes, still a lot of training for the Head Archivist position.
@Goldfinch
judging by the prison’s architecture, I think that is a giant horizontal window, likely with glass/magic to keep the book rotting weather outside.
“You think we’re kidding about how meticulously we copy the texts exactly as is? You see this symbol on page 174? That was a originally a coffee stain in the first book.”
Still, information entropy will always be a factor due to changes in language and understanding. It’s possible the story doesn’t convey the original message anymore through no fault but the march of time.
wouldnt this be just a terribly inconvenient time for VD to show up and destroy the book that probably has some secret to stopping him in a huge burst of void.
@Votyn totally, can’t wait for that.
@Peteman yes I believe! ( so totally happening)
I can’t quite wrap my head around the lord stuff but I’ve just had a thought. What if the troublemaker crew (Falst and Alina + Tess (currently)) thinks I bet Erin is at the play we were staying! Since we’re hopelessly lost let’s just send him the birb and follow it.
Or it’s just the first thing I though of after reading that which was alright mentioned- sneaky fma ( fullmetal alchemist) style with say them down sunflower st new fake voice I’ve seen them on jilberry rd no there over here ahhhhh-
Essentially that but honestly I worry they won’t think of that and also I’d guess there’s only one birb per guard. More likely even is that the guard they try and steal it from will give their location or worse still the way they give the message, part of it is a against some rule or they need a pw of identification immediately telling everyone where they are and likely triggering some sort of alarm.
Holy shit. Teachings of the First Champion is older to Erin than The Epic of Gilgamesh is to us, if only by a couple of centuries. Erin had better appreciate how impressive that book is. (Thank you, Mat, for the title’s translation.)
Forgot to mention this on the previous page, but it’s interesting that mostly everyone has scrubbed the Light Dragon from the mythological history (or Myth-tory) except the paladins. It is known, however, that paladins possess unique magical powers that aid in, at the very least, keeping the law in Zuurith. Those such facts bear two questions: Why don’t people believe in the Light Dragons shows of power, and what scrubbed her from history and not the Void Dragon?
Is this the Paladin Order’s most sacred text? Should anyone aside from members of the Paladin Order even be able to read it due to thousands of years of linguistic drift? Is the Void Dragon going to take this prime opportunity and corrupt the paper through Erin’s touch? Am I the only person here who knows that the communication spell is called a messenger BORB, not birb? Does that tome also contain the original, unaltered recipe for Temptations cat treats?
And now all I can think of is how the Catholic Church (which I am part of) preserved Sacred Tradition through apostolic succession.
Basically, all our doctrines can be traced back through the ages all the way to the apostles which is why we believe them to be true. They’ve needed to be clarified as heresies arose, and certain of them were first put in the general case and then applied to the particular, but the basis for them is in the writings of the church fathers – the very earliest of whom were personally taught by the apostles.
All in all, I think that archivist is being nicer about Erin’s misconception then I would be.
Impressive work from the junior archivist, usually it takes Alinua going full-Life to make Erin’s eyes that crazy.
Dedicated preservation of a first hand source from thousands of years ago? Wow you’re really tugging Erin’s heartstrings there. If it weren’t for the whole V.D. situation I bet Erin would like to bring back this kind of dedication to Aseran Academy.
As much as I fear that V.D. will rear his head and destroy that book I don’t see it happening. From what we’ve seen he only manifests when he’s sure he’s at an advantage or if Erin’s life is at risk; manifesting now, far from the caves and surrounded by his enemies, would only hinder his cause.
Impressive dedication yes but it still doesn’t answer the question of where was L.D. when the Voidy Vs. Primordial showdown was going on or provide evidence of her being the hypothesised eighth primordial. Unless that’s for the coming pages of course.
Erin realizing he has a legit detailed primary source from an ancient mystery culture in front of him. That galaxy ceiling above him has exactly the right vibe for a moment like that.
I’m having trouble digesting the notion that a book has been preserved for so long by a single order. For even a small number of people to have preserved knowledge continuously for so long… Nothing like it exists in our history. Yes we have texts that old but not maintained by one tradition or people. This is like if one of the original tribes of Israel was still around and maintaining an original version of the old testament. Yes we have the epic of Gilgamesh but the civilization that wrote it is long gone, even the civilizations built upon that one are gone.
Are there archives all over the world duplicating knowledge so that if one falls the others can continue? Some process for spawning news ones in new secure locations?
Are this world civilizations much more stable than ours? Less likely to destroy each other in war? Why hasn’t technology advanced dramatically? Especially with the huge amount of free energy of the storm and magic?
Has Zuurith been continuously inhabited for 4000 years?
blarmy blar blar:
Considering that even primary sources can be rife with authorial biases or straight-up fabrication, it makes sense that someone as academically-minded as Erin would question even them in the search for truth.
DS:
Clay tablets are indisputably more durable, but they take up much more space for the same amount of information contained (beyond one or two pages’ worth, anyway); the size of a building needed to contain every single tablet would be wildly impractical for the sheer volume of vellum contained in the archives.
Especially as it means that his expression could be interpreted a couple different ways– it could be Erin, stunned at the implications of the tome before him and its history, and at what could be contained within its pages, or the Void Dragon, recoiling in horror for the very same reasons.
The book is only 70 years old… I have a book in my house that’s wayyy older than that (published around 1860?) and considering the fact my family is CHAOTIC and that book is somehow still alive, I’m sure that text can take an aggressive slamming.
Do not mess with librarians. Erin should know this already.
Anyway, given that life was created on this world far more recently than it arose on our Earth, that text is far more impressive. It would have been dictated not too long after humans and elves managed to get out of the caves, I’m betting. Legitimately not only the oldest document Erin has ever seen, but very possibly one of the very oldest to have possibly been recorded.
So, I went back to the first couple of pages again, and noticed something interesting. The process by which the constructs of the Twin Gods gain souls is portrayed as a glowing blue-white light emerging from the darkness.
The soul is noted as an emergent phenomenon arising from the mind… but that doesn’t track with this scene, the first being to gain a soul is the one possessed by the Void Dragon, and then it spreads outward through those watching. If the soul was built from the mind than the oldest creations would have possessed it first and the Void Dragon would have directed his twin gods to destroy the ensouled individuals because it would have been a risk to his plan.
So what if the soul was the creation of the light dragon; deliberately created to stave off the release of the void dragon from his adamant prison? This answers both why the first human open to all the elements was the first to gain a soul, and why the current magic tradition doesn’t recognize an eighth element. It was hidden in plain sight.
wait, if that book is that special. Why did she slam it on the table so recklessly???
That’s probably the most important book of the library. Not just in a utilitarian level, but in a symbolic one too.
I wonder if she will later realized what she is done and regret it a little.
I get that she is angry and pasionate about what she is saying and that slamming the book was a way to show that (both to Erin and the audience) but she is probably instructed not to treat books like that. I kinda feel she broke a rule, which should be a non trivial thing, being paladins and stuff.
@Zeful Alternatively, the creation of souls could have been the Light Dragon’s reaction to the Void Dragon’s plan. Realising his plan to possess mages to unseal the Adamant Prison, she might have prepared a counterploy, and upon his possession of the first mage, she might have created free-willed souls. It may not be her creation happening, just her first action that we know of.
You should know that rule number one of library is don’t doubt the librarian or her records. (For a dude whose dad (it’s his dad, right?) is the Aseran embassy and has done so much research you should know not to ask questions like that)
I mean they’re copying them exactly to the letter, I suspect you wouldn’t need to understand the language to do that. Having said that, a book’s useless if you don’t understand the contents so there should probably be a couple scholars who are proficient in a specific dialect for any given book. Alternatively it could be a single ancient language that the texts are all written in that all the scholars of all ages have to learn. Similar to Latin and Church Slavonic in medieval to early modern Europe.
“It’s old as balls and very fragile, which is why I used the librarian-sanctioned Safety Slam to put it on the table. Do not attempt this maneuver yourself or I will see you in gaol for roughly ever.”
Okay, I’ve heard a lot of people talking about how incredible the Paladins archive system is, and yeah it’s really impressive especially compared to real world cultures similar to this, and I think that’s why red made it that way because IRL red studies old cultures for her YouTube channel, and is often frustrated by how little the people of the past wrote about their culture, and how much of it was lost, or confused with other writings, and so I think that the archive system is red’s way of coping with that loss of information IRL
You know. Now that i think about it.
The moment they invent the printing press, the paladin archivists are going to cry tears of joy.
Unless they prefer to copy thing word for word by hand.
Not sure if this was said yet, but the Archive lady just *SLAMMED* down the oldest book in the archive! Didn’t she say something of needing to be delicate with books from the archives?
The Archive itself is pretty old by the sounds of it. Also that sounds like it’d be written in a language very different from the ones spoken on modern Aurora, do your scribes have to learn dozens of ancient languages just to transcribe the texts?
these poor paladins’ carpal tunnels
In secula seculorum…
Asera is supposedly younger than that, so obviously Erin is blindsided by how good of a system this is to pass down information (and probably a little envious)…
The information
is passed through the centuries.
Erin looks surprised.
I tried translating the text in the 6th panel but some of the characters are new. Did red add new letters to the alphabet or something?
Also in a previous page, someone in the comments mentioned that the cat side of Falst was a lion. Is that canon or is it just guessing cuz I figured Falst was just an orange cat
wait a minute what’s that white glowy thing behind Erin in the last panel?
@Indigo Toxin I think they updated the big chart 2 months ago on the wiki, but the Discord guys know some more about that probably.
Also yes it’s a Lion Ferin, Red confirmed it on twitter some time ago.
Doubting the existence of her god? Fine. Insulting her records? UNACCEPTABLE! Show some respect, man.
@sunstorm, I think that’s just the lights in the archive. I could be proven wrong on Weds though.
“This is the oldest text in the archive”
*firmly slams it on the table*
@Indigo Toxin
Nah, by all accounts she made all the letters when she made the alphabet, we just haven’t stumbled upon them all yet. I’m pretty sure we have almost all of them now.
BTW, the title on that book says “Teachings of the First Champion”.
@Indigo Toxin
And yes, Falst is a lion ferin.
Erin, you can doubt their interpretation of events, but don’t doubt their recording of it. Just because the explanation of the how seems suspect, doesn’t mean the what is.
Blue would approve of their fierce dedication to historical accuracy
I wonder if miss Paladin lady has something to do with the light dragon other than ya know, BEING a Paladin.
Either I’m analysing this wrong, there’s no meaning in it or the White and Black in the bg are sort of signifying Voidy and Miss Light dragon lady. Who knows, though. Not me.
I heard “previous Head Archivist” and started screaming. All I can hear is Jon complaining about Gertrude now noooo
@Aodh
Maybe they just learn dozens of alphabets. The books are transcribed ‘letter by letter,’ not word for word. If you have good handwriting you don’t necessarily need to *understand* what is being transcribed. But yes, still a lot of training for the Head Archivist position.
@Goldfinch
judging by the prison’s architecture, I think that is a giant horizontal window, likely with glass/magic to keep the book rotting weather outside.
Next page onwards: Essential Lore
“You think we’re kidding about how meticulously we copy the texts exactly as is? You see this symbol on page 174? That was a originally a coffee stain in the first book.”
Still, information entropy will always be a factor due to changes in language and understanding. It’s possible the story doesn’t convey the original message anymore through no fault but the march of time.
Alt Text: old as balls, you might say
Inb4 we don’t get to see the lore because erin suddenly gets a little birdie telling him “HELP! WE GONE DONE SOMETHING DUMB”
TL;DR: How dare you insult our dusty shelves of cult classics. Read this one, the allergies you’ll get are the product of the finest ancient dust.
A+ ???
wouldnt this be just a terribly inconvenient time for VD to show up and destroy the book that probably has some secret to stopping him in a huge burst of void.
loving the composition of that last shot w the bookshelves looking like the void dragon’s wings behind erin
he has a lion tail
@Sunstorm and here I thought it was an abstract representaion of time.
@Votyn totally, can’t wait for that.
@Peteman yes I believe! ( so totally happening)
I can’t quite wrap my head around the lord stuff but I’ve just had a thought. What if the troublemaker crew (Falst and Alina + Tess (currently)) thinks I bet Erin is at the play we were staying! Since we’re hopelessly lost let’s just send him the birb and follow it.
Or it’s just the first thing I though of after reading that which was alright mentioned- sneaky fma ( fullmetal alchemist) style with say them down sunflower st new fake voice I’ve seen them on jilberry rd no there over here ahhhhh-
Essentially that but honestly I worry they won’t think of that and also I’d guess there’s only one birb per guard. More likely even is that the guard they try and steal it from will give their location or worse still the way they give the message, part of it is a against some rule or they need a pw of identification immediately telling everyone where they are and likely triggering some sort of alarm.
*lore
Holy shit. Teachings of the First Champion is older to Erin than The Epic of Gilgamesh is to us, if only by a couple of centuries. Erin had better appreciate how impressive that book is. (Thank you, Mat, for the title’s translation.)
Forgot to mention this on the previous page, but it’s interesting that mostly everyone has scrubbed the Light Dragon from the mythological history (or Myth-tory) except the paladins. It is known, however, that paladins possess unique magical powers that aid in, at the very least, keeping the law in Zuurith. Those such facts bear two questions: Why don’t people believe in the Light Dragons shows of power, and what scrubbed her from history and not the Void Dragon?
Is this the Paladin Order’s most sacred text? Should anyone aside from members of the Paladin Order even be able to read it due to thousands of years of linguistic drift? Is the Void Dragon going to take this prime opportunity and corrupt the paper through Erin’s touch? Am I the only person here who knows that the communication spell is called a messenger BORB, not birb? Does that tome also contain the original, unaltered recipe for Temptations cat treats?
Tune in This Week to Find Out!
How DARE he question primary sources
And now all I can think of is how the Catholic Church (which I am part of) preserved Sacred Tradition through apostolic succession.
Basically, all our doctrines can be traced back through the ages all the way to the apostles which is why we believe them to be true. They’ve needed to be clarified as heresies arose, and certain of them were first put in the general case and then applied to the particular, but the basis for them is in the writings of the church fathers – the very earliest of whom were personally taught by the apostles.
All in all, I think that archivist is being nicer about Erin’s misconception then I would be.
Impressive work from the junior archivist, usually it takes Alinua going full-Life to make Erin’s eyes that crazy.
Dedicated preservation of a first hand source from thousands of years ago? Wow you’re really tugging Erin’s heartstrings there. If it weren’t for the whole V.D. situation I bet Erin would like to bring back this kind of dedication to Aseran Academy.
As much as I fear that V.D. will rear his head and destroy that book I don’t see it happening. From what we’ve seen he only manifests when he’s sure he’s at an advantage or if Erin’s life is at risk; manifesting now, far from the caves and surrounded by his enemies, would only hinder his cause.
Impressive dedication yes but it still doesn’t answer the question of where was L.D. when the Voidy Vs. Primordial showdown was going on or provide evidence of her being the hypothesised eighth primordial. Unless that’s for the coming pages of course.
Erin realizing he has a legit detailed primary source from an ancient mystery culture in front of him. That galaxy ceiling above him has exactly the right vibe for a moment like that.
I will just go ahead and say the light dragon is connected to soul energy
Kick him out. Kick. Him. Out.
In-universe Gilgamesh!
(Though the Archive really should have used clay tablets like the Sumerians/Akkadians. Much more enduring than paper or parchment).
Gotta say the framing of those bookshelves in the last panel make it look suspiciously like Erin has dragon wings
I’m having trouble digesting the notion that a book has been preserved for so long by a single order. For even a small number of people to have preserved knowledge continuously for so long… Nothing like it exists in our history. Yes we have texts that old but not maintained by one tradition or people. This is like if one of the original tribes of Israel was still around and maintaining an original version of the old testament. Yes we have the epic of Gilgamesh but the civilization that wrote it is long gone, even the civilizations built upon that one are gone.
Are there archives all over the world duplicating knowledge so that if one falls the others can continue? Some process for spawning news ones in new secure locations?
Are this world civilizations much more stable than ours? Less likely to destroy each other in war? Why hasn’t technology advanced dramatically? Especially with the huge amount of free energy of the storm and magic?
Has Zuurith been continuously inhabited for 4000 years?
If Erin slammed a book onto the table to prove HIS point, he’d be kicked out faster than you can say, ‘But I’m the Elemental Magus’.
Also it totally looks like he has wings in the last panel, brilliant move by Red.
blarmy blar blar:
Considering that even primary sources can be rife with authorial biases or straight-up fabrication, it makes sense that someone as academically-minded as Erin would question even them in the search for truth.
DS:
Clay tablets are indisputably more durable, but they take up much more space for the same amount of information contained (beyond one or two pages’ worth, anyway); the size of a building needed to contain every single tablet would be wildly impractical for the sheer volume of vellum contained in the archives.
To Vocabulary Man:
Especially as it means that his expression could be interpreted a couple different ways– it could be Erin, stunned at the implications of the tome before him and its history, and at what could be contained within its pages, or the Void Dragon, recoiling in horror for the very same reasons.
The book is only 70 years old… I have a book in my house that’s wayyy older than that (published around 1860?) and considering the fact my family is CHAOTIC and that book is somehow still alive, I’m sure that text can take an aggressive slamming.
Red, Don’t lie to us, you made the archivist specifically because your sick of not having original sources to pull from in your research aren’t you?
Do not mess with librarians. Erin should know this already.
Anyway, given that life was created on this world far more recently than it arose on our Earth, that text is far more impressive. It would have been dictated not too long after humans and elves managed to get out of the caves, I’m betting. Legitimately not only the oldest document Erin has ever seen, but very possibly one of the very oldest to have possibly been recorded.
@ somebody
Cult classics really got me
…and suddenly I ship these two.
So, I went back to the first couple of pages again, and noticed something interesting. The process by which the constructs of the Twin Gods gain souls is portrayed as a glowing blue-white light emerging from the darkness.
The soul is noted as an emergent phenomenon arising from the mind… but that doesn’t track with this scene, the first being to gain a soul is the one possessed by the Void Dragon, and then it spreads outward through those watching. If the soul was built from the mind than the oldest creations would have possessed it first and the Void Dragon would have directed his twin gods to destroy the ensouled individuals because it would have been a risk to his plan.
So what if the soul was the creation of the light dragon; deliberately created to stave off the release of the void dragon from his adamant prison? This answers both why the first human open to all the elements was the first to gain a soul, and why the current magic tradition doesn’t recognize an eighth element. It was hidden in plain sight.
damn, thats older than gilgamesh!
Erin: *gets shouted at*
Erin: On no she’s hot!
wait, if that book is that special. Why did she slam it on the table so recklessly???
That’s probably the most important book of the library. Not just in a utilitarian level, but in a symbolic one too.
I wonder if she will later realized what she is done and regret it a little.
I get that she is angry and pasionate about what she is saying and that slamming the book was a way to show that (both to Erin and the audience) but she is probably instructed not to treat books like that. I kinda feel she broke a rule, which should be a non trivial thing, being paladins and stuff.
@Zeful Alternatively, the creation of souls could have been the Light Dragon’s reaction to the Void Dragon’s plan. Realising his plan to possess mages to unseal the Adamant Prison, she might have prepared a counterploy, and upon his possession of the first mage, she might have created free-willed souls. It may not be her creation happening, just her first action that we know of.
Tsk tsk Erin. How dare you doubt their records.
You should know that rule number one of library is don’t doubt the librarian or her records. (For a dude whose dad (it’s his dad, right?) is the Aseran embassy and has done so much research you should know not to ask questions like that)
the light behind him is the light dragons tail
@Yellow Rose This book was handwritten and manually put together, i don’t think it’s as durable as 17th century books
@Aodh
I mean they’re copying them exactly to the letter, I suspect you wouldn’t need to understand the language to do that. Having said that, a book’s useless if you don’t understand the contents so there should probably be a couple scholars who are proficient in a specific dialect for any given book. Alternatively it could be a single ancient language that the texts are all written in that all the scholars of all ages have to learn. Similar to Latin and Church Slavonic in medieval to early modern Europe.
Aye I’m back! Glad we’re back at the bookstore now
“It’s old as balls and very fragile, which is why I used the librarian-sanctioned Safety Slam to put it on the table. Do not attempt this maneuver yourself or I will see you in gaol for roughly ever.”
@miss bell, hey a fellow Catholic! Nice to know I’m not the only one here
Okay, I’ve heard a lot of people talking about how incredible the Paladins archive system is, and yeah it’s really impressive especially compared to real world cultures similar to this, and I think that’s why red made it that way because IRL red studies old cultures for her YouTube channel, and is often frustrated by how little the people of the past wrote about their culture, and how much of it was lost, or confused with other writings, and so I think that the archive system is red’s way of coping with that loss of information IRL
Is Adaine a reference to Adaine Abernant from Dimension 20?
You know. Now that i think about it.
The moment they invent the printing press, the paladin archivists are going to cry tears of joy.
Unless they prefer to copy thing word for word by hand.
Not sure if this was said yet, but the Archive lady just *SLAMMED* down the oldest book in the archive! Didn’t she say something of needing to be delicate with books from the archives?
don’t you find it so funny when erins hair just stops being poofy