Written by Muadib Baraka, a Preceptor of the Collegium, serving in Shamandar. Discoveries, letters, and notices, sent the old way, by wing.
Your email is used only to send the Zagel. No sharing, no spam. See it as a promise, not a policy.
In which the Collegium's decision to make its records public is explained, and not entirely without objection from certain Preceptors.
Read the Issue →Muadib Baraka is still deciding what the Collegium is prepared to let outsiders know.
Muadib Baraka has not yet decided what the Collegium is prepared to let outsiders know.
To whoever is reading this,
My name is Baraka. I am a Muadib, a Preceptor of the Collegium, serving at Shamandar in Shama, some distance from the Seminary itself, though it was within its walls, in the Mawsoa, that I was made whatever it is I've become. I still argue by letter with men far older than myself about whether a thing that happened four centuries ago happened quite the way we've always said it did.
It is not, I promise you, as dull as it sounds. Most days.
I am told that what I write here will be read by people who live nowhere near Kanana, who have never heard a war-drum from the Ascent or tasted the salt wind off the Medial Sea, and who will, in all likelihood, never set foot in Mehirea at all. This was explained to me at some length. I did not fully believe it until I was shown the manner in which it would travel, not by Zagel, not by rider, but by some means I confess I still do not entirely grasp. I am assured it works. I am taking this largely on faith, which, as a man of the Collegium, I suppose I ought to be better at than I am.
So: welcome. You are, as of this letter, among those to whom the Collegium's records are now sent, in whatever loose sense that means to a reader who has only just arrived. I am not asking you to study here, only to receive what I write. I will send word when there is something worth sending, a discovery from the Mawsoa's older shelves, a correction to something I got wrong the first time, word of the next book, or simply an account of a day in Shama that seemed worth setting down.
I do not promise you comfort. Some of what's recorded here was preserved precisely because it was difficult to look at. But I promise you it will be true, or as true as I can make it, and I will tell you plainly when I am uncertain rather than dress up a guess as history.
More soon.
Muadib Baraka
Collegium of Preceptors, of the Seminary
There is a small room in the Seminary, smaller than you'd expect for something the Collegium takes so seriously, where a handful of readers are given a book before anyone else outside these walls has seen it. Not because they paid for the privilege. Because they were willing to read carefully, and to say honestly what they found, even when what they found was not what the author hoped to hear.
I am asking whether you might be one of them.