(urth) Severian's family tree

[Roy C. Lackey]

Don Doggett wrote:
>Even if b sharp is correct in his interpretation, Ymar is a more likely
candidate for the shared memory  than Thecla, as his childhood is
definitively established in the citadel.<<

Severian doesn't have Ymar's memories. The only more-or-less intact memories
he acquired came from the directly-ingested flesh (plus analeptic) of Thecla
and Appian. The chain of autarchic memories inherited from Appian grows
weaker and weaker the further removed the memory of a particular autarch is
from the present.

Severian, interrupting his narrative to directly address the reader at the
time he was writing, wrote:

"Ymar is dead, and such memories of his as lived for a time in the blood of
his successors are long faded.
    "So mine in time shall fade too." (SHADOW, chapter XVII)

That's why he "spent weary days in reading the histories of my
predecessors". (ibid., previous page) That's where he got the anecdote about
Ymar and the dog. Such accounts were stark and very unsatisfying to him.

-Roy