(urth) what is an autarch?

[Jeff Wilson]

On 9/27/2010 7:21 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
>
> From: "Jeff Wilson" <jwilson at io.com>
>
>> He also says that the huge volume and jumble of memories are the
>> obstacles to his direct recollection, and he has to search for the
>> desired ones among the great pile. This means he would constantly be
>> coming across other memories along the way, and he is able to
>> attribute them to various sorts of people that he mentions include
>> children and peasant wives and scholars. He apparently comes across
>> some memories that seem to be older than those of Ymar - any memory of
>> utterly uncarved mountains, for instance, and this is from his
>> perspective in URTH, after being in the confidence of Inire the
>> analeptic supplier for a decade.
>
> Didn't that 'memory' of uncarved moutains come from old photographs?
> - Gerry Quinn

It's the "oldest pictures" (photographs seem not to have been 
reintroduced into the Commonwealth, possibly due to the lack of silver) 
that would serve to verify that a hypothetical memory of utterly 
uncarved mountains comes from before Typhon's reign. This still wouldn't 
be the Age of Myth, which by definition would have left no readily 
verifiable artifacts.

I'm not citing a specific memory of exceptional age, because Sev doesn't 
record the distinguishable content of any, but he does mention the 
quantity of disordered and "strange" memories that are accessible to be 
searched through.  He does mention knowledge of previous donors coming 
up unbidden on occasion, so there are certain comprehensible memories 
there still, and his supposition that they extend back into the Age of 
Myth implies that sometime he remembers things that can't be placed in 
any historical era on record, as well as some that might match the times 
of the earliest successors of Ymar, ao that some memories that have no 
particular historical context could be those of Ymar himself.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >