Pity those who reach its end, and see at last what they were seeking’ – Malcador the Sigillite, Admonitions to the Solar Lords I am a follower who followed his lord. My lord was Ahriman, and I am Ctesias. These are the stories of my time in his service, laid down in words as I watch my life fade with the candle that lights these pages. I will die soon, and with me so much of the past will die. There are others that were there, at Ahriman’s side, in that lost age: Kiu, Sanakht, Gaumata, Gilgamos, and later Credus, Ignis and the rest. Some perhaps still live now, but how many remember how things were in that time between the fall of Amon and the search for the Athenaeum? Time has a habit of burying lesser events under the weight of later calamity and triumph. The extraordinary seems diminished when compared to the momentous, but it is still important, it still has meaning. So it is that I choose now to write not of the grand and terrible endeavours which would come later, but of the steps which took us there.
