Saga of Shadows 1: The Dark Between the Stars Read Online Free PDF Page A

itself unnecessary—especially someone with such a servile attitude! But Ildiran rememberers considered it a mark of respect and claimed that Anton had earned it.
    The eager young rememberer appeared in an instant, and Anton fumbled to switch off the humming crystal; finally, Dyvo’sh had to do it for him. “Do you need assistance with translation, Rememberer Anton?” Dyvo’sh had a hopeful tone in his voice. (But then, he spoke in a hopeful tone even when Anton asked him to fetch a hot beverage.)
    “I’m too restless for desk work today,” Anton said. “I heard that the excavators discovered a new document crypt beneath the old sculpture museum. I’m curious to see what’s inside it—aren’t you?”
    The lobes on the young rememberer’s face flushed with a bluish tint that flowed into red, signaling Dyvo’sh’s excitement tinged with reluctance. “Those records were sealed away by some ancient Mage-Imperator for a good reason. Whatever is there will not be canon to the Saga of Seven Suns. We should not question his wisdom.”
    “Of course we should—that’s what a scholar does. Questions are our business.”
    Dyvo’sh vigorously shook his head. “A rememberer is taught to repeat and preserve only what is already known. The Saga is the only record we need in order to understand Ildira.”
    “But the Saga came from somewhere. Don’t you want to see the original sources?”
    Dyvo’sh blinked. “No. It is not necessary.”
    Anton shook his head. “Before you preserve the words for all time, it’s imperative that you have accurate information. Otherwise, you’re merely perpetuating errors—and you know that has happened before. Come on, we don’t even know what’s in that vault. I’ll do this myself if I have to . . . or I can request another assistant.”
    When Dyvo’sh became alarmed, his facial lobes shifted through a rainbow of colors. “No, I am assigned to your care. It is a great honor. I would not have anyone else carry out those duties.”
    “Then let’s go.”
    Anton marched out of his office and through the Hall of Rememberers. In the reviewing corridors, Ildiran storytellers stood before wall-sized crystal sheets that recorded every word in the billion-line Saga of Seven Suns. Apprentices muttered to themselves as they memorized the entire epic, which was ever growing but never changing once established. At least, not usually.
    Dyvo’sh had been one such apprentice until recently when he had passed his test—a five-day recitation, without sleep and without a single error, of a randomly chosen section of the Saga. And Anton had thought defending his PhD thesis on Earth was grueling!
    Now, thanks to the changes Anton had instituted over the past two decades, by command of Mage-Imperator Jora’h, rememberer scribes worked in a new wing of the Hall of Rememberers where they also preserved the apocrypha, restoring sections of the Saga that had been deleted or censored in times past.
    For millennia, Ildirans believed that every word in the Saga was the absolute truth, set down permanently by infallible rememberers. Ildirans had never dreamed that the Saga might be inaccurate—intentionally so—but previous Mage-Imperators had changed the records to cover up their part in the ancient conflict against the hydrogues, rewriting the story for posterity. Oh, the uproar Anton had caused when he revealed that!
    He demonstrated that in order to hide the censored history about the hydrogues, new stories of “bogeymen” had been fabricated—tales of terrifying creatures called the Shana Rei that devoured light and infiltrated the Ildiran soul with blackness. Supposedly, they were the reason why Ildirans feared the dark.
    When he studied the matter objectively, Anton noticed striking differences in the passages about the Shana Rei. They were sketchy placeholders, not as rich in detail or implied veracity, and he found evidence that these sections were fictional, meant to hide the horrific