Kaydre Ysparo

Kaydre Ysparo (96-161 AWR) was a Pholyan geographer and thaumatologist noted for her significant contributions to the early post-Wesmodian study of magic.

Biographical details

The precise circumstances of Kaydre Ysparo's birth are not clear. Identifying herself in her work as having been born in Pholyos, she appears to have come from a fairly humble family; no official records suggest that anybody named Ysparo occupied any significant office in the city in the years before her birth. Very possibly her family were tradespeople, perhaps scribes or functionaries of some description. This would certainly explain how they had the wherewithal, and perhaps inclination, to educate their daughter. Ysparo seems to have been an apt pupil, and her compositions are renowned for their clarity and grace.
There are few records of Ysparo's life before she began her writing career and it is not particularly clear what moved her to her to begin producing work on the history of magic. She is known to have married Tarkad Jeromyn, a member of Pholyos's Glassblower's Guild in good standing, in 119 AWR, and to have produced a daughter named Hayanan the following year. The link to the guild, itself thought to have had pre-Wesmodian links to the cults of both Zargyod and Ynglyas may have sparked an interest in magic in a clearly well-educated, literate person. Jeromyn also appears to have rather obligingly bankrolled his wife's work and seen to the care of their child while she engaged in her often time-consuming fieldwork.
Ysparo continued writing for a number of years, primarily a series of short, pamphlet-like essays on a variety of both magical and mundane topics. She is known to have suffered a traumatic miscarriage in 134 AWR and to have increasingly entered the orbit of the Pholyan Brotherhood of Rooks thereafter. Much of her subsequent work was conducted under their auspices, and was not published in any modern or conventional sense, instead being donated to their archives.
A common story has it that Ysparo was researching in the library of the Brotherhood in 161 when she suffered a serious nosebleed and, rising from her desk to see to the affliction, collapsed and died. She was buried in the Pholyan licyard with all due ceremony.

Thaumatological significance

Beginning in either 123 or 124 AWR Ysparo embarked on a wide-ranging tour of the Eleven Cities and their environs with the evident intent of producing a comprehensive gazetteer of the region. In practice, however, the fieldwork produced a catalogue of sites of thaumatological interest. Ysparo spent three or more years on the expedition, arriving back in Pholyos in late 127, and then spent another two years of full-time work writing up her findings from what must have been fairly voluminous notes. The resulting book, A Gazetteer of the Eleven Cities is Ysparo's primary contribution to posterity. The suggestion has been made that her interest in thaumatology actually arose as a result of this project rather than vice versa; in addition to the focus on magic the book contains a great deal of apparently very accurate geographical information.
Ysparo's other writings are housed in the Pholyan guildhouse of the Brotherhood of Rooks. No comprehensive bibliography of them has ever been published. A pamphlet-length biography of the wizard Morogyad, purportedly written by Ysparo, was circulated in Pholyos by the Rooks shortly after her death and it is widely believed that they possess a great deal more such literature, including a supposedly comprehensive history of the Shadow Men.