The Books of the Nameless Ones

The Books of the Nameless Ones are or were books of religious devotion, and evidently thaumaturgy, kept in the custody of the Nameless Ones, a pre-Wesmodian mendicant order connected with the cult of Ynglyas, goddess of prophecy, the moon, and female fertility. They appear to have been credited with oracular power.

Historical account

The Nameless Ones were an order of itinerant clerics of Yngylas who travelled in a great circular itinerary through the cities of Pholyos, Ramoros. Elpaloz, Dyqamay, Andymalon and sometimes Tyros. The group, which appears to have been an all-female affair, does not seem to have ever consisted of more than a dozen or so members.
Much of their logistical energy was expended in ensuring that several large trunks of books were transported safely with them on their perambulations. When they reached one of the major settlements on their circuit the Nameless Ones would set up lecterns in public places and begin reading aloud from these books, generally at night. In some cases multiple members of the Nameless Ones would read from different books in turn as if holding a conversation, while at others multiple members of the order would work in shifts to keep the reading going for several hours. These readings apparently had some sort of ritual purpose, often commencing as certain stars became visible in the evening sky and continuing until the star faded in the morning, or pausing periodically so that the lectern could be shifted so the reader was always facing the moon as it traversed the night sky.
The ritual aspect of these readings is of interest to thaumatologists. These readings were often conducted with the extensive collaboration of the local cults of Ynglyas, who billeted the Nameless Ones, provided them with an audience and possibly, in some cases, participated in their rituals. Whatever collaborative research the cult of Ynglyas were doing in the pre-Wesmodian era, the Nameless Ones and their books were clearly esteemed contributors.
Adding considerably to the interest this historical phenomenon generates is that all surviving accounts of these readings belabour the alien, unintelligible, yet oddly resonant and musical. This is surely has only one possible interpretation; the books from which the Nameless Ones were reading were written in some form of the fabled and imperfectly understood Ynglyan Codes, which, when spoken aloud, had some sort of ritual or thaumaturgical significance. This makes the post-Wesmodian disposition of these books of critical interest to a number of thaumatologists.

Modern whereabouts

As is well-known, the cult of Ynglyas was among the hardest-hit by the Wesmodian Reformation. The widespread withdrawal of public subscription and governmental support quickly caused their carefully-maintained intercity network of rituals and research to fray and come to pieces, with the clerics themselves evidently thrown on the cultural scrapheap alongside the cults of less scholarly gods such as Ajqyod and Dahan. It is not clear what became of the Nameless Ones, and their trunks of fabled books were apparently lost to history. Given that historians record the temples to Ynglyas in Pholyos, Tyros and Dyqamay being essentially looted and their stocks of thaumaturgic literature tossed to the winds - those in Tyros are reliably said to have been dumped in the city's harbour - it is highly likely that most of these books eventually went on a fire or were torn to pieces to create padding for a shipment of mundane goods.
There is, however, reason to suspect that a few of these books found their way into the hands of those who would value them appropriately. The chapterhouses of the Brotherhood of Rooks in Pholyos and Dyqamay are said to possess substantial volumes bound in blue leather and written in secret codes - almost certainly Ynglyan literature, and therefore just possibly the books of the Nameless Ones. Furthermore the Lunar Society of Pholyos was founded with the explicit purpose of studying, and if possible reconstructing, the research of the Ynglyan cult. As such they made a concerted effort to collect Ynglyan literature and use it to reconstruct the Ynglyan Codes. Ryl Rayan Kol's book Antique Codices lists a total of seventeen pre-Wesmodian books, all of which are described in sufficient detail as to be almost certainly assembled from first-hand study. Eleven of those books are written in the Ynglyan Codes, and full versions of Kol's book - which are themselves hard to find - actually contain excepts from these books in all three of the scripts that make up the code. Of the eleven, Kol presents two as being books salvaged from the Nameless Ones. This creditably establishes two things, that a handful of these books did survive the attrition the Wesmodian Reformation wrought upon Ynglyan literature, and that these books were, indeed, a part of the same body of spiritual, intellectual and thaumaturgical research that literature provided. Kol's famously magpie-like approach to thaumatology meant that he himself made only fragmentary progress on determining what the Nameless Ones were actually up to, but his book, although difficult to find, is something of a prerequisite to any further investigation of the matter. Apart from anything else it would be by comparison with the texts described in his book that any of books of the Nameless Ones that might subsequently come to light would be recognised as such.

Item type

Book / Document