My visit to the Book has been fully approved, and the necessary paperwork stamped and signed. I can enter with a Record Guide on Saturday morning, and have permission to stay up to three consecutive days in some selected sections.
To celebrate this, Keeper Thadron and some of his colleagues took me out for dinner and drinks. We first went to an area close to the Book, with a lot of small restaurants and bars. After a simple but tasty meal, they brought me to their usual after-work bar.
The Guides and Keepers have a vast supply of legends and tales about the Book of Records, and especially about the vast labyrinth of bookcases and scroll racks. I think they were trying to impress me with their campfire stories, knowing that I will enter this harrowed collection soon.
They told me about poor souls that get lost in the Book of Records and never return. And they have a legend about a cursed Keeper who mislaid a scroll and is doomed to forever wander the halls in search for that elusive scroll. She continues to search even after her death, as a ghost.
All this they claim with a certainty that grows stronger after each round of beers.
I asked about the legend of the tree at the heart of the Book, with a carving from our prophet Dano Gheinok. In their minds, its existence is a self-evident fact. Even though no-one of those present ever saw it with their own eyes, they believe old Guides that claim to have seen it.
The tale the Keepers believe is that St. Gheinok, when he arrived on what we now call Amarr Island, created two settlements. The first one he dedicated to God. The Keepers situate it near the Grand Basilica since that is where Dano Gheinok also built the first church. The second one he dedicated to his love, Marie. The tree stood in a garden at the edge of that second settlement, where nowadays the Book of Records stands. The second settlement turned out to be on more fertile land and in time became more succesful than the first, and it grew to eventually engulf the first.
I pointed out that this story is meant as an allegory indicating that dedicating one’s life purely to God is more difficult than dedicating it to worldly love but that in the end the two can merge. Keeper Thadron and his friends were almost offended, they believe in their tale as literal historical fact.
They added that since the second village was dedicated “to Marie”, or “à Marie” in an old tongue, its inhabitants were soon called Amarrians. And that, in their legend, is the origin of our name, Amarr.
At some point one Guide who had been pouring beer down his throat as if there was a small black hole in his stomach, climbed on the table and with a grand sweeping gesture proclaimed that “All of this great galactic Empire is nothing more than a lovestruck guy’s attempt to impress his girl!”. We quickly forced him back down from the table and concluded our evening out, blaming his blasphemy on drunkenness and a partially Gallentean ancestry.