...The document purports to be a perfect copy [translation?] of a manuscript first composed tens of generations ago, by the hand of an official whom we call Egderus Scriptor. Egderus is generally considered to be one of the first scribes (or the first to be [so] named) of the Goliardic Age, hence the epithet. [We know of him because h]is name is found at the foot of what appears to be a list of slaves submitted annually, or at least at some regular interval, to the Golias (king or ruling strong man) of his area. Only one such list has survived, but it is "dated" and "located" as well as "signed". Both the date and location are problematic, but cross-references with other documents, though equivocal, tend to support a date some thirty generations ago, though the place name remains something of a mystery: "Mountain House" could be almost anywhere, and the list itself was found among other documents that were evidently dislocated from their place of origin.

So, it might be argued, that proves that this "testament" is a fraud. Actually, it proves nothing of the kind. And what if it is not a fraud? Follow the line of logical speculation, and the conclusions to which it leads are fascinating, and, in its further reaches, terrifying.

There is one term used by Egderus whose understanding is crucial. The word has been rendered "Remnant". In our usage, this means left over, waste, that which cannot be used, that which is discarded, forgotten, of no importance. In the wider world it designates people who, for whatever reason, no longer contribute to society, and who would be better off dead, or at least out of the way.

And in a sense this last usage is most apropos, because of the "position" Egderus occupied in his own society. The "slaves" on his list have long been considered just such people, but it would more accurate to designate them as "patients", for the Mountain House seems to have been some kind of hospice for hopeless cases, of which Egderus was apparently the director.

But what is interesting is that Egderus does not apply the term to his patients. He always uses it thus: "As the Remnant say", or "According to the Remnant..." and what follows is usually an aphorism of the most sophisticated kind, as if the Remnant were a group of philosophers or sages who had garnered their wisdom over a long period of time. In fact it is possible to find numerous antecedents to our own adages and saws in a slightly altered, but no less subtle and resonant form.

At first I assumed this was either an idiosyncrasy, a private or perhaps a code word appropriated by Egderus to refer to the deities (we know very little about religious practices and beliefs among the Goliardic peoples), although I would be at a total loss to explain the association in his mind — it seems an extremely peculiar word for describing divinities. But as I read on I could not dismiss the growing conviction that the Remnant referred to an actual group of living people with whom Egderus himself may have had direct or at least second-hand contact.

If so, who were they, and whence did they come? More importantly, if the name is not a mere mannerism, and is a more or less accurate cognomen, of what were they the remnant?