One day a stranger passed through the land of the remnant, having become lost between one outpost of Golias and another. He was injured, near death. The remnant cared for him, bound his wounds, fed him. They would not speak to him or tell him who they were. When he was well enough to travel they bound him and blindfolded him and took him to the nearest outpost of Golias. They left him outside the walls and went back to their own land.

The stranger was welcomed into the city, where he began to tell his story. Immediately he was taken to the Good Doctor, who set about to cure him by expunging the story from the stranger's memory, or at least by convincing him it was a dream and meant nothing in a world where such creatures could not possibly exist.

But the stranger was cunning. He soon realized that his interrogation could tell him more about his strange benefactors than he could tell the Good Doctor. In time he pieced together a story: the remnant were an ancient people, who came from a land called Sub[ob]scuram; they were outcasts in this world because of some horrible crime they had committed, and for which they were being punished unendingly — by being denied a place to rest, and by a terrible disease which caused their children to be deformed and the adults to go insane. The remnant had apparently been able, from time to time, to infiltrate the society of Golias, for every once in a while a deformed child or insane adult appeared within the walls. The unclean child was exposed as soon as the deformity was detected. The polluted adult could always be identified by the onset of ravings about flames and smoke, or light beneath the darkness [sub obscuram erat lux]. Even dreams were suspect, especially if they contained such images [ — hence the stranger's arrest].

Although the Good Doctor was a master at interrogation, the stranger was determined to retain his belief in what had happened to him.

The Good Doctor was on the verge of giving up and having the stranger put to death as an incorrigible [heretic], when it was discovered by Robenc, the Golias' chief of security, that the man in the Good Doctor's custody was in fact the son of a prominent citizen. Robenc, whose hatred of the Good Doctor was of long standing, attempted to topple the Good Doctor by creating a scandal, but the Good Doctor foresaw the maneuver in time to bring down Robenc with him.

In the ensuing bloodbath, the stranger managed to escape, with the aid of Egderus, Robenc's young accomplice. The Golias himself settled the dispute between the agencies of his government, and Egderus was made the scapegoat, and assigned to oversee the Mountain House, at the time a kind of leper colony.

It is here that Egderus' story begins.