The Author who calls himself the Last One may well be the last but one of the Ancients, a trenchant thinker struggling to comprehend from his lonely perspective what caused his race to destroy itself — sparing only himself and the young Boy who was his last companion.

Almost certainly it was the Last One whose holdings (including his own work) constituted the anthology of texts from which Egderus formed the Archives that bear his name. Previous volumes contain his most substantial Writings, but the remains presented here contain what might be called the distillation of his thought.

Foremost among his peculiar ideas is the paradoxical hostility with which he regards text itself, as exemplified by the acerbic pronouncement in {enemy}, in which he dismisses the ambition of even such as himself — but why write at all, we must ask, if it is not to be preserved?

It will be suspected that, judging from the gnomic {impatience}, (see separate legomenon) the Last One considered his lack of forbearance to be his besetting sin. It also seems that he regarded the invention treated in {mirror} as the technology that set the feet of his contemporaries on the slide into ruin.

But it is the almost scriptural language of {deities} that shows the Last One's gift for language at it lyrical peak, outlining his spiritual journey from youthful faith through the disillusionment of middle age to the peace he seems to have attained at the end, when all the vanities of the world evaporate like the bubbles they are, landing him on the shore of silence and serenity at last.