If everyone is comfortable, we will begin. Ya-Banan, the glowglobes, please? Thank you.

There are three kinds of criminals in the Mother Countries: the ones who don’t matter, the ones who will be forgiven, and the ones who go to Quodiron. I am not a large man, and my training is in lorecraft not violence, but I assure you I could if I chose kill every man, woman, and child in Lerfannos. One or two might escape at first, but I could hunt them down across the land. There’s nowhere they could hide from me, except under the skirts of some warchief or runethane whose arts of murder surpass mine.

Forgive my crudity. It’s not usually phrased so baldly. I can see I’ve upset you. It’s entirely possible that were I to engage in fisticuffs with one or more of you, you would tear out my throat. I have no idea. Although I could deduce it.

But I digress. Quodiron is not, strictly speaking, a location. It’s more a state of mind, or a level of being. What makes a rock a rock? What provides it with its identity, makes it not a stick or a song?

These are questions of ontology, and I won’t debate them. My point is that on at least some level, there is something which is a thing, which isn’t basal matter. The rose is more than the crude elemental earth and water which compose its physical form. Do you understand me? No? I will try again, for the benefit of the less able. A book, printed, you follow me when I say that it is paper and ink? Yes? Very good. Baby steps.

But two different books may be composed of the same amount of paper and the same amount of ink, the same amount of thread and so on, and yet be different books. Quodiron robs you of the thing that makes your paper and ink different from others’. That is its function. There is a storehouse of identity, where lives and personalities and memories hang suspended in the air, but the storehouse is not Quodiron. Quodiron makes the storehouse possible.

The storehouse merely precludes those freed lives from rejoining their source or penetrating into the akashic record. Wouldn’t be much point to pulling apart one entity only to have its sickness of thought permeate the aether, would there?

Incidentially, now that you are have been told of the Warehouse of Excised Dreams, leaving the boundaries of the Eternal City is a capital crime.

Now, as I was saying. Quodiron detatches these fragments from the basal matter, removes the animate spirit or Rune-phrase or Truename or tacentry or whatever you want to call it, as I said, ontology. Quodiron may be accessed safely only within the Warehouse of Excised Dreams, underneath the in the basements of the Tower of Tongues. Technical details follow. Ready yourselves.

SEE ALSO Living Memory (Gaps In), Tacentry, Tower of Tongues