22 / 27

Notable Figures & Legends

Among the living figures of the present era, Khaemwaset the Riddle Master stands foremost as the most celebrated scholarly mind in Sahar-Al-Mutaqaddim. His seventy-year tenure as head of the Ministry of Ethics and Balance has produced three major revisions to the Balance Codex, each one responding to a novel magical crisis with characteristic precision. He is known for posing riddles to petitioners before granting audiences, not as theatre, but because he believes that how a person formulates a question reveals everything about whether they are ready to receive an answer.

Senenmut the Star Mapper charted the previously unmapped southern celestial hemisphere in a solo Starfall expedition that became the subject of the most-copied memoir in Great Library history. Nefertari the Star Mapper built on his work to produce the Unified Celestial Index, integrating Scholar astronomical records with those acquired from the Celestial Order through diplomatic exchange. Wenebgamun the Eternal — so called because he has outlived three sets of colleagues through still-unexplained longevity — serves as the Great Library's Chief Archivist and is believed to have personally processed more archival material than any other Scholar in recorded history.

Zahra the Scroll Keeper maintains the Restricted Archive, a wing of the Great Library whose existence is officially acknowledged but whose contents remain sealed to all but the seven members of the High Scribe-Council. Hemiunu the Architect designed the current observatory dome system in use across all Madrassa-Khanates. Mutnofret the Water Warden oversaw the last expansion of the deep-aquifer monitoring network. Imhotep the Healing Hand pioneered the Sand-Physician discipline of magically-assisted trauma recovery. Omar the Sand Seer and Hatshepsut the Ink-Born are the two most prolific Riddle-Poem composers of the current generation.