The Pendragon Journals

Called the Pendragon Journals for their discoverer, Pendragon Hunter Jusenkyou, the series of spiral-bound notebooks were discovered in the Rinoin city of Nine Pounds. According to Hunter Jusenkyou, they indicate that Rinoin civilization is much older than originally believed, possibly dating back to late Classic Antiquity.

Discovery

Archaeology was a hobby for Hunter, who frequently went on digs or arranged to visit them when taking vacations. For the find, he had chosen the site based on what was understood about the layout of the city and subtle topographical clues from the surrounding region. As Hunter explained:

"When the Marcons paved over the place, they buried it. But if you grew up in them, you can spot suburbs". True to form, his team uncovered a suburb of Nine Pounds, including several homes and numerous well-preserved artifacts. There was little left of most houses, any metal or wooden materials were long gone. But they found many factory-made ceramic items and other materials, including evidence of consumer-grade electronics."

Hunter said: "If I took you into one of these houses today and sat you down in front of the TV, you'd have no idea. Your only clues would be that the magazines on the coffee table were in a different language, and the TV... otherwise, everything would feel so normal. You could walk down the street and it's just like any suburb anywhere."

The major find happened in the yard behind one of the homes. The topography of the area and clay dumped during the burial had kept this particular vault dry, while other similar constructs were rotted through.

Hunter said: "The belongings were not much. Old books, clothes, small appliances, the kinds of things we all have in our garages and attics. Useless junk you can't bring yourself to throw out. Of no value to the owners, but a glorious treasure-trove for us. I think it was just stuff: maybe a new owner bought the house, maybe they were storing things for a friend. There seemed to be items from two or three different families collected over a few decades. Impossible to say if it all went in the hole at once or just built up over time."

"Not sure how it stayed in there. We know the Rinoins were wiped out during a war. It seems if you had a bomb shelter, you'd use it. So whatever stuff was in there was stacked inside when there was no need for shelter - but it was built back when there was. Quite a lot about their history we don't know. Still, somehow, this little room got packed full of junk, sealed, and forgotten about for more than ten thousand years."

Journals

Among the belongings, Hunter discovered a collection of several dozen spiral-bound notebooks of the type students use for assignments in school: simple in design, unadorned, each filled with seventy to a hundred sheets of blue-lined notebook paper. In this case, someone had used the books as a journal, which covered around seven years of life.

The journals were not dated or signed, but Hunter maintains that they are the work of none other than Nathan Searlin.

Hunter said:

"Even just archaeologically, these are beautiful. The writer is only about 5 when the first journal begins. He can barely write, and fills every page with two-line high, large block letters. He doesn't have anything to say and just talked about a need to write. He talks about his day, normal childhood experiences. Petting a cat, going to sporting event. After a few years he starts to talk more about his feelings, his compulsions, how alone he is."

"The prose style is completely unmistakable. The wording, the sentence structure, it's all there. His writing improved by the time his authentic journals were recorded, but there are many very less-than-subtle nuances."

The journals found had no name on them. The entries were un-signed, and most were un-dated. This is consistent with Nathan's known writings; his journals were less a record than a personal act of expression. He was writing to get the thoughts out of his head. To that end, the notebooks and the confirmed journals are decidedly similar. The handwriting is different, but Hunter speculates that this may be due to the early journals being written with ball-point pens, and the later with feather quills. There is also one particularly telling detail, which deniers of the journals have no way to address:

"In it, he mentions Gideon Rikart by name. He never gives his own name, the journals aren't like that, but he speaks of meeting Gideon, and states his name in no uncertain terms. Now, let's run through the logic, here: either a Nathan was born in Rinoin and met Gideon there... or another young man, who writes exactly like him, with the same style and same inflection, and also coincidently met a guy with the exact same name as Nathan... yeah, it starts to fall apart."

One more point of note: the later journals found in the cache even include rudimentry spell-forms, and speak at length of Nathan slowly learning magic.

Comparison to Extant Journals

It is true that the known journals of Nathan Searlin are written in another language, but he frequently uses words taken from the Rinoin dialect. The two were also similar enough that several actual Rinoin words in Rinoin script went un-noticed throughout years of study.

The prose style is definitely very similar, with any discrepancies explained by the distance and change in language. There is a gap of about six years, by best estimates, between the two sets of journals. The latest age fixed in the first set puts Nathan at thirteen, with the earliest age in the second set at nineteen. Some journals from the second set are definitely missing, but the first set is believed to be complete. It is most likely that, for whatever reason, when Jason traveled to Asysias, he was unable to bring his original journals, and began keeping the new ones, of which many were lost. The second set of journals covers over forty years of his life.

Impact

The dates of Rinoin civilization are not well-understood. The fall of the civilization definitely happened around 2200 B.G.A. The founding of High Tower is distinctly fixed to within plus or minus one hundred years of B.G.A. 3700. Nathan's journals indicate that Rinoin civilization was in full swing by then. He refers to historical events happening hundreds of years before his birth, and gives no distinct beginning for the Rinoin origin. Some historians who support the authenticity of the journals speculate this places Rinoin origins much further back, possibly into Antiquity.

But what does this do for the date of its destruction?