But not quite.

And certainly not this idea, not in mere 70 years. Not the idea of people, normal people, passing the torch of civilization in a world of gods and other monsters; gradually, slowly building the pieces of knowledge and order and cooperation into a stairway to the stars.

What's death to His cause - as if those who first tamed wolves and first smelt iron and first hung a cantrip aren't long dead! What's 70 years to His work - as if He haven't walked the universe for ten times that length, unknown and undiscovered!

Reading books isn't the most suspicious activity in the world, Asmodeans have to judge. You have to attempt to track down anyone raising an army, or starting a Good cult, spies and assassins, and, of course, each other. It isn't easy to track down everyone who have ever read a book, though they do make a good effort into that direction because they aren't complete fools.

But they are fools still; because they are Asmodeans; because they are denied permission to think even on their own time; because they mainly think of reading the sorts of books they do not like as of an act of insolence, an insult, a violation of rank, or a sort of an infestation and outside corruption. Had they any good sense they (would not have been Asmodeans, but otherwise) would have burned all of the books they laid their sight upon and lived in a wasteland ruled by immediate hierarchy enforced by raw might, as writing itself is their undoing.

...would they? Does Solan really, in his heart of hearts, think that, after decades of growing up under diabolist rule, after generations of wizard children grown up into the system's "education", after an eternity of Hell itself copying it's damned books en masse and shipping them into a thousand worlds?

Maybe not. Maybe he doesn't.

And maybe neither do his mentors and teachers, those people who ought to be running the Ostenso academy and Ostenso library and Ostenso administration, but are instead running unremarkable apprenticeships, tiny clubs, or simply attics with stashes of books and sometimes the now-useless (unattended, most, but not thrown away) altars hidden inside.

People who are not scribes or librarians or managers but work menial jobs or arrange in some or other way to have none. People who can't hang anything higher than first circle at most. People who are not clerics because why would gods send magic to those who would never get away with using it or indeed try. People who are not the most gifted or nobleborn because the Tyranny steals those most gifted and murders any noble nobility. But let the Tyranny have all the "special" ones, the cunning and noble and God-chosen, His people are simply people, "the men", with no further discriminant needed. A simple man in Azlant could be more than an archmage is today.

Maybe these people did not most of them have the capacity of imagining the completion of His work anytime soon. Maybe these people had no ambition, no plan, not even really a dream.

But someone has to pass the torch, and someone have passed it to them, and now it is their turn. It is as simple as that. And that is enough. Custom is the spark that once lit the light of civilization.

You know a guy, and he knows a guy, and you don't know that guy and certainly not any of the people he knows. You don't meet every two weeks under the cover of the night wearing hoods, you don't have messengers running around, you don't publicize anything, rendezvous are not large, referrals are not quick, and to a passive observer, nothing is obvious. Nobody would track every manufactory worker's free time, every tiny landlord's visit to a friend, every book on whether it is what it says on the cover.

Ostenso's invisible university was proud to have Ernest Solan as a student. And now, he is proud to, when possible, be an occasional teacher, in service of His lawful cause (public thoughts that might be accidentally read don't have to specify who He is, now do they?)

And then one day, the wheel turns and the hammer drops and a new page is opened in the history/present/future of humanity. 

You would remind me of a dear old friend, if I had processing power to spend on mulling such things over.

As it is... Go forth and build Good and know that you, none of you, were ever forgotten.

You are not Him.

I am not. But-

-those who first tamed wolves and first smelt iron and first hung a cantrip are long dead, but their descendants - all of us - live on as their rightful inheritors.

When the Convention rolls around, he is readier than the most.