Intercontinental locations seem like a promising avenue, before he goes tracking down the dominion-of people to make sure they're all dragons or whatever. Gnoll tribes might also work but he has no specific reason to think they will, he'll save those for last.

There's healthy trade with the continent of Chandrar and less trade with Baleros. Very limited trade with Drath and Rhir. 

Chandrar is also full of places with people names in the same way as Izril, but if you read carefully it's also possible to deduce that Chandrar also has a nasty case of Dragons-ruling-the-most-powerful-states.

Less data on the others, but there it seems to be mostly non-people names, though there are still people names.

Drath place names are in a different language! The other continents have some foreign etymology snuck in at spots, too, but Drath places are actively a different language and just transliterated into the local one (which appears to have changed much less than expected through the ages).

He utterly fails to notice that there's a second language involved at all.

It's looking increasingly like dragons might be key to the mystery, here; while he's waiting for Sacrra to get back with the autobiography he'll see if he can find books on dragons and identify something that looks promising, since he can do that from here.

There's nothing like "A Primer on Dragons" or anything, but there's a section on historical relations with Dragons, and another on Draconic philosophy, and another on Drake pre-history.

Drake pre-history refers to the era around and before the founding of what historians refer to as "modern civilization", a period which spans at least, uh, 30,000 years, and is marked by the creation of the first Walled Cities, either under the command of dragons or in defiance of them, depending on the account. Zeres likes to argue they were the first Walled City but everyone else is pretty sure that isn't true. All information on this era is from (alleged) verbal accounts from Dragons, distorted ad infinitum through retellings and embellishment and possibly wholly made up. Most "real" historians consider this field to be nonsense.

Draconic philosophy isn't philosophy by Dragons, but philosophy on how Drakes relate to Dragons, how the psyches of the two species reflect on each other, the study of the cultural and social impact of their shared history, and a lot of arguments about whether the Dragons were cool and sexy, or horrible tyrants all Drakes are well rid of.

The secretary comes back with a book titled Memoirs of the First Gardener 1st Edition Annotated.

"How are you getting along?"

"No luck so far but the dragons seem like a promising lead. Do you know if they allow checking books out of the library? This would be faster if I had my priests at home helping with it."

"No, but you can purchase copies, and they keep a small stock of the more well-known volumes. The others you'd have to wait for a copyist and pay more for it."

"That's all right, I'll keep going by myself. Do you happen to know if any dragons live near here?"

The secretary snorts unwittingly, then covers her mouth. "No, sorry—there hasn't been a dragon sighting confirmed in five thousand years."

"Huh. Is it common knowledge what happened to them?"

"Picked too many fights, didn't have enough children," she says. "Most people think there are still some out there, but they don't show themselves. Six thousand years ago was the Creler Wars. Dragons were a dying breed even then, but the last Dragonlords came out then to fight. Not all of them survived, and the rest went back into hiding, even more reclusive than ever, and some of them showed their faces in the centuries after, but since then—we're on our own. For better or worse."

"That might be what I'm looking for. Can I get an overview, to start? And if it looks promising I'll want to buy a more comprehensive accounting." If dragons were filling the same niche as gods and now both of them are gone, mutual destruction isn't implausible as an explanation.

"About dragons? So they used to control large parts of the world, mainly Izril and Chandrar, parts of Terandria too—we think they're from Izril originally, but it'd be so long ago that no one is sure—and the Drakes in particular are descended from them. They were around when we built the Walled Cities, and they ruled over us in those early times.

"I don't remember the full details, but the gist is the Walled Cities revolted, and Chandrar revolted, and the Dragons lost the war, and... so they weren't a contiguous political unit, see, they were very individualistic, and a lot of Dragons didn't take a side in the war, and some of them supposedly fought on our side, and they didn't have territory they controlled as a species separate from the empires of other species they conquered...

"What I'm trying to say is the Dragons were thinned out a lot, but they weren't extinct, but also they didn't have a 'homeland' to be driven back to, and the popular interpretation is their... society... sort of... atomized? I don't know if 'society' is the right word. I don't know much about it, and I don't know if historians know that much about how Dragons were like before, or why they died, or if it's just, you know, pet theories that got popular over the millennia.

"Anyway, whatever the reason is, that's around the time they started dying out. Not immediately, but over thousands of years. We kept killing them over time, not systematically, but just... you piss people off, things happen... and they didn't make enough more to replace themselves, so the story really tells itself, doesn't it?"

"That doesn't rule out my theory, at least. I think what I'd actually like next is something abut the relationship between the Dragons and the Walled Cities written just before the war, if you can find it."

In the meantime, it's been long enough for a useful test; what's senator Jealwind up to?

"...may be able to reduce patrols and divert resources to strike teams. You know Shirka's going to push back on the proposed cuts to 3rd Army." He's talking to a Drake in fancy clothes in a different building down the street. He's acquired a different secretary(?)

The pre-existing secretary says, "I was glossing over a bit there; it's less a 'war' and more a series of rebellions and wars between rebelled states and remaining Draconic states over many centuries, maybe millennia, depending on who you ask. There's not a good chronology of it. The Dragonfall Wars, that's the term you're looking for. And the Manus papers are actually during the Dragonfall Wars, and what we have before that is very sparse and not authenticated."

Good, people don't forget about him if he ignores them for half an hour. He'd been a little worried about that.

"That does sound like it might be what I'm looking for. ...I suppose I can try asking, at a bit of a remove... There's a subject that, when I bring it up, people from this world can't think about it, they just forget what I said. Does that sound like a known phenomenon? Something to do with a Skill, maybe?"

"That... doesn't sound good. It sounds like something a Skill could do but I don't know of any specific cases, off the top of my head... there are lots of skills that forbid actions, less that forbid thinking... It might be a spell, as well as a Skill, but I don't know if that makes a big difference to the considerations."

"I haven't heard about spells yet but I don't expect it will, no. What I'm trying to find out is whether whatever-it-is is dangerous to me - there's reason to think it might be - so I'm looking for something that discusses the topic from before the effect was in place, as a starting point to trace forward from and try to figure out what happened. If there's an event where most of your records were lost - well, it's not good news, but it does seem like it might be a clue, someone who set up an effect like that would probably want to cover their tracks."

"I think you might be underestimating how hard it is to not lose records over tens of thousands of years. The very, very oldest buildings in Pallass are thousands of years old at most; even the oldest platforms. There are fires and sacks and collapses. The only part of the city that's supposedly intact from its founding is the walls, and even then the outer layers get refurbished every couple of decades, and who knows about the insides, so I personally take that with a grain of salt. The same goes for every Walled City.

"And the other problem is people can just... make things up. Wall-Lords that want to make themselves or their ancestors or the city look good. Legends and stories that aren't clearly marked and become impossible to tell apart from genuine events with time. Any claims about more than ten thousand years ago are more myth than history, except very specific records with precisely traced lineage, like the Manus documents.

"There's no one event where we lost our records, it's just that information decays over time and the times you're talking about are a very long time ago."

"I suppose that would be the case, if your gods are dead. Do you have any suggestions for how I might figure this out?"

"Most Skills that affect minds, and in general Skills which have nonphysical effects on people directly, can be more easily resisted by high-level people. So I'd look for the highest-level person I can find and ask them about it, see if they can work past it."

"That seems reasonable. How would I go about it?"

"That's the catch, isn't it? It's hard to get an appointment with important people. The highest-level person in Pallass is either [Grand Strategist] Chaldion or Saliss of Lights, one of those. In all of southern Izril... I really don't know. It might still be Chaldion, but I'm biased, of course. Just by presupposition, the humans probably have someone similarly powerful in the north. In the whole world... the King of Destruction? The Blighted King?"

She shakes her head.

"Your best bet would be the [Grand Strategist]. If your situation with the roads goes well, you'll have to meet him sooner or later."

"All right, thank you. I'll see if I can get senator Jealwind to arrange for that sooner rather than later." He reallocates a sliver of attention to waiting for an opportunity to ask. "In the meantime - you mentioned spells, is there anything else like that that I should know about?"

He's winding down the conversation, probably going to leave the building soon.

"Spells—magic, you don't have magic where you're from?"