Joshor, head of His Majesty’s Silent Gatherers, presents a recorded death rattle that astonishingly takes the form of a ketek: “Above silence, the illuminating storms—dying storms—illuminate the silence above.” He identifies it as a complex, five-part Vorin poetic structure that reads the same forward and backward.

Joshor emphasizes the improbability of its origin: the speaker was a dying, illiterate Herdazian who barely knew the language, yet produced a grammatically correct, poignant ketek. This raises the implication that something beyond normal learning influenced the utterance.

After consulting ardents, who praise the structure but cannot source it in any known repository, Joshor notes their interest in meeting the “poet.” He leaves the interpretation to the king, urging consideration of why storms would be central and why “silence” might exist both above and below. The report is dated Tanatanev 1173 and signed by Joshor.