Knowledge and Record

No person, settlement, or institution in Elyndorath automatically knows the whole world. Knowledge must be learned, witnessed, taught, recorded, carried, purchased, stolen, remembered, forgotten, verified, or rediscovered. News can travel slowly. Rumor may reach a place before certainty does. Maps can be incomplete, copied badly, or made obsolete by war, disaster, migration, and changing roads. Archives preserve knowledge, but records can be lost, damaged, altered, hidden, or misunderstood. What a community believes therefore depends not only on what is true, but also on what evidence has reached it and whom it trusts.