Respected among the Bazrahin, praised by the interstellar performance art community and legendary among glam-rock enthusiasts everywhere, Cerys Irolat would have left a sizable cultural legacy had she ignored politics altogether. As it is, her ascent among the Vermailian elite was driven less by a desire for power and fame than by her claimed 5212 encounter with a blue ray of light that downloaded the universe into her brain.¹

The content of Irolat’s revelation appears to have been that the cosmos is fundamentally disordered, that there exists no reason why one event happens after another, and that attempts to reorder this will only create misery. The Bazrahin nomads hosting Irolat at the time saw the obvious parallels between her experience and their own Zeroist philosophy and took her under their wing.

While Irolat’s emerging ethos of benign chaos and genre-hopping avant-pop was a poor match for the more staid Conclave of Mek’ril, the Conclave coveted her access to the Bazrahin Ta’rot’rag Prophecy. Long suspicious of the Viridian-based Arcturian Church, the Vermailian elite wanted a rival source of future information, which she was happy to provide.

We now know that Irolat not only lacked access to the Ta’rot’rag, but had lied about the document’s existence: the hundreds of pages she provided appear to have been assembled from random newspaper clippings, horoscopes and self-help books, and the Bazrahin had been training similar disciples to release elements of this curiously elaborate religious hoax to the galaxy’s elites for centuries. By the time the Vermailian government discovered this in 5298, Irolat was long gone, having exploded onstage decades earlier at the end of her farewell tour.

—Recorder 3000-21