Editing Shattered Sun (section)

====''The Legacy''====
While it was incredibly difficult to believe that the touch of the Anchordread did not always kill the people whom they touched, more stories began to crop in the research community about such a phenomenon. The creatures were beginning to understand humans in ways that mere monstrous races should not. They were growing a sense of empathy with the surface-dwellers. But just why were the creatures this involved, this interested in humans? Why were these aquatic beastmen pouring as much effort into this endeavor as the humans were in their research of them?

The answers to these questions would only come to the boldest researchers, those who took the place of the Anchordread as the initiators. At first, the contact was quite trivial and hard to decipher. But with further study, more open-minded researchers would finely tune the emotions and sensations brought upon them to bring forth a clearer picture of the creatures' situation, while the creatures would better accommodate their message to the humans' understanding. Through countless mental conversations with their counterparts, the researches came across the core value of the Anchordread's society: the freedom and exchange of information; "the Legacy" as the Anchordread termed it.

A basic understanding of the Legacy is akin to the oral tradition of storytelling in human cultures. Information about one's people is accurately passed down from generation to generation through the practiced and repeated telling of a carefully tailored story. Basic facts, adventures, exploits, achievements, failures, everything that someone needs to know about one's family, tribe, city, so forth and so on, were all contained in the story. Once the story became lost or altered somewhere along the line, the information became such as well. The Legacy works like that, but through the electrical imprinting of information upon cherished objects, such as the weapons passed on through the Anchordread's generations. It is also passed through intimate contact with each other in a familial fashion. Once the objects become contaminated or when relations sour between Anchordread, the Legacy changes.

While a story can easily be changed among humans in the oral tradition through a mere change in perception, the Legacy is not as much so. The Anchordread exhibit a powerful sense of empathy and understanding, allowing them to look past feelings which may alter another's state of mind and to gain the core information behind such a facade. This clarity of mind has allowed the Anchordread to read into human history through their touch with an unbiased and extremely interested perspective, fueling their own research and connection with humanity with as much fervor as the scholars put into their own knowledge of the creatures.