Daerydean Cortex

This temple village is the homeplace of the daeryds, high in the mountains where the air is thin, dry, and cold. As their population grew, more and more daeryds would return and the campus of buildings grew with them to accommodate. Many of the first daeryds to die did so still pontificating with their peers, their bodies grown so old that they had fused their seats. At first, these corpses were treated with a reverence akin to a monument, respected from a distance, but then it was discovered that while their consciousness had left, their memories were still stored in the bodies and whats more passed to other daeryds through touch. Soon thousands of daeryds would make a pilgrimage each year to absorb the knowledge of their ancestors, while other daeryds who could feel their bodies slowing, would choose to stay, passing away still in communion with those who passed before them. Here sits the Cortex, a complex network of ancient daeryd corpses all welded into a mottled pile. 

The daeryds believe that the cortex stores the collective memories of all daeryds who have connected to it. The structure has grown too large for the temple constructed around it, and and so instead a series of telegraph cables have been run down to the city of Felithos, where a larger and even more complex network of more recently deceased Daeryds may connect.

In the 4th Age of Blimnor, while the traditional lifecycle of the Daeryds continues, their is cause for concern, as the ability to absorb the memories of ancestors is harder and less reliable, and with it the anxiety that when they too pass on, their memories will be lost to this unreliable ritual. 

Instead, many Daeryds consult a council of very old individuals called Discernants who then record the most important information into conventional means such as books, wax cylinders, and photographs, and occasionally purge or omit information that may be irrelevant or harmful.