The Anthropological Institute, seated in the city of Sabyan, is among the old world’s foremost bodies for the study of peoples, cultures, and tongues. Its scholars range far afield to live among remote tribes and record their ways; the anthropologist Yendal Applewhistle is one of its number, and it was an obelisk-inscription she brought back from a remote tribe - written in Old Common - that first drew the young Corian Ballard into the discipline.