Alhammarret's Egress
"Alhammarret's Egress" is a massive technical manual detailing exactly how the sphinx Alhammarret escaped Vorago.
It's veracity is unconfirmed, because no-one has successfully deciphered and implemented the technique yet. The manual is written in multiple ciphers, though most of them have been cracked by scholars. More distressingly, the manual is incomplete; it is missing a few pages, and references multiple nonexistent "appendices" which scholars suspect are other hidden tomes.
Some hypothesize the technique involves The One Piece, but such speculation is dismissed by most scholars.
Purpose
Alhammarret was said to have a perfect memory, so the existence of the Egress is puzzling; why would he write the information down? The spinx was notoriously antisocial, and it seems uncharacteristic for him to want to help mortal engineers. Moreover, if it is supposed to be helpful, why is it written in code and partially scattered among secret tomes? Some scholars speculate the Egress method involved manipulating memory, or that the sphinx was under some sort of external memory curse, but nothing can be confirmed.
Regardless, the work of some of the best scholars over multiple centuries has more-or-less confirmed that the tome does indeed seem to detail a realistic method for interplanar transport, even with roughly 40% of the important information missing.
There is a frightening possibility that the whole thing is a practical joke on the whole of academia, and that it was written by a madman instead of the sphinx. Most scholars dismiss this possibility (out of fear more than anything else).
Historical Details
History
Alhammarret must have written this work sometime during the last century he was on Vorago (1900-2000 PE), but nay further detail is unknown. Some scholars have tried to make a record of his travels during that time to determine where the hidden appendices are, so far to mixed success.
Public Reaction
The discovery of the Egress manual in Alhammarret's abandoned lair in 2012 PE caused an uproar in the scholarly community. The potential creation of a reliable interplanar transport method, one powerful enough to move a sphinx, was a potentially massively lucrative technology. Even if it proved unfeasible the tome would surely advance arcane engineering by decades.
Like many of his artifacts, the Egress changed hands many times through bidding and theft, but was available to scholars consistently enough for them to learn to be disappointed by the tome's absolute impenetrability. While it remained an item of legend, scholarly interest died down after little progress was made in the first few decades.
Legacy
A resolute group of scholars remains dedicated to deciphering the Egress, and it has yielded real - if slow - results. A few minor advnacements in arcane engineering were reverse-engineered from the Egress, and the reserach has been the backbone of advances in codebreaking and ciphers.
Quests for the appendices are also perennial jobs for adventurers, to little success.
Type
Manual, Technical / Blueprint
Medium
Papyrus
Authoring Date
Unknown: roughly 2000 PE
Myth
Authors
Comments