The events of the first book begin with the remnants of the expedition to Myrddin’s Hermitage. In the most recent book, we get to meet the Archaeologist who narrated the first chapter, and he detailed some more of his experiences in the Black Wastes. We know that powerful diviners were looking for something, and thought that they found it, but we don’t know exactly what they were searching for and what they hoped to find. Was it Myrddin’s home, specifically, were they looking for a spell to convert celerium, or were they looking for something else entirely? And who was behind this massive divination effort?
Fun question! So, Myrddin lived a very long time, and as he became increasingly reclusive, people were aware that he was spending most of his time in a secret location. A hermitage, if you will. Every few years, he’d suddenly make an appearance with some new amazing magic, saving an entire town from a mudslide, floating in a dragon that he’d killed in the wilderness, or whatever. So as these things go, rumors started to abound about his “fortress of solitude” and the amazing riches and knowledge that could be found within. Even during this time, people who wanted something from him—or to try and steal something from him—tried to find where he was staying.
And then Myrddin disappeared.
For a long time, people assumed he was just holed up in solitude. It wasn’t until around 800 BCE when a powerful demon from the Plane of Fire was summoned and caused a huge amount of destruction—without him showing up to save the day—that people finally started to believe he was dead.
In the approximately 1000 years since then, finding Myrddin’s Hermitage has been kind of like the idea of finding the Holy Grail, or Noah’s Ark or something. People have been trying this whole time.
The University research team really just got lucky, with one of the ward stones Myrddin had used to anchor his hermitage’s protection getting broken and making it possible to divine the location, shortly before they made a somewhat routine attempt with some new items to source divination off of. They certainly did hope that they could find a method to create celerium within, based on various records that suggested Myrddin had figured this out, but they weren’t sure. After all, there were just too many outlandish rumors.
Even without that, even minor access to Myrddin’s purported knowledge would be almost literally priceless. And if he’d left his various artifacts, riches, and other belongings behind, all the better.
