The settlements are not a rumor. Their exact locations, scale, routes, and present condition are the unknowns.
Remembered relationships
Before the Silence, Veyra maintained settlements on other worlds. People remember household ties, civic partnerships, research, travel practices, names, and ordinary relationships—not merely abstract colonial outposts.
When deep-space contact failed and Archive Severance closed the dominant route records, knowledge of exact paths, locations, scale, and current conditions became unreliable or unavailable.
No confirmed return
In the nine centuries since, there has been no confirmed two-way contact and no verified completed arrival-and-return journey. That absence does not prove the settlements were destroyed.
The disputed Displaced Horizon theory asks whether causal routes changed, but it does not establish that Veyra or any settlement literally moved.
How distant lives remain present
Knowledge of the settlements survives through testimony, names, household ties, civic stories, gifts, travel memory, and later fixed records. Those sources can establish that relationships were lived without reconstructing a reliable interstellar chart.
The difference matters to the First Public Account and every later history of the Silence. A broad fact can be secure while its scale, route, chronology, and present condition remain inaccessible.
An obligation, not an expansion fantasy
The open question is not whether unnamed worlds await conquest. It is what Veyra owes communities that may still remember it, and how hope can remain responsible after nine centuries without confirmed exchange.
The Unlocated Guest makes that question immediate without answering it. Their unplaceable home and missing transit are testimony to investigate, not proof that they came from any remembered settlement or crossed a displaced route.