A later census reveals an unusually exact number for the Formocci in the Empire: 11,632. Surviving court documents and imperial correspondence indicate that a number of important government, military, and trade posts were held by men with the distinctive -ci and -su Formocci suffixes on their names.

The next census, though, does not mention a single Formocci. Their suffixes abruptly disappear from court records as well, and later copies of earlier works that mentioned them, even in passing, appear to have been edited.

Historians still debate the meaning of this sudden and inexplicable disappearance. Many have pointed out that the disappearance of the Formocci was soon followed by the disastrous period in Imperial history known as the Barracks Anarchy, when dozens of claimants to the throne nearly destroyed the Empire through civil war. It could be that the sudden loss of experienced Formocci politicians left a power vacuum for eager claimants to fill. Some have even speculated that the Formocci were the power behind the Imperial throne, and that in their absence weak and incompetent emperors were vulnerable to coups.

But the question remains: what happened to the Formocci? Long-ago chroniclers, writing after the fall of the Empire, speculated that they had bargained the collective souls of their race for power and disappeared bodily when infernal agents came to collect. Today, though, the prevailing scholarly opinion can be summed up in a single word: genocide.