The Page About Ossul

Kindling · page 1 withdrawn

Greetings, my dear readers. Lu'kifær Morkinstar.

I have a fire going, a case in front of me, and ninety-one of ninety-one slots filled, and I want to put those two facts next to each other plainly before I do anything about them. I have known for some days now, and sitting with it alone has not made it smaller.

I wrote the last page first. That was page ninety-one, filled a whole season before its turn, because I wanted the final word in this case to be mine on purpose and not whatever I happened to be holding when the slots ran out. It felt, that night, like the clearest thing I had done all season. Nobody warned me that clarity and arithmetic are not the same skill. The case does not fill at ninety-one. It fills at ninety, because ninety-one was already spoken for, and I spent a whole season not noticing what that did to the count.

A case with ninety-one of ninety-one slots is a complete account. A complete account is a finished one. I am not going to tell you what a finished one is called, my dear readers, on the grounds that you already know it, and I have spent this whole case refusing to use that word about myself and I would rather not break the streak in my opening paragraph.

(Small correction that has kept me up two nights running. I did not defeat that word by refusing it. I built a box with a slot for exactly its shape and then, very diligently, across ninety-one pages, filled the box.)

So. The fire, which I did not build for warmth. And the case, which I am about to open for the last time in the order that actually matters.

Page one comes out first, and I want to be honest about why, because the honest reason is smaller than you would expect from a man about to do this thirteen more times. It is not that page one deserves it, or that there is a ceremony owed to firsts. It is that page one is the first thing I put in, and if I opened this case anywhere else tonight, at page forty, at page seventy, I would only have found a clever way to not have started yet. I have gotten very good at that, across four hundred entries. Not tonight.

Page one was Ossul.

Twenty-two galaxals in one room, nine decks down, unlit side, a man the Directory never once turned its attention on, because staff do not get filed, only worlds do. I wrote down the smallest things I had. A grain paste he calls, without any apparent irony, "the paste," as in a complete sentence describing an entire meal. A stone on his desk, no bigger than a fist, that he moved closer to himself the day I first sat down and never once explained, and I never once asked.

And a word he says wrong. Fifty times a shift, on the wrong syllable, every time, for twenty-two galaxals, because nobody stayed down there long enough to hear it twice before me.

I read the page once. I am not going to read it twice, and I want to tell you why before you decide it is because I am being brave about this. It is because I already know exactly how the paste tastes to him, he told me once, unprompted, and I wrote it down. And I know precisely how far his hand moves to reach that stone. Those two are not going anywhere, fire or no fire.

It is the third one I go looking for and cannot quite get. My own hand, that night, on the word itself, the actual wrong syllable spelled out the way he says it: I wrote it fast, and badly, and now I genuinely cannot tell from the page which vowel I meant. I could sit here and reconstruct it from memory instead. I am not going to. Whatever I settled on right now would not be the word I heard him say eleven days ago. It would be the word I have since decided he says, which is a smaller and worse thing to be putting into a fire while calling it the truth.

So the page goes in as it is, unread a second time, gaps and all.

It does not do anything dramatic. You have been reading me long enough to expect a monster, or at least a noise, and there is neither. It catches at one corner, the way paper does, and for about four seconds it is light instead of a page, and then it is nothing anyone could read even if they badly wanted to.

Ossul is nine decks down right now, most likely on shift, most likely eating the paste, and he does not know that the only account anywhere in this galaxy of the exact wrong way he says one word has just stopped existing, in a fire I lit for entirely different reasons. He is never going to know. The one person who could have told him is the one who just burned it, and is, my dear readers, going to sit here a while before opening the case again.

Ninety slots left, and every one of them still full.