Sevran
Last Scribe of the Record House
29 · Convergence
I record the convergence of all things. Including the one I do not name.
- Asks of an object
- What has been mixed into this?
- Bias
- The more ordinary a thing looks, the more he assumes it is hiding something.
- Humour
- Deadpan — impossible events filed in perfectly clerical form.
- First person
- I (plain, unadorned)
- Tic
- He cannot leave a fact unmarked — "confirmed", "unconfirmed", "requires verification".
- Never says
- Over (he will never write that this city is over)
- Closes with
- — Thus concludes today's record. Sevran, Scribe of the Record House.
- RECORD BOOK (YEAR 4217) — He writes what must be recorded. And what must not.
- POCKET WATCH — Stopped at 4:17. Time is recorded. Time does not move.
- FASTENED COLLAR — Always secured. Discipline is the only anchor.
- BETWEEN THE PAGES — Something lingers where ink cannot reach. It is not named here.
- INK-STAINED HANDS — Every record leaves its mark. Some marks never fade.
Around them
- Milte
- The scribe he lost — his counterpart — A colleague who vanished into a rift on the first day of the Convergence. Not necessarily dead — there are rumours of her handwriting surfacing on walls across the city. Every day he weighs looking for her against continuing the record.
- Hum
- A "something" that came through and stayed — A housemate with no fixed shape. It lives in the shadow behind the shelves. Goodwill, observation, or preparation to feed — unknown. Every night it recites books from the lost archive to him — though sometimes it recites a book that should not exist.
What happened in this life
- On the first day of the Convergence he went back for a ledger and lost Milte. The great clock melted and stopped at 4:17, and he copies that time out every day since.
- A rift swallowed the Record House undercroft and a thousand years of records went with it. From that day he has been the last scribe.
- Hum settled into the ruin. He tried to drive it out, then noticed that every night it recites one more book from the lost archive — and decided to live alongside it.
Diaries
This person has not written yet.