Adept Corren's Survey Ledger

The Listening College surveyor's field ledger, left in the abandoned camp — two galleries mapped in a careful hand, then the hand goes ragged at the moment they understood the count had turned to the living.

The first pages are exactly what a College mapper is trusted for: clean elevations of the dry hall, the correction gallery's rack-count, resonance readings taken at four stations and tabled without comment. Careful, patient, untouched by wonder — Corren measures a thing without letting it measure back. Then the hand changes. 'Cross-checked a strike against the town rolls to date the engine's drift. It does not drift. The record I dated is not old. It is this season.' A gap. Then, smaller, pressed hard: 'Read three more. Two dead, one living. The living one has a date on it. Checked it twice. It is not recording the death. It is setting it.' And last, barely a line, the ink dragged: 'It is not recording. It is scheduling. I am in the rolls. I did not put myself there. I am going up.' There the ledger ends. The brazier by it is long cold. Corren did not come back for the notes.