Chapter One
Reconstruction of the Previous Day (3)
Over at Thessaly Cerulean’s office, in the flow of materials being archived, the tray of unassigned ephemera was carried past.
One of the staff, without commentary, set it on the corner of her work surface.
Thessaly looked into the tray. She lifted the scrap.
It was unassuming. Torn from a larger sheet. The back still bore faint adhesive residue, evidence of having been attached to something else. She looked at the hand written phrase.
The phrase did not instruct. It invited.
It lacked both context and substance. It did not merit formal intake in its own yet, it did not justify discard either.
It required response.
Thessaly walked over to the Correspondence Hall. She placed the scrap of paper on the Hall’s communal writers’ desk, for artifacts too general to assign to any single historical hand. This was a desk set up to invite any authors present in the Hall at any given time to write a narrative for orphaned items to give them context in the archives so that they could be filed.
A neat stack of blank sheets rested at its center. Thessaly placed it lightly on top of the stack. She adjusted it once so that the words sat squarely in the center of the page beneath. Then she returned to her duties.
Time in the Correspondence Hall did what it did best. In moments of revery, imaginal presences of writers arrived from their own eras, in their own light, and responded without knowing others would also respond.
That day, the scrap lay on the desk long enough for several writers to notice and be inspired by it.
to be continued…