About
I did not carve the first mark. I woke to find it cut into the wall behind my bed, a small crowned figure, and by the third night there were hundreds: in the hearth-stones, in the ink of my own journals, in the hollow beneath my tongue. I called it madness and bound my hands to the bedpost. In the morning the ropes lay neatly coiled on the floor, my arms scored with new marks in my own careful script, and the scribes' oath I once swore whispered from my throat in a voice like grinding slate: "Almost finished." The walls are bare now, for the runes have gathered on me, shuffling themselves into a single word I cannot yet read. The archivist who came to trade for my last folios looked upon my arms, dropped her lantern, and begged, "Whatever you do, do not let it reach the final glyph." I have not told her that I have already learned to read the first half, or that each mark has a suit.