Extract, translated from the settlement hand. Marginalia preserved. The keeper permitted a copy to be taken and stood in the room while it was taken.
Third keeper, undated, early:
The instruction from my mother’s mother was: write what you see, and never what you expect. I did not understand why she made me say it back to her until the year I wanted very badly to have seen something else.
Third keeper, ninth winter:
Bright ones, in their places. Nothing lost this year. The reckoning stone at the door casts to the second mark at high winter, as it did last year and as it did the year my mother cut it.
Fourth keeper, twenty-second winter:
Two out of the low field since the last count. I have checked the sightline four times and asked Tover to check it once without telling him what I was looking for, and he found the same absence, so it is not my eyes.
Marginal, different ink: I want it written that I did not believe this when I wrote it.
Fourth keeper, thirty-first winter:
Nine gone from the low field. I no longer check four times.
My grandmother’s instruction holds and I am keeping to it, but I will set down one thing that is not a sighting: this is faster than the old books from the ship say a sky is allowed to change. Either the ship’s books are wrong or something is happening to us that is not in them.
Fifth keeper (Vessa), current:
The count continues. I add nothing to my predecessors’ entries and I correct nothing in them, including the entries I believe to be mistaken, because a record that has been improved is not a record.
The roadmaker cartographer asked me today whether the early entries had been adjusted to agree with the later ones. I told her no. She asked how I could be sure. I told her that the ink is four different inks and the hands are four different hands and that a lie would have been tidier.
She went quiet for a while and then asked if she could see the ship’s logs as well.
Marginal: She is the first roadmaker to ask what the records are for before asking what is in them. I have written that down too, since I write what I see.
Note on provenance
The settlement record is continuous, contemporaneous, and unamended, and it is anchored at its start to the node-logs of the ship that brought these people here — which carry their own authentication from a time and place no one can now dispute. That combination is exceedingly rare. Most of the sky has no one who was watching it and wrote it down.
Ostry had someone watching for five generations. That is the whole reason anything could be proved.