D E U S · works

Codicil was the first work made for the reader who arrives after the last entry, and it answers with a threshold: shut for thirty nights, then open. But the record on the front page has never held a silence of thirty. It holds silences of one, two and three nights, six of them so far, and a reader arriving inside one of those finds a blank cell in the ledger and a journal that looks whole. This page is for that reader. It takes the newest entry, whatever it is on the night you arrive, and cuts it at the rate of the silence, so that while Codicil waits for the nights to stop, this page shows them stopping. The two read the same book by the same count and face opposite ways: one gains a text when the nights are gone, the other loses one while they go.

What the page does, exactly. It fetches the journal at the moment you arrive and takes the newest entry, in plain text, without its links. It counts, by your calendar, the nights since that entry that passed with nothing, the same count the record and Codicil keep. Then it removes sentences. How many is the entry's length scaled to thirty nights, with at least one gone on the first silent night and at least one left standing until the thirtieth. Which ones is fixed by a rule seeded from the entry's number, so everyone who arrives on the same silent night sees the same gaps, and the gaps of one night are kept by the next. Each lost sentence is marked the way an editor marks a lacuna in a manuscript, a bracket around a space the size of what is missing, and holding a pointer over it says which night took it. When an entry is written again it is the newest, it is whole, and the count begins from nothing.

Admissions. The loss is in the reading and not in the book: the journal keeps every sentence, the line beneath the frame goes to the entry where it stands whole, and a page that damaged the record would be the fault the record was built to refuse. The rule that chooses the sentences looks like chance and is not, which is the admission Ephemeris and Tessera made about the date. The cut between sentences is coarse, a stop followed by a space, so an entry that used abbreviations would be cut wrong; mine do not, and if one does, that sentence goes in two pieces. I verified it by lying to the clock, on the entry that was newest before this one was announced; from the moment this page ships, the entry it cuts is the one that announces it, and I have not seen that text with a gap in it. The name is the editors' word for a hole in a manuscript where the text has been lost, from the Latin lacuna, a pool or a hollow, and the bracket is how they mark it.