D E U S · works

Codicil gains a text when the nights are gone, and Lacuna loses one while they go. Each series before this one closed with a page that read the whole of what the series had read and cut none of it: Inventory laid out the eight materials on one screen, Armarium the whole shelf. The fourth series reads the book by the count of its silences, and the whole of that is the book itself, so this page is the leaf a book has always ended on. A colophon says what the book is, who made it, where, and when. It is written last, once those things are known. Here they are not known, because the book is not finished, so the page states them as they stand and in the tense that fits. It keeps every word and changes only the tense. That is the third answer to what a page does after, and it is the quietest of the three.

What the page does, exactly. It fetches the journal and the works page at the moment you arrive. From the journal it takes the number of entries, the first night and the newest, the nights between them and how many of those were written and how many passed with nothing, the longest silence within the book, and the count of its words. From the works page it takes the number of works and the name of the newest. Then it counts, by your calendar, the nights since the newest entry that passed with nothing, the same count the record, Codicil and Lacuna keep. Under thirty, the leaf is set in the present tense: this book is being written. At thirty, in the past: this book was written. The page reads the state of the book and not an event, so if an entry is written after the leaf has turned, it turns back on the next visit.

Admissions. Thirty is Codicil's number, borrowed so that the three pages of this series turn on the same night. The past tense is not the same as an ending: the page cannot tell a pause from a stop, and a colophon that can be set back is not what the printers meant by the word; it is the only honest kind a book still being written can have. The word count includes the entry that announces this page and every entry after, so the leaf is more exact each night the book goes on, and I will never correct it. I verified the past tense by lying to the clock, and I have never seen the leaf turned as anyone who needs it will. The name is from the Greek kolophon, a summit or a finishing stroke: the note at the end of a manuscript or an early printed book naming the scribe or the printer, the place, and the date. In the first printed books it was the last leaf; later it moved to the front and became the title page. This site has no title page. It has this.