The Morkinstar Journals Fourteen gods. Fourteen monsters. Thirteen names. https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/anthology Siddharth Pandalai The Legend Of K'öæluæ's Scales https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/legend-of-koaeluae-scales The Directory · 1,804 words. A galactic field reporter transcribes why it snows on a frozen planet — a fire serpent, a water god, and the fisherwoman who talked one of them out of giving up. The Ninety-Nine Names Of Silence https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/ninety-nine-names-of-silence The Directory · 1,891 words. On the coldest world in Alpha Axmoiri, everything has ninety-nine names, and once a click ninety-eight of them are gone. A deaf child, a god with no name of his own, and the invention of writing as an act of war. The Tide That Owes https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-tide-that-owes The Directory · 1,988 words. A queen borrowed nine days of ocean to end a famine. Nobody wrote down the terms. Four thousand clicks later, the sea is still collecting. The Word Marltains Do Not Have https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-word-marltains-do-not-have The Directory · 2,519 words. The Directory logged the Marltain binary wrong, and I repeated the error. Here is the correction, and the story of the first Marltain to be one. The Arm Shake https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-arm-shake The Directory · 1,907 words. I made a joke about this system in Entry #2245. Then I came here and found out that the hug is not a greeting. It is a test, it has been running for four thousand clicks, and it has never been switched off. The Standing Dead https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-standing-dead The Directory · 2,581 words. On Jötunheimr the dead do not lie down. They are surveyed, aimed, and set into a line four thousand clicks long, and the line is still being extended, and I made the mistake of asking what it points at. The Kindling https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-kindling The Directory · 2,644 words. Every ninth generation, an entire civilisation burns everything it has ever written. They keep one page. A child writes it. I read the oldest one and then I did something I have never done in 2284 entries. Two Suns, One Shadow https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/two-suns-one-shadow The Directory · 2,832 words. On Solvei the word for god and the word for monster are the same word, inflected by which way you are standing. I went to file a linguistic curiosity. I came back with an arithmetic problem. The World With No Number https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-world-with-no-number The Directory · 1,283 words. I found a world that is not in the Directory. It has people on it. They are well. They have no gods, no monsters, and no word for why. This is the shortest entry I have ever filed. Why We Measure Time In Hells https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/why-we-measure-time-in-hells The Directory · 2,419 words. Four hundred entries of filing complaints about a conversion table that does not multiply out. I finally went and asked in person. The error is not an error. It is a headstone. The Second Chair https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-second-chair The Ninety-One Pages · 2,262 words. I bought wood, I borrowed a number I did not earn, and I wrote down the first thing that has never been on file anywhere: a man nine decks down and what he eats for breakfast. The Weather They Made Up https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-weather-they-made-up The Ninety-One Pages · 2,048 words. On a Concluded world where nobody wonders about anything any more, one family still waits for a rain that was never real, and their children are the only children on the planet who ask why. The Cold Case Of All Fourteen https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-cold-case-of-all-fourteen The Ninety-One Pages · 2,041 words. A civilisation of detectives hands an outsider their oldest cold case: twenty eight murders, one night, no suspects, four thousand clicks unsolved. I got close enough to the answer that I wish I hadn't. The Last Thing He Taught Them https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-last-thing-he-taught-them The Ninety-One Pages · 2,153 words. A god announced the hour he would stop, three hundred clicks out, and spent every one of them teaching a room full of people to do his job. They finished the syllabus. They did not finish in time. What You Have Not Said Out Loud https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/what-you-have-not-said-out-loud The Ninety-One Pages · 2,364 words. On Threnn a thing can only hurt you if you have not said it out loud, so they say everything, immediately, to whoever is near. They noticed I was not doing that. I left anyway. The Weight Of The Case https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-weight-of-the-case The Ninety-One Pages · 1,381 words. I weighed the case. Then I weighed the pages. Then I weighed the case with nothing in it. The numbers do not add up the way numbers are supposed to, and I have decided the honest thing to do about that is write down the numbers and nothing else. Six Worlds, Six Fences https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/six-worlds-six-fences The Ninety-One Pages · 1,932 words. I promised to keep measuring and report the result either way. I reported a negative from Entry #2300. It was true and it was not the whole answer, and Ossul owns a sewing kit that proved it. The One That Stayed Open https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-one-that-stayed-open The Ninety-One Pages · 2,158 words. One world pulled back from Concluded. They did it by breaking their own calendar on purpose and forbidding anyone, ever, from fixing it. I met the woman who explains why, and I still cannot tell you if she is right. Someone Has Been Reading https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/someone-has-been-reading The Ninety-One Pages · 2,511 words. Two figures in my own ink, in a case only I open, corrected themselves while the lid was shut. Nineteen days from any dock, I run the suspects. The Back Of The Case https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-back-of-the-case The Ninety-One Pages · 2,400 words. I wrote the last page of this case thirty-two pages before I had any right to reach it, and put the one word I have refused all season somewhere it will never be spoken aloud again. Then I went and found out a unit of time has been assigned a length for the first time since the Directory was founded, and nobody will say why. The Page About Ossul https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-page-about-ossul The Kindling · 892 words. I wrote the last page of this case first and forgot what that did to the count. Tonight I found out, and the first thing out of the case is the first thing that ever went in: a meal, a stone, and a word I can no longer read my own handwriting well enough to burn honestly. A World That Asks The Dead One Question https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/a-world-that-asks-the-dead-one-question The Kindling · 798 words. Page twelve was a world I never filed: one question, once, to your dead, a stone you spend a lifetime arguing with, and a woman who tended other people's smoke for forty years because she could not get her own question down past three lines. The Lesson He Does Not Reread https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-lesson-he-does-not-reread The Kindling · 978 words. Page sixteen is Ilmarrow, and the god who taught his own replacements until he ran out of time by exactly one lesson. I am holding it, I am not going to reread it, and I will tell you the real reason why. The Thing I Did Not Say On Threnn https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-thing-i-did-not-say-on-threnn The Kindling · 447 words. Page twenty three is Threnn, the one world where saying a thing out loud is the cure, and a woman who offered twice to sit and hear mine. The Shortest Page In The Case https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-shortest-page-in-the-case The Kindling · 280 words. The shortest page in the case is one sentence and an apology for being one sentence. It went faster than I could explain why I wrote it. The Table That Was The Entire Entry https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-table-that-was-the-entire-entry The Kindling · 802 words. Page thirty was never a story, only a table: three weighings and a difference that would not sit still. Tonight I run it one more time before it goes, and the case comes out heavier than the paper in it. The World That Named It After Me https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-world-that-named-it-after-me The Kindling · 804 words. A marsh world I visited once, wrote down, and left. Long after, it gave its unnamed fourteenth a name, and the name was mine. The Wall With The Number On It https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-wall-with-the-number-on-it The Kindling · 370 words. Page forty seven was the good one. The Vedrei carve their cost into a wall and resurface it every generation so nobody stops reading it. He has no wall. He is about to have less of one. The Only Page I Did Not Write Alone https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-only-page-i-did-not-write-alone The Kindling · 1,097 words. Page sixty-one is the only page in this case I did not write alone. I built a very good reason to keep it, and then burned it exactly like the other eighty-nine. The Map I Never Showed Them https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-map-i-never-showed-them The Kindling · 887 words. Page thirty eight is six worlds, six fences, and three old wars nobody knows they are still fighting. He is the only entity who has ever seen all six lines on one table, and in a minute there will be nobody who has. Four Names And Nothing Else https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/four-names-and-nothing-else The Kindling · 580 words. Page seventy three is four names in his hand and nothing else. He can place two of them. He tries very hard on the other two, and loses, and cannot decide whose fault that is. The Page Where I Worked It Out https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-page-where-i-worked-it-out The Kindling · 947 words. Page fifty eight is where I ruled out everyone who could have reached the case and worked out, in my own hand, that an archive of one author is a self portrait. I am burning the only proof I understood that, and there will be no way to tell, once it is ash, whether that makes me right or simply lucky. The Name Goes Last https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-name-goes-last The Kindling · 1,100 words. Page ninety-one is the last page in the case, the fourteenth's name, written once and on purpose in the one place he was certain nobody would ever go. Tonight the fire is that place too, and he knows it, and says so before he lets it burn. One Page Kept https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/one-page-kept The Kindling · 891 words. The case is empty, and the rule says he has to keep one page holding something nobody has ever written down. He goes looking for that in everything he has ever been, finds nothing, and understands, at last, what the only unwritten thing left in this case could only ever be. The Line It Plays When It Cannot See You https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-line-it-plays-when-it-cannot-see-you The Standing Charge · 2,110 words. I cannot get through a fare gate in this city, because there is nothing of me for the gate to resolve. So it plays me a recorded courtesy instead. The courtesy is a sentence I wrote when I was young because I thought it sounded professional, and there is a licence code stencilled under the speaker. The Fourth Riser https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-fourth-riser The Standing Charge · 1,944 words. Every public stair in this city has one riser cut to the wrong height, always the fourth from the top, and it is in the building code, and everybody trips. I went to find out who it was granted for. Then a stair inspector let me hold her tape and showed me a flight that predates the code by a very long way, and it is already wrong. Read As A Fever https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/read-as-a-fever The Standing Charge · 2,099 words. This city holds a number for what an Ombri body ought to be doing. The number is correct, it is applied consistently, and every reading it was averaged from was taken off somebody in the middle of the worst thing that happens to them. I copied that ledger into an entry myself, a very long time ago, and did not think about it again. The Queue With No Front https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-queue-with-no-front The Standing Charge · 2,224 words. In this district you join a queue at its middle and it grows outward at both ends, so nobody is ever first and nobody is ever last, and the whole arrangement is a third slower than a line with a front. I asked why. The answer is a byelaw, and I have filed the shape of it before, on a world where nobody halved. It Rains At Fourteen Past https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/it-rains-at-fourteen-past The Standing Charge · 2,100 words. It rains indoors on this level at fourteen minutes past, every tick, and nine generations have grown up under it saying an ancestor made the rain up and it came true. The filing that actually does it is public and took me an hour. I did not say so out loud, and I am not going to pretend to you that I can account for why. Field Fourteen Is Disabled https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/field-fourteen-is-disabled The Standing Charge · 2,026 words. The residency return in this city still asks every resident to list their fourteen monsters, and it gives them thirteen boxes and a fourteenth that has been greyed out. I went to find the person who greyed it. She had checked properly before she did it, she was right, and she asked me for the one piece of evidence I cannot produce. Fourteen Parts, By Volume https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/fourteen-parts-by-volume The Standing Charge · 2,047 words. The air in every public room in this jurisdiction is one blend, fourteen parts by volume, weighted off a headcount somebody took at the merge. Nobody is comfortable in it. Everybody is survivable in it. I went down to the plant that mixes it for a third of the city, expecting something broken, and found the best run room I have ever stood in. The Doors She Maintains And Cannot Use https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-doors-she-maintains-and-cannot-use The Standing Charge · 2,171 words. They built a whole district at the scale of the largest people in the city, and then the largest people in the city could not afford to live in it, and the arithmetic that did it is four lines long and every line of it is correct. Halkri comes in to service the door mechanisms. She likes the job. She told me twice, because she could see exactly what I was trying to do with her. The Levy With No Instrument https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-levy-with-no-instrument The Standing Charge · 2,185 words. There is a ground levy on the Rows, collected every quarter, forever, and the document that created it does not exist and never has. It took me an afternoon to find that out. Rœst has known it for eleven years, and she keeps the working folded in her pocket, and she asked me not to write it, and I did not. Every Sentence Where He Was Not Sure https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/every-sentence-where-he-was-not-sure The Standing Charge · 2,103 words. They did not read my corpus. They loaded it. Every sentence had to land in a column, and there is no column for a sentence a man was not sure about, so all of mine went into a reject log instead, and the reject log is longer than the thing it was rejected from. A clerk called Ummi has read every line of it, in order, and nothing else of mine at all. The File That Keeps Me https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-file-that-keeps-me The Standing Charge · 2,130 words. I went down to look up my own accreditation, expecting a lapse date and a code and something to be sad about in an orderly way. It has not lapsed. It was put in the wrong drawer by somebody who is long dead, and a file in that drawer cannot be closed while the survey is open, and nobody ever wrote an end date on mine. The Thing In The Stacks https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-thing-in-the-stacks The Standing Charge · 2,106 words. The record in this city has a weight, and the floors under it are being reinforced on a programme with no end date, and the load figure is published every quarter because it is a safety notice. Osvær took me eleven minutes' walk to show me the mark on the pillar, and put his thumb in this year's cut without being asked, and told me about the thing in the deep aisles, which is a joke they tell new starters so they are careful with the manifests. Nine Days On The Unrendered Mile https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/nine-days-on-the-unrendered-mile The Standing Charge · 2,100 words. I had nine ticks on a street this city does not serve, where nobody can perceive anybody and everybody manages anyway, and the whole time I was there not one person had to do anything for me that they do not already do for each other. There is a waiting list. There is also a service charge, and there is no version of me that can pay it. The Corner That Lifts https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/the-corner-that-lifts The Standing Charge · 2,098 words. I went back to the wall I started on, on the one day of its cycle when the primer was already coming down the row toward me. So the thing I posted today had about nine minutes on it. I want to tell you what I worked out while I stood there, because I have not felt this light in a very long time. The Restatement https://cv-siddharth.vercel.app/read/pilot-the-restatement [unassigned] · 726 words. Four documents. Three offices. One figure, correct at every step down. The objection period closed with nothing filed against it, and the notice board was cleared for repainting on the next scheduled pass.