There were no brackets, no gilded heraldic frames, and no royal crowns stamped around the letters that formed two feet above the frosted pewter basin.
The script was the deep, unblinking slate-blue of wet river basalt when the sun strikes a newly split quarry face, rendered in the square, chisel-cut capitals that Jon and Sister Oda had seen scraped half away on the brass viewing panel down in the subterranean ring chamber:
KEEPER PETITION RECEIVED
Beneath that primary line, three secondary lines of smaller blue stone-script scrolled steadily across the shadowed air between Jon’s chest and the sleeping Returner on the cot, audible in the room as a low, rhythmic clicking like an abacus frame tallying stone weights in an archive vault:
CUSTODIAL AUTHORITY: RIVER LANTERN COMMONS (FIFTY REGISTERED SHARES) PRIMARY WITNESSES VERIFIED: LORR, S.; ODA; HALE, E.; BRAM, A. MIGRATION OF SAVE-POINT ANCHOR INITIATED — 12% ... 18% ... 24%
Outside the outer salt circle, Lady Signe Lorr stood up slowly from her high-backed oak chair, her court portfolio pressed against her blue velvet breast as she stared at the glowing blue lines hanging in the lamp-lit room.
“By the First Covenant,” the magistrate breathed, her judicial composure cracking into pure, scholar’s astonishment as she read the archaic syntax of the secondary lines. “It is the original municipal registry language from before the Kingdom of the White Rose was even founded. The Crown artificers did not invent the return engine, Sister Oda. They merely bolted a military override lock…
