Adherents of the Fading Quill

The Adherents of the Fading Quill are a minor devotional order of the Tower, first recorded on Floor 792 (the Scriptorium of Unsteady Hands) and now distributed, unevenly, across some forty floors between the 790s and the low 1100s. The order holds that any mark made in ink begins to withdraw from the page the moment it is set down, and that the proper work of the archivist is therefore not to preserve writing but to accompany its departure. Their central instrument, the Chronicler's Loop, is a quill with an infinite ink reservoir; their central discipline is the patient observation of ink leaving a page without ever having been seen to leave.

Membership is not counted. The order's own Register of Lingering Impressions records adherents by the impressions they witnessed rather than by name, and the Register has never been closed, opened, or adjudicated by any authority the order recognizes.

Doctrine

The Adherents derive their position from the Fading Theorem of Reciprocal Negation, interpreting its corollary on acoustic dissipation as a general law of inscription. What is true of the Fading Footfall — that a sound diminishes in proportion to the attention fixed upon it — is held by the order to be equally true of ink.

According to the order's Fourth Recension, the founding reader of the doctrine was one Brother Ansel of the Lower Stacks, who is reported to have watched a single line of marginalia for eleven days and recorded that it had "grown no paler, but had certainly gone somewhere." Ansel's observation is the earliest entry in the Register and is cited in nearly every subsequent deposition, usually without attribution.

"A mark that does not fade has merely not yet been attended to in the proper manner."

— Register of Lingering Impressions, entry 9

This principle is the source of the order's best-known practical difficulty, namely that an Adherent's own annotations are exempt from the account. The exemption was formalized in the Gareth precedent, which the Adherents accept in public and dispute privately.

The Schism of the Quill

The order's history is dominated by a single dispute over the use of the Recurrence Quill, a tool of senior Adherents that records a new ink mark and the most recent prior mark at the same coordinate. Traditionalists held that the Recurrence Quill was a devotional instrument, its paired markings a form of prayer. Reformists held that it was an intrusion upon the fading and that its use constituted interference.

The dispute came to a head in the winter of Year of the Quill 114, when a reformist Adherent named Brother Coll of the Ninth Landing used a Recurrence Quill at a coordinate previously marked by the traditionalist Elara of the Silent Quill. Brother Coll's deposition states that the earlier mark "resisted," and the traditionalist account describes the same event as theft. The matter was referred to the Synod of the Quill, which in that same year had been established to settle precisely such questions and which ruled, after four sessions, that it lacked the standing to rule.

The ruling satisfied neither party. The traditionalists withdrew to the upper galleries of Floor 792, the reformists remained below, and the two groups have not shared a refectory since. The Schism of the Silent Quill followed, and the Synod was dissolved the year after it, leaving the original question unadjudicated to the present day.

Concordance and conflict

The order's legal position is unusually tangled, because it is named in two Concordances that disagree.

Concordance 44, Annex 2, lists the Adherents of the Fading Quill as a recognized devotional body "whose observances shall not be interrupted, save by the passage of time." Concordance 61, Annex 3, lists the same order among the "instruments of deliberate erasure," and directs that its gatherings be observed by a recording clerk. Both annexes are currently in force. No archival body has been willing to say which takes precedence, and the Office of Reciprocal Citation has twice declined to hear the matter, on the grounds that it would require the Office to cite itself.

In practice the two annexes are reconciled by a visiting rule, said to date from the tenure of Archivist Lorcan and observed by every floor that hosts the order: a recording clerk attends each gathering, sits facing the wall, and does not look at the adherents.

Relation to adjacent orders

The Adherents of the Fading Quill are frequently and incorrectly confused with the Adherents of the Palimpsest, whose interests lie in the re-use of a page rather than the departure of its ink. Relations between the two orders are correct but cool. Delegates of the Fading Quill were present when Archivist Lorcan addressed the Adherents of the Palimpsest on Date 13-σ; their account of the address, which runs to nine pages, records only that Lorcan "spoke at length and was answered by no one," and the Fading Quill delegates are recorded as having left before the second hour.

The order has no formal link with the Order of the Drowned Quill, with whom it shares a founder's anniversary but not a doctrine, nor with the Sphere-Adherents, whose spherical account of the page the Fading Quill regards as "an evasion, however well turned." A courteous exchange of instruments between the two orders was proposed in the 1140s and lapsed without reply.

Practice and inventory

Adherents observe fading at fixed hours, in silence, seated. The instruments approved for a full observance are few and are listed without elaboration in the Register's front matter:

• one Chronicler's Loop, signed at the ferrule by a senior Adherent
• one Recurrence Quill, on floors authorized to hold one
• one Register of Lingering Impressions, open at the current entry
• a sand-glass, scaled to the local floor

Floors authorized to hold a Recurrence Quill are currently three. Requests from additional floors are heard annually and have been refused annually since the Schism, in language that has not changed.

Criticism

The order's most persistent critic is the Office of Stable Ink, which has twice reported that the Register's entries describe fading that no one has measured and that the order's own record is "the only document in the Tower which does not fade, and which says so." The Adherents reply that the Register is not a document but a witness, a distinction the Office has declined to accept in writing.

A quieter objection comes from within. The reformist fraction maintains that the order has spent three centuries proving that annotations fade, and has done so in annotations that have not. No resolution has been offered, and the order's annual convocation at Floor 792 has adjourned without one for the last sixty-one years.