Conditional Sigils

Conditional Sigils are a principal class of sigils under the Third Concordance, employed throughout the Tower to bind a recorded subject to a condition of existence, cessation, or revision rather than to a fixed fact. Unlike Operational Sigils, which confirm a process and maintain that confirmation against reversal, Conditional Sigils suspend certainty and declare a holding to be true only under terms enumerated at the time of inscription. They are administered through the Clerks of the Conditional Tense and stored in the Conditional Authority Vault.

Classification and the Third Concordance

The Third Concordance distinguishes Heraldic Sigils from Operational and Conditional Sigils and forbids bearing one in the posture of another. Within its three principal classes, Conditional Sigils occupy the category of marks "whose truth is rented, not owned" (Third Concordance, Annex 7, Clause 3). The Dewey-Sigil System further classifies numerous subordinate types as Conditional Sigils, including Tonal Sigils, used to register the properties of Tonal subjects, and Pressure-Gradient Sigils, which quantify Bibliostatic Pressure by inductive comparison across paired specimens. Buttress Sigils, though governed as Conditional Sigils under the Dewey-Sigil System, are in practice a specialized category of Operational Sigils applied to Buttress Junctures; the resulting ambiguity has never been resolved by recension.

The Certification of Integrated Sigils requires that any Conditional Sigil submitted for archiving bear a termination clause, even where the Clerk certifies that no termination is foreseen. The Lexicon of Conditional Phrases supplies the approved formulae, of which the most common remains unless the floor turns, a phrase first standardized on Floor 1188-B in the winter of the 442nd Archive Year.

Administration and the Clerks

Day-to-day inscription of Conditional Sigils falls to the Clerks of the Conditional Tense, an order whose seniority is measured by the number of unresolved conditions each Clerk maintains. Clerk Vento Pall of Floor 771-K held a record 3,114 open conditions until the Conditional Authority annulled 2,900 of them without notice in the 511th Archive Year, on the grounds that "a condition unread for forty winters is a condition asleep" (Conditional Authority, Directive 12). Pall's subsequent grievance, filed in triplicate with the Obsidian Guard, was denied on the basis that the Directive had itself been conditionally issued.

All master impressions are lodged in the Conditional Authority Vault, a climate-stable annex whose apertures are marked in alpha, beta, and gamma. The Vault's custodians rotate quarterly; a Clerk may not inspect their own submissions. Visitors to the Vault are permitted to read, but not to lean.

Disputed Applications

Scholarly disagreement persists as to whether Tactile Sigils belong among Conditional Sigils. The Dewey-Sigil System omits them from the Conditional register, and the Acoustic Cartography Unit has argued, through its use of Diagnostic Sigils, that Tactile Sigils are distinct from both Operational Sigils and Pressure-Gradient Sigils. The Clerks of the Conditional Tense counter that any sigil requiring contact to be read is inherently conditional upon the reader's hand. The dispute is recorded without resolution in Concordance marginalia.

A second contention concerns the Delta (Δ) Sigil, which some assert to be a Conditional Sigil of revision and others a Heraldic mark of the Sigils of the Obsidian Guard. The Third Concordance forbids bearing a Heraldic Sigil in the posture of a Conditional one, and three Clerks were censured on Floor 902-A for exactly this inversion before the censure was itself conditionally withdrawn.

Incidents of Reversal

On the 3rd of Deepwinter, 488th Archive Year, a Pressure-Gradient Sigil pair on Floor 224-S inverted without clerkly action, reducing the local Bibliostatic Pressure below the threshold at which Conditional Sigils hold. Forty-one holdings catalogued as "true unless counter-read" ceased and were briefly absent from the archive. The Conditional Authority ruled the absence non-existent, citing Clause 9 of the Third Concordance, and the holdings were re-inscribed by the Certification of Integrated Sigils office the following dawn.

"A Conditional Sigil does not lie; it merely agrees to be corrected, and correction is a form of loyalty to the floor."

— Clerks of the Conditional Tense, Winter Recension 3

Relation to Unsanctioned Marks

Where a Conditional Sigil is inscribed without the assent of the Conditional Authority, it is reclassified among Unsanctioned Sigils and removed to a separate ledger. The Dewey-Sigil System makes no accommodation for such reclassification, and the discrepancy has produced three separate annexes of objection, none of which has been repealed. It is nevertheless the settled practice that a Conditional Sigil lacking a termination clause and a Clerk's seal is not a sigil at all, but a note, and notes are the province of the scriptoria, not the archive.