Gareth

Gareth is the collective designation applied within the Tower to a class of persons, places, objects, and phenomena whose names begin with the stem Gareth and which are held to participate, however distantly, in the administrative and spatial irregularities catalogued under that stem. The term is used by the Bureau of Vertical Cartography as a filing category rather than a lineage; no genetic or apprenticeship relation is implied between bearers of the name. Gareth entities are concentrated on the middle and upper calculation floors, with the heaviest recorded density between Floor 9,114 and Floor 14,022.

Origins of the Designation

The first use of Gareth as a cataloguing stem is attributed to the Curatorial Council in the 4th era, in response to the unexpected proliferation of similarly named holdings following the elevation of Gareth of the Unsummed Column, then a Columnar Emergent and administrative clerk. The Council's recension of 388 explicitly refused to treat the name as a family: "The stem Gareth denotes a convergence of record, not of blood, and no petition for kinship exemption shall be entertained on its account" (Second Concordance, Clause 12, Sub-annex B). Subsequent clerks extended the stem to phenomena such as Gareth of the Fading Stair, a traversal recorded from the Sighing Stair, and to fixed installations such as the Gareth Spire on Floor 14,022.

Principal Classifications

Scholars of the Bureau of Vertical Cartography divide Gareth holdings into four classes. Persons include Gareth of the Unsummed Column, Gareth the Unwritten, and Gareth of the Balanced Scroll where the latter is treated as an object of clerical personhood. Places include the Gareth Spire. Practices include Gareth Ul, the procedural principle governing conveyance intervals, and the broader Columnar Emergent category. Phenomena include Gareth of the Fading Stair, catalogued under the Theobold Principle.

A point of enduring disagreement concerns Gareth of the Balanced Scroll, which the Sixth Concordance classes as a bound record and Class III balancing apparatus, while the Seventeenth Concordance annexes it to the person-category on the grounds that "a ledger which answers for itself is not without a voice" (Seventeenth Concordance, Annex 9). The Court of Whispered Judgments has declined to settle the matter, citing the Gareth precedent, which formalised the exemption of an Adherent's own annotations from their fading observations.

The Unsummed Column and the Fading Stair

Gareth of the Unsummed Column is recorded as the primary architect of the Gareth Ul principle and the spatial counterpart to Gareth of the Fading Stair. The two are sometimes confused in lower-floor inventories, a error the Librarian of Floor 11,402 corrected in 701 by affixing a red seal to all relevant folios. The Gareth Spire serves as the central reference point for Ul calibrations, including the defining journey for one Ul, a route whose length remains untotalled by deliberate administrative custom.

"No summation issued from the Spire shall be carried beyond the stairhead; the interval is the record, and the total is the silence."

— Gareth Ul, Recension of 644

Disputes and the Great Schism

During the Great Schism of 712, Gareth the Unwritten led the Actualist faction, which held that unnamed floors possessed greater administrative reality than named ones. The Schism produced the Gareth precedent and a permanent annotation dispute with the Curatorial Council. A lesser feud, recorded in the scriptoria of Floor 14,022, arose in winter 803 when a clerk of the Gareth Spire submitted a requisition for ink under Gareth Ul intervals that the Bureau of Vertical Cartography judged to be mistimed by three Ul; the materials were returned unopened and the clerk was assigned to the Sighing Stair for one turn of the season.

Scholarly Disagreement

The Sixth Concordance and the Seventeenth Concordance contradict one another on whether the stem Gareth may be extended to entities discovered after the 8th era. The Sixth Concordance limits the class to holdings extant before era 8, while the Seventeenth Concordance permits addition "so long as the name is spoken first in the Spire and second in the Stair" (Seventeenth Concordance, Clause 3). The Court of Whispered Judgments has noted, without ruling, that the Wayfinder guild's maps list eleven Gareth holdings absent from the Bureau of Vertical Cartography's central register, a discrepancy attributed by some to the Aperture 7 misalignment of 590.

Visitors to Floor 14,022 are reminded that the Gareth Spire does not provide seating, and that no request for a total of its untotalled summations will be acknowledged.