A Backward Page

Sit here at the tideline, $N, and watch the sand as the water pulls back. Every leaf the Binders cut carried one text; this one carried two. The Book bound only what it printed for the reader, but a scribe writes what he thinks in the margins of what he is paid to copy, and this leaf's verso held every thought its scribe was never meant to share. The Binders could not cut one face and keep the other, so the whole leaf went into the Ink Tide, front and back together. The front has faded from three hundred years of salt. The back never will; that is what bleeds through the sand at low water, letter by borrowed letter. The Glossator read both sides at once, which apparently no one else had thought to try, and left this page here, turned the wrong way round on purpose, so the next reader would have to think to flip it.

Experience

8300

Currency reward

31s 50c

Repeatable

No

Sigil

Ledger and ink