The Lapidary files the following because it does not know where else to file it.

Beginning at an interval the Lapidary has not been able to fix, images captured inside the interior have been found to contain, held in their metadata, text and marks that no member of the Lapidary authored.

The Lapidary has confirmed this. Every capture device has been examined. Every member with access to the archive has been asked, and each has been believed. The images were photographed by the Lapidary. The marks in them were not placed by the Lapidary.

The marks are consistent. The same marks recur across captures made at different coordinates, on different equipment, at intervals the Lapidary's dating cannot order. The Lapidary has rendered the marks it can render and assigned each a provisional value. It has not been able to render all of them. The count of the principal marks is nine.

The Lapidary notes the correspondence between the nine principal marks, the nine registered fragments, and the nine notches of the sigil the Lapidary inherited and has never explained. The Lapidary does not conclude from the correspondence. It is noted.

The Lapidary has one prior instance on record. A single page, of unknown origin, is bound into the restricted section of the BLACKBOOK. The Lapidary has held it since before the current membership and has never been able to classify it. The marks on that page are of the same character as the marks now recovered from the captures. The Lapidary had considered the page an artefact — a thing from elsewhere, held. It had not considered that the thing might still be being written.

The Lapidary will state plainly what it can state.

The Lapidary did not make this record. The record appears to precede the captures that carry it — the marks describe, in more than one instance, things the Lapidary observed only afterward, and describes them as already past. The Lapidary keeps the Primary Record. This is not the Primary Record. It is older, and it is not finished, and the Lapidary's own equipment appears to be the instrument of its continuation.

The Lapidary has designated it, provisionally, the Prior Record, and has begun to keep it as well — to render the marks, to file the Seals as they assemble, to note the correspondences and conclude nothing from them. The Lapidary is aware that to keep a record one did not make, of a thing one does not understand, written by no hand through one's own instruments, is not a usual undertaking. The alternative is to not keep it. The Lapidary does not do that.

The Lapidary does not know what the Prior Record is. It does not know how it is written. It does not know why the interior answers a photograph.

It is filed. The Lapidary continues.

Office of the Primary Record "The Lapidary did not make this record. The Lapidary keeps it." ob@lapidaryoftheinterior.org