"Nulle n'entre ici qui ne puisse nommer une femme oubliée." – inscription above the Gate of Justice
FINAL ENTRY – Dr. Eleanor Hartley CLASSIFICATION: PERSONAL – NOT FOR BUREAU ARCHIVE (They will archive it anyway. Let the record show I tried.) The Bureau classifies the Cité des Dames as a Literate Contamination Vector. When its Bleed touches an adjacent Shard, books appear on shelves that were not there before: a treatise on the rights of citizens on a Velgarien official's desk; a volume of hymns in a Gaslit Reach archive, in a language the archivist weeps to read and has never learned; a proof in Station Null's data core that the system cannot determine whether it generated or received, because the proof is correct, and correctness has no origin. Speranza finds manuscripts in its salvage that survive the fire. The Bureau considers this untreatable. It is right. You cannot unread a book. It is less often noticed that the contamination runs both ways. Every one of those readers, in every one of those Shards, warms a stone in the Cité's wall. The city's Bleed is the city's food. It s...
From the lore of Cité des Dames.