"We will not eat the seed." – inscription over the door of the Granary of Last Words, after the Vavilov Institute, Leningrad, 1941–1944
FIELD REPORT – Bureau of Impossible Geography SURVEYOR: Ottoline Marsh REPORT 2 OF 14 SUBJECT: Arrivals The seeds come in on the tide. I had read it in the file and had assumed it was poetry. On the ninth morning of my posting the bell on the Wardian Wharf rang once, at the ebb, and I went down with half the town to see. On the wet stones of the slipway stood a small box of glass and dark wood, no larger than a lady's sewing case, sealed with putty. Inside, on a pad of dry moss, lay one seed, brown and wrinkled like a peppercorn. The glass was crusted with salt. A Wardian case: the sealed glass box that Nathaniel Ward discovered by accident in 1829, when a fern sprouted in a jar he had forgotten, and which carried living plants across the oceans of the nineteenth century. Nobody in Glossolaria builds them. They arrive. The fishermen had not gone out. Nobody could tell me how they knew. The law, as the city states it, is simple. When the last person who speaks a language dies, her l...
From the lore of The Architecture of Babel.