"A true stain is darkest at the hours the person was there most. A forged one is dark all over, like a lie." – the Reader-Major
FIELD REPORT – Ferdinand Lusk REPORT 8 OF 14 SUBJECT: The Wall; the Readers; one true thing The old town is called the Hours, and its south wall is four hundred paces of ochre render along a lane where people have sat in the evening sun for six centuries, and the wall has kept every one of them. I went at the last hour before sunset with the Reader-Major, a small white-haired woman called Marrow with one clouded eye and a lens on a ribbon, because she said that was the only hour at which the Wall could be seen, and she was right. In the flat light of midday the wall is a wall. When the sun gets low and rakes along the render, the stains come up out of it: thousands of faint grey shapes of seated people, shoulders, bent heads, a hand lifted, a child's size beside an old man's, darkest where the sitter sat most, overlapping where a daughter took her mother's place on the bench. For the length of the last hour the lane looks occupied by six hundred years of people who are not there, and...
From the lore of The Ledger of Shadows.