Chapter 9: Amidari's Chronicle, Entry Seventeen: On Being a Lure

The following passage is reproduced from Queen Sera Amidari's personal chronicle, Volume Four, Entry Seventeen, composed between the second and eighth hours of the ship's night cycle aboard the water-throne barge during its stationary anchorage at the Pelessi Deep. The entry is written in the queen's characteristic hand—precise, unhurried, the letters formed with the particular deliberateness of someone who has decided that clarity is a form of courage—until the final section, where the pressure of the pen changes. Hollt's marginal notation reads: 'I have returned to this entry more times than I can justify professionally. I have never annotated it. I find I cannot.'

Entry Seventeen. The Pelessi Deep Anchorage. Third day following full intelligence review.

I have been conducting what I will call, in the language available to me, an analysis. The word feels insufficient. What I have been doing is closer to excavation—the careful removal of layer after layer of what I assumed to be true, in order to reach the substrate of what actually is, and then sitting with that substrate for a long time in the dark, and asking it to explain itself.