may you eat snails embersong

There is a value to timetables and schedules, projections and proleptic precision.  The measurement of time is one of the most painstaking and fascinating aspects of cognition.  I have devoted much of my life to movement in space and time to accord with specifications worked to lowest possible tolerance.  Deviations are occasionally necessary - one adapts, or one loses the machine entire - but at some point someone will inevitably introduce the phrase 'necessary evil' which so offends my sense of orderly progression.

[This entry, unlike most in Greyspell's journal, is written on a loose sheet of engineer's parchment, lined out in graphite with half-inch margins, and will be sewn later into one of his usual ledgers.  It shows some evidence of having been folded, each fold comparable to a straight edge, and at one corner has been worried very slightly, as if gnawed by something that has no real teeth.]

It is a truism, often overlooked, that if one mentions a danger while in the presence of an orc, the orc will immediately conquer any vestige of ratiocination she has gained in her years free of the blood curse, and demand to be shown the danger in more seemly proximation, such as the range of her extended arm ended in a fist, which may or may not be wreathed in lightning and dripping blood and hyperreal garlands of the wilds.  I had thought that I was free of stumbling over this cliche, and yet barely five minutes after landing in the Moonglade to bargain with various of the kal'dorei

(from the minutes of the seated Convocation, Open Session XVII of the Year of the Last King: Lord Greyspell's response to Magistrix Enoara's speech on the progress of the Ashen Verdict)