Here are seven things I've chased and failed to catch. I've put them together because anyone who read only my conclusions would think this a settled place, and it's far from that.

What else can put a shape in a child

A House places a foundation by holding a template against an opening while it's still in the act of opening. During that window the opening has no shape of its own, and it takes the shape of whatever is nearest, which is usually a House.

I put it to an archivist that a House needn't be the only thing that could be nearest. She agreed, and then declined four separate times to narrow it down, telling me each time that she was declining, and that she wasn't pretending ignorance.

Nobody has yet told me I was wrong, and that makes me uneasy.

Where the iron goes

Ironvale licenses the recovery of iron, and every transfer is logged at a frontier post, in registers open to anyone who walks in and asks to see them.

Roughly a third of all the weight transferred is recorded as institutional acquisition. Each of those entries carries a reference number and no name, and the reference numbers belong to the Registry.

I wrote to the Registry twice. The first reply took eleven days and was courteous and correct. It explained that acquisition records are administrative, and so closed to the public. The second took six days, was shorter, and said the same thing without the explanation.

Nothing improper has been shown. An administrative body may have a perfectly legitimate need for a metal that suppresses Aura, and a third of a very small quantity is still a very small quantity.

Still, it's more than arming a few dozen Wardens would call for, and it has grown over thirty years. Asked a simple question about public records, the Registry chose to refuse when it could have explained. I've had three chances to make a story of that and taken none of them.

What Cross was

A man walked into the Greytower tournament, fought several times, and left.

Nobody could read him. Not one witness from any of the five Houses could say what he was joined to, what tier he stood at, or whether he was a practitioner at all. Duellists who have spent thirty years learning to read an opponent came away describing an absence.

Every theory anyone has offered me has been rejected by someone better placed to judge it than I am, including all five theories the Houses offered about one another.

He had three foundations. He must have, because whatever leaves no signature still had to open somehow, and it opened three times like everyone else's.

I've more notes on Cross than on anything else in these journals, and none of them tells me who he was.

Why the Registry will not delegate an assessment

An assessment settles a practitioner's tier and Source, and it takes under an hour. A House tender could do it, and so could any competent Lorekeeper, and several have offered.

The Registry has turned down every one of those offers. It insists that every practitioner in the Dominion be seen in person by a Registry practitioner, and in the whole history of the institution it has never once made an exception, for anyone.

If all it wanted were an accurate count, House records would serve better and cost nothing. Insisting that every single practitioner be looked at individually by its own people suggests the assessment is looking for something the House records don't contain.

I don't know what. I've asked in writing and been thanked for my interest.

Whether anyone has ever gone further than Presence

Every House talks about the ladder as if it carries on, and Hollowglass even has a word for what lies beyond, which they won't define. The accounts I've been offered were secondhand at best and mostly fourth-hand.

There's more ladder, and presumably somebody has stood on it, but I can't prove either and I won't invent the proof.

Why the Three exceed everyone

The Registry puts the Three at Presence with everyone else at the top of the ladder, and nobody who has stood near both believes one word covers them.

The Crown's explanation is inheritance. I've no evidence for or against it, though it's the only inheritance in the Dominion that does anything of the kind. No House has ever trained anyone to a Seat's level, or claimed it could.

So either the blood does something nothing else does, or the answer lies somewhere else entirely. Chapter five has my observations, and I've drawn no conclusion from them.

The two who did not fit

Chapter two tells of the two practitioners I met whose Source was none of the six. Both answered plainly when I asked, and neither was confused about what they were joined to.

I couldn't place either answer when I heard it and I still can't. Six Sources are recognised and at least two more exist outside them, which is the whole of what I know. Someone with better training should go and ask properly, and yes, I know I keep recommending work I've decided against doing myself.

A note at the end

I've been asked more than once why I publish the questions alongside the findings, when leaving them out would make me look a good deal more authoritative. The questions tell the next person where to begin, and the findings never do.

I don't expect to answer these myself. Some I've already decided to leave alone, for the reasons given where they come up, and one of them I've stopped short of three separate times now.

Somebody will answer them, though. Probably somebody reading this, who finds one of the seven annoying enough to go and check, and discovers I had it wrong. If that's you, I hope you'll write it down.