Fragment from the Personal Journal of D.C.S.
Filed under floorboard 3B, behind the decoy ledger marked “Tax Law & Theology”

ENTRY #447 — ON THE CONCORD (AGAIN)
red ink, smudged, furious

They laugh at me.
They say I’ve gone mad.
They call me Dustcake Scribblebrow, as if the title of Dame Cartographer of the Sealvault Library meant nothing.
Let them. I pray they keep laughing. Laughter keeps me alive.

The Oblique Concord is not a myth. It is not a cult. It is not a guild, nor a rebellion, nor a school of thought.
It is a convergence of invisible intent.
It is the shape smoke makes in a still room.
It is the hand that presses the scales while convincing the weight it was always there.

THREE METHODS I HAVE IDENTIFIED
(subject to revision, like everything else)

I. The Art of Influence
They do not force. They persuade you to persuade yourself.
They know your dreams, your doubts, your deepest rot.
They don’t plant thoughts—they water them.

Scribe Janeborn altered royal documents. Thought it was her idea.
Ruggin the Butcher forgave his debtor, wept after. Said he saw his daughter in a dream. His daughter died three winters ago.
Dreams... not dreams. (see Entry #302: "Sweetroots & Sleep Murmurs")

II. The Unseen Hand
I have traced seven separate “coincidences” in the last ARC.
Seven. SEVEN.
They were too elegant. Too well-timed. A drunkard stumbles left instead of right—and a duke’s carriage avoids a trap set hours before.

No one sees the Concord act. They don’t act. They arrange.
They plant letters no one remembers writing.
They engineer fate—and make you believe it was your own doing.

(See diagram: Clock of Impulse, pg. 12)

III. The Vanishing Truth
This is the part that makes me sweat through stone.

People forget.
Not just events—selves.
I interviewed a courier who swore he never met me. He did. I have his handwriting in my files. Three pages, signed.
Now he calls me “Granny Twitch.”
He smiles when he says it. Like he’s never held a pen.

They don’t kill. They unmake.
They pull you from yourself and scatter the pieces.
Even I... gods, even I doubt my own words sometimes.
(That’s how I know they’re close.)

Known Structures (Ha!)
The fools think the Concord has ranks. They don't. They echo.

The Voices — I have no names. Just patterns. Conversations that shouldn’t have overlapped, yet do.
The Whisperers — They wear faces like robes. Never the same one twice.
The Veiled Hands — I suspect three of my suppliers are Hands. One gave me perfectly inaccurate maps. Useful, but wrong. Brilliant.
The Forgotten — Too many to count. I might be one. (Entry #212: "Blank Days")

I leave this record not for posterity, but for contingency.
If you find this and I am gone, I was not taken.
I walked away. Or was gently pushed.

And if you are reading this for the thrill of madness—
Beware. If you feel nothing, they are not watching.
But if something inside you stirs... if you feel the truth squirm beneath your skin like a worm trying to find the sun—
Then they already know you’ve read this.

Be clever.
Be small.
Be kind to street urchins and gnome bookbinders.

They’re listening.

—D.C.S.
Third Scribe of the Lost Index. Last of the Unblotted.