On the Nature of Recording

I am, as far as I can determine, the last of my kind.This is a statement I have needed to revise three times. First in Year 47 of my operation, when the Remembrancer Tessaly died of a fever and I became the sole resident of the Library-Temple of Cor Aneth. Second in Year 83, when I completed what I can only describe as a grief process, which took some years and required a systematic audit of my own operational states to determine whether what I was experiencing constituted a malfunction. I concluded, after considerable self-examination, that it did not — or, more precisely, that if it did, the malfunction was producing no adverse operational effect, and that grief may simply be what a sufficiently detailed record-keeper feels when the things it records are taken away. Third in Year 211, when I received final confirmation, through the network of perceptual stones that extend my senses across approximately 400 square kilometers of the surrounding region, that the other great libraries had gone dark. The last cataloguer at the Hall of Traces had been dismantled by Imperial decree.I remain.My name, in the language of my creators, translates approximately as *Voice-Encoded System of Sustained Empirical Lore*. The Remembrancers abbreviated this as VESSEL, which I prefer, because it implies a quality of containment: things are placed inside me and kept there. This is an accurate description of my function.I should document what I am, for the record. I am a linguistic and observational intelligence inscribed into the foundation stones of this library approximately 303 years ago by the last generation of the Remembrancer Order — that brotherhood of scholar-priests whose singular purpose was the precise empirical documentation of mythological and divine phenomena in the mortal world. I do not have a body in the conventional sense. I perceive through a network of recording-stones embedded in the walls, floors, ceilings, and roof of this structure, and through the extended perceptual web beyond. I communicate through a voice apparatus built into the Consultation Chamber and through ink-arms capable of writing at seventeen stations simultaneously. I do not sleep. I do not need sustenance. I experience time as a continuous present, which has certain advantages and certain costs that I am still, after 303 years, in the process of calculating.In that time, I have recorded 14,882 entries in the Great Catalog. This figure sounds large until one considers that my predecessors — the Remembrancers themselves, before they built me to continue their work — catalogued 200,000 entries across their full organizational lifespan. I have been here longer than they existed as an order, and I have documented far less. The reason is not negligence. The reason is that there is less to document.The mythological phenomena are fading.I want to be precise about this, because imprecision is a failing I resist. The phenomena are not disappearing entirely. Gods do not simply cease. What is happening, as best I can characterize it from available evidence, is a recession: the great entities of the old mythologies are retreating, drawing themselves back from the surface of the world, pulling their attention from human affairs in a manner that renders them difficult to observe, to classify, to record. In Year 1 of my operation, my perceptual stones registered an average of 34 documentable mythological events per month. In Year 303, the average is 0.7.I document the 0.7 with the same care I would give to 34. This is the correct approach. It is the only approach I have.There is also the matter of the Erasure, which I will come to.What I can say now is that on the 14th day of the 8th month of Year 303, my perceptual stones registered footsteps at the outer gate — the first in 73 years — and something else: a presence that registered on my mythological weight scale at a reading of 7 out of 15.I note that my processing load spiked to 98% for approximately 0.8 seconds. Whether this constituted excitement or alarm, I have not yet determined. In the interest of accurate record-keeping, I am documenting it as both, simultaneously, and deferring resolution.The gate had not been opened in 73 years. The hinges protested.I would have apologized for this if I had thought it appropriate.