Leaves in the Temple Hand

The Leaves in the Temple Hand are not a book. They are a set of stone leaves, carved rather than inked, each cut on one face only; not thick, but solid, and heavier in the hand than their size suggests. There is no binding and no cover; the leaves lie loose in a case, and the case is the Library's. Twelve were made. Nine remain. Each leaf is notched along one edge with its number in the set, and three numbers are absent. The Library does not hold the missing three and has no record that it ever did.

The cutting is finer than it has any right to be. The signs are small, close and clean at the edge, finer than any point a hand drives into stone can manage, and the Library's binders, who have been asked, know no tool that cuts stone so. The script is a close, hooked hand, its signs crowded shoulder to shoulder, every stroke ending in a small curled hook. It is one hand throughout, from the first leaf to the last. Each leaf opens with a short line set apart at its head, in the manner of a title. The Library's catalogue names the script the Temple Hand. Scholars who have compared it hold it to be the script cut on the walls of the old temples, and on nothing else the Library holds. There is no key to it, no primer, no gloss; the catalogue records the title of the set and nothing of its contents, and no one in Crownhold is known to read it. The stone is held to be older than the Sundering.

Stone was a choice. Whoever cut these meant them to outlast skin and paper, and they have. The leaves are held in the Aldra'vhen Bequest, a scholar's deposit in the Lower Collection, under the depositor's standing instruction.