Everyone had a different reason for coming to Anonymous.

"I am a daughter of the Upheaver," the woman said serenely as she sat across the desk. "Here in the South that is not a comfortable title; our stories of him are much different than yours."

It took a long moment for that announcement to sink in, and even after some quiet thought, automatically beginning a new entry and scratching in the details of the day and the nature of the visit, the Recorder still wasn't certain what it meant. Curiosity was not a trait encouraged in Recorders; it conflicted with impartiality, but despite himself, the Recorder found himself interested.

"You are time-touched?" he asked. Her voice was oddly accented: the barest hesitation over the hard sounds, the slightest roll of l's and r's and a throaty fullness to the vowels. She didn't sound insane.

Her laughter was light. "Not as you call it, no."

"You are from the north," the Recorder prompted. The people who came to the Recorder had tales to tell and they wanted to tell them; they did not often need him to ask questions.

"Yes," she said agreeably. The Recorder guessed that she was pretty; she had a confident voice, and her hand in greeting had been soft and strong. "Further north than you would think, beyond the World Edge Mountains."

The Recorder duly noted the fact on his parchment. Perhaps she was time-touched.

"I remember Methra, and the way that she would tell tales up the foolish Upheaver with her hands and her face and her voice all at once. She was younger than I was, but quickly looked older, for time sheds from me like water from an oilrat. That was my first clue to my heritage."

"As the Upheaver's daughter," the Recorder said without judgment. Her story was at least a change from the usual criminals and political refugees he received every day.

"I do not move independent of time, as the Upheaver could, but time does not touch me; I look now as I did at 20 summers, and I have seen perhaps two hundred of them."

The Recorder paused in his writing. "Two hundred?"

"Perhaps," she emphasized. "I didn't mark all of the years." Her voice took an edge of laughter. "I knew the first Recorder."

"Did he take your story?"

"I didn't offer it to him."

She sat very quietly. If he were given to imagining, the Recorder may have guessed it was a by-product of hundreds of years of living in an unforgiving world, but imagination was no more encouraged than curiosity in Recorders.

The Recorder ran out of words to write down and stuck to questions of rote. "Why did you come to Anonymous?"

Her voice went grim, and flat. "There is a terrible price that the time mines will demand, and your people are not equipped to deal with it. I came to have the story recorded, so that when the Others come, someone will know what to do."

"You are a Purist?" Purists would not eat anything that had been timed, or use time-crystals in any fashion. They would not accept the use of medicine, either, or bathing as a civilized practice, and their children were not permitted to be educated. The Recorder was too practical to suffer such nonsense; he had a respectable sized time-crystal box for the keeping of food, and several time-crystal lamps for his wife, who could see. They would burn, un-flickering, for hours, without using oil or producing heat. They were worth their exorbitant price.

"I am not a Purist," the woman said, and there was a whisper of hair as she shook her head. Long hair, the Recorder guessed, and he noted the fact. "But they have the right of this."

"The mines are corrupt?" That was too close to a judgmental statement, and the Recorder regretted the term.

"Not corrupt," the woman said thoughtfully. "Unstable. The pockets of fragile time that are useful for mining time-crystals are thin between the Otherplace and our world."

The Recorder capitalized the word. "What is the Otherplace?"

"No one knows," the woman said, and for the first time, the Recorder thought he heard frustration in her voice. "It is where Others come from. Where time doesn't mean anything. I believe the Upheaval happened when the boundary broke."

"The time-mines will cause another Upheaval?" the Recorder continued to write. It was a terrible idea; another Summer of Snow, another decade of death and destruction. The Upheaval was fifteen hundred years past, drifting into comfortable myth.

"Not at first. First the Others will come, and you will not see them coming." The Recorder would not have guessed that her voice could get more grim.

"Will not see them?" She needed a great deal of prompting for a woman who had come to have her story Recorded.

"I don't think that you will see them," she amended. "No one I have met can see the time fractures at the mines, or sense the disturbances as I can; as all of my people can. These cracks feel the same as the Others; I don't believe that you will be able to see them."

"There is very little that I see," the Recorder said, and the woman laughed unexpectedly. He supposed a sense of humor was a necessary thing to survive two centuries and was a little surprised to find that he inclined to believe her.

"The Others flow through anything; their progress is halted only by metals, and any living thing they touch becomes burnt and time-mad. They flock to light, to bright and shining things, and are mindless, soulless things. You don't see them the way that you see a rock or a plant... you see them with your eyes shut, in the dark, and through trees as if the trees weren't there."

"You sound very familiar with these... creatures," the Recorder guessed.

"They are common in the North. An annoyance, little more, because of the snowies. And because we can see them. The barest touch of metal will crystallize them, and they do not move that quickly."

"Snowies?"

"Snow-unicorns."

Definitely time-touched. "Unicorns." Recorders weren't supposed to sound disbelieving, either, but there were times that these things slipped out.

"Not those frilly, wimpy little goat-things on the tapestries at the Council Hall," the woman said firmly. "Our snowies are work animals, much taller than horses and stronger than oxen." She sounded proud. Or possibly smug. The Recorder chose to write proud.

"Intelligent?"

"Not appreciably. They're trainable, but don't expect them to do any higher reasoning. I watched one of them walk right into a mud pit and get stuck. It took seven of us to pull the creature out. He was shrieking and distressed and unhappy, and more inclined to fight with us than help. Not an hour later, he'd walked right back in."

"And they protect you from the Others?"

"They hate the Others, and can sense them better than we can. They become restless and fidgety whenever one comes close, so we never have to worry about being snuck up on, though we don't always know where they will come from. We put metal sheathes on their hooves and horns and they can be trained to fight. The untrained ones get in the way more than they help, of course, but it is always a good idea to have one around. When the mines become unstable, someone will read your record and go North to collect them."

"You see ahead in time?"

There was a rustle of a shaking head. "No. Not like that. I'm only guessing. It is all I can think to do."

"You didn't think to go to the Council?"

"I went to the Council," she said sharply. "But who will take the word of someone claiming to be a daughter of the Upheaver from beyond the World Edge Mountains?"

The Recorder nodded. He could see the problem with that. "They threw you out?"

"They banned me from the city, refused me a job license and then named me a criminal when I tried to destroy the Time Mines. There is a contingent of men outside your front door waiting for me to take a step out of Anonymous into the jurisdiction of any country so that I can be executed."

"You will be staying in Anonymous for some time, then." It wasn't a question.

"Perhaps." She sounded amused, and there was a sound that may have been a shrug. "I do not choose to end my life right away." From the angle of her voice, the Recorder realized she had gotten to her feet.

"That is all?" he asked, almost disappointed. "You have no more to be recorded?"

"That is enough," she said wryly. "You have the important parts, and no one will want to read through two hundred years of one woman's life. I want this entry to be easy to find, and to-the-point."

The Recorder ran callused fingers over the text he had scratched into the parchment. It wasn't easy to swallow, that was certain, but he nodded absently and added the finishing touches to the text as she made her exit.

Everyone had a different reason for coming to Anonymous. Hers wasn't the strangest the Recorder had ever heard.