The Black Index

The oldest record in the Index is not a drawing. It is a cut across an empty field. The first makers had built for so long that they could no longer remember what any structure was meant to protect. One of them stopped, named the absence, and the Unmade drew back from the wound. Where the edge held, the First Scar appeared. Every later Mark begins inside it. The Archive records the event as an act of creation. A witness in the margin insists it was only the first honest admission.

The scar was not inflicted. It appeared when the old map was finally called false.