The Apparition at Cill Aoife

FROM THE HOUSE'S BOOK AT CILL AOIFE Entered by the one who kept it, from what Brother Daire told the house. The leaf carries no year.

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Aoife was almost alone in the village as the shadowy apparition glided towards her. Brother Daire stood watching, more concerned for her safety than his own. Aoife took out a wooden cross and held it up.

"You don't belong here. You are unfounded; go back to your own world or the outer darkness, whence you came forth."

Something like a glowing turquoise dove appeared briefly above Aoife, and then all was quiet.

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Archive note: the leaf is the house's, not Daire's. He did not put it in the Life, which records only what Aoife permitted to be written, and the house's book records what the house was told; the two disciplines are different and the record keeps them apart. The leaf carries no year. Daire's presence places it in his years at Cill Aoife, and nothing on it says whether it fell before or after the vision at the thorn well in 1216 AD (1416 UCSD); the Archive declines to fix what the leaf does not. Three things in it are registered and none is settled. The word unfounded is the nineteenth-century transcription's English for whatever the leaf's own tongue carried; the Survey Archive's term Unfounded is Theorist Kade's, from the doctrinal papers of 2822 to 2824 UCSD, and was taken from the record's own findings and not from this leaf. The echo is registered, and nothing is derived from it. What Aoife did is a refusal, which the record elsewhere observes an unfounded thing does not bear; her words are filed as what she said, not as a method, since nothing in that class acquires a counter that can be run twice. And the thing Daire saw above her is the house's figure for it, like a glowing turquoise dove*: the record files a* Levril by signature and not by shape, no signature was taken in thirteenth-century Ireland, and the figure a witness supplies is the witness's contribution. Whether it is what the Survey Corps' register names the Turquoise Dove is a question the record is not placed to answer and does not. That page's line stands: no Material-layer archive holds a first-person account of a meeting with her, and this is a third hand's account of a thing seen above someone else, after, briefly, and then quiet. What Aoife met at the thorn well remains unplaced; what Daire saw in the village is filed beside it, and no nearer.

See also: The Life of Saint Aoife, What Was Carried, Saint Aoife, Aoife (character profile), Brother Daire, Unfounded, The Borrowed Silhouette, Levrils: Dragons and Constraint Literacy, The Turquoise Dove.