The shoebox

lore/sisken carded for nineteen years. The Index is the most valuable missing object in the folder — unlike the lore/marchford ledger, which would settle one incident, the Index would name people, and per lore/the-unnamed the names are the thing the tradition does not have.

Its location rests on one sentence.

The remark

Ossuary, in a message on lore/dead-letter, in passing, in the course of answering something else: that he had the boxes.

He did not say whose, did not say what was in them, and never mentioned them again in eleven thousand messages. He produced nothing from them, cited nothing to them, and did not respond to at least two people who asked directly.

lore/lineage draws the edge dotted and it is the thinnest solid-looking thing in the diagram.

Why it is believed anyway

Three weak reasons that people find persuasive together and should not.

Sisken did not arrive in 1994 and Ossuary was still active. Material has to go somewhere, and Ossuary is the nearest person who kept things.

The phrase is oddly specific. The boxes, definite article, as though the referent were obvious. That reads like a man mentioning something he assumes everyone knows he has.

Nobody else has ever claimed them. Thirty years, and no competing claim — unlike the ledger, which has three.

The third is the strongest and it is an argument from silence about a group whose defining practice was silence.

Against

Ossuary published constantly and at length about everything. A man who wrote daily for fifteen years, who argued for eleven of them about a point of practice, who would have found the Index directly useful in that argument, and who never once cited it, probably did not have it.

The counter to the counter is that the Index's cards record sources as an initial and a year — lore/carding — and that Ossuary, holding a box of material naming people who had not consented to be named, might have concluded that the honest thing was to say nothing and use nothing.

That is entirely in character and completely unfalsifiable, and the folder should be candid that it is a story constructed to make a silence meaningful.

What would settle it

Any card, anywhere, with a source initial on it that is not already attested.

None has surfaced. lore/the-specimen-card is a printed illustration, not a card from the Index, and the distinction gets blurred constantly in secondary accounts — the specimen is a page from a newsletter that sixty to a hundred and ten people received.

Thirty years of not producing a single card is, on any ordinary reading, what it looks like when the boxes are gone.