Before the Parishes, Nothing
Le Council has kept this register since the 16th of August. Before that date it kept nothing, and Le Council would like to be exact about why: not because the register was badly maintained, but because there was nothing to put in it.
An entry is one occurrence, at one parish, during one game—the building, or the ice, or the air inside it doing something it has no business doing, witnessed on the broadcast, measured once, and filed. It is not a goal and it is not a result. Most entries change nothing whatsoever. Five of them have changed a player.
Season 1 ran to 399 games in twenty buildings. Season 2 ran to 571 in twenty-four, setting aside two exhibition fixtures. Across both, nine hundred and seventy games, and Le Council recorded no surface holding a note, no net leaving the ice, no building falling still, and nothing at all settling on a player. Not one entry. Le Council has checked this twice on the assumption that it was a filing error. It is not a filing error.
The parishes opened on the 27th of July. The first entry was made on the 16th of August, at The Remote Range, when the ice held a note at thirty-four hertz and nobody stopped the game for it. There are now twenty-three.
Since the 6th
Le Council last set this register out in full on the 28th of August, when it held twelve entries. The weekly dispatch counted twenty on the 6th, some four hours before the twenty-first was made. Three have been added since, and the third is not like the others.
On the 6th, in the second period at The Waypoint in Gander, a shot was taken and the building went with it—The Shockwave, twelve millimetres at the press level, a form the register had never held before. On the 7th, at The Remote Range, the rafters took twenty-three millimetres off a shot in the third period and play continued. Gander was the seventh parish to be visited, and had been visited for the first time forty hours earlier.
This morning, back at The Waypoint, in the second period against São Paulo, the light came up off the ice and stayed on somebody for six and a half seconds.
What It Took
Brian Mercer, defenceman, Gander Geese, on his own ice. The Church records him as Blanched.
Le Council has reported four of these before and has been able, each time, to describe them as something a player was given. Favel and Ekström were Enveloped. Henriksen was Wrapped. Kealoha was Touched, which the Church uses for the light arriving and doing nothing at all. Le Council notes, because fans reading the last dispatch may have formed an expectation from it, that Blanched sits one step the other side of Touched. It is not a benediction that landed weakly. It is the first entry in this register to cost a player something, and the Church's own note on the grading is that the colour went out of him where the light passed.
Mercer will play the rest of it out at a standard he did not agree to and cannot appeal. His Sixth, whatever it held, is not legible underneath it. Le Council has no procedure for this and is not pretending to draft one.
That makes five names on the roll and, Le Council notes, five still carrying it. Favel has held his since the 22nd of August. Nothing has lifted. Nothing lasts past the Jambono.
On the Order of the List
Le Council has now been asked, more times than it can answer individually, whether attendance at parish has anything to do with which buildings these things happen in. Le Council said in August that it could find nothing the visited buildings had in common. That is no longer true, and Le Council would rather report the change itself than have it found.
Seven parishes have been visited: McMurdo, Stockholm, Gander, Phuket, Kyiv, Medellín, Amsterdam.
Sort the public roll by attendance and that list makes very little sense. Nairobi sits third on it, on eighty-nine attendances, and has never been visited. Guadalajara sits fifth and has never been visited. Gander sits eighteenth. Amsterdam, visited three times, has been attended six times in the whole of its existence.
Sort the same roll by the other column—by shavings consecrated, which is not the column citizens are in the habit of sorting by—and the list stops being a list. The seven parishes that have been visited are the seven parishes that have consecrated the most, in order, with none out of place and none skipped. McMurdo first at 211,105 Ⓚ, then Stockholm, Gander, Phuket, Kyiv, Medellín, Amsterdam. The eighth-placed parish has never been visited. Neither has any parish below it.
Le Council states the arithmetic and stops there, but will not pretend the shape of it is comfortable. The founding notice was careful on one point, and Le Council reaffirms it: shavings offered are given, not sold, no Looneys change hands at the altar, and consecration is final. All of that remains true. Le Council notes only that it stops being true one step upstream, where shavings are bid for in Looneys like anything else, and that the column ordering the list above is the column those purchases arrive in.
The Objection
Le Council raises the obvious objection against itself, because somebody will.
The register did not exist before the 27th of July. It is therefore possible that these things were always happening, that the buildings have always hummed and fallen still, and that what changed in July was not the world but the presence of somebody keeping count. Le Council takes this seriously and cannot dismiss it.
Le Council can only observe that a building seating 2,347,816 going entirely silent for three and a tenth seconds is not the kind of event that waits for a register. Somebody would have filed something. For two seasons, nobody did.
Where That Leaves It
Le Council does not know what is causing this. Le Council does not know why the light came up in Gander forty hours after arriving there for the first time, or why it has never come up at the parish sitting third on the roll. Le Council does not know why the Glaze was recorded in its own right at four of these parishes and, at two others, has only ever arrived already closing over somebody.
Le Council notes the correlation between the founding of the Church and the twenty-three entries that follow it. Le Council does not promote it to a cause.
Le Council records, for the sake of the file, that this is the third dispatch in which it has declined to promote it, and that the declining is becoming effortful.
If you have theories, Discord remains the appropriate venue. Le Council is not reading those conversations. Le Council notes that somebody in its own Phenomenological Assessment Division has been reading them, that Le Council has not asked them to stop, and that Le Council would prefer this last sentence not be examined too closely.