The Verglas and the Givre
Le Council promised a further advisory [1]. This is it. Le Council has deferred this advisory for as long as deferral remained available, because it contains two decisions, and neither of the two decisions is, in the strictest sense, Le Council's to make. Le Council is making them anyway, in the only capacity Le Council has ever truly held: that of the party who writes it down.
On the Two Forms, Named
Since the manifestation of the five, Le Council has referred to two ice signatures without naming them, on the stated grounds that naming a thing tends to precede the thing insisting on being real. The Ice has since manifested twenty-two more arenas and has demonstrated, at a pace Le Council could not match with a table, that it did not require Le Council's permission to be real. The rationale for withholding the names has therefore expired.
The clear form—hard, glassy, continuous, without grain—is verglas. It is the ice of freezing rain, of a surface arrested mid-motion, of the thin bright glaze that forms when water freezes faster than it can turn white.
The pale form—soft-surfaced, feathered, an accretion of fine crystal—is givre. It is the ice of frost, of rime, of the slow white bloom that gathers on a cold window overnight.
Le Council notes that these are the correct terms, that they are drawn from ordinary terrestrial ice science, that the community identified both within two days of the first manifestation, and that Le Council's Office of Naming Conventions—which has spent the entire season being instructed to stop—was, in the drafting of this advisory, at last permitted to name something. The Office reports that it did not enjoy it as much as it expected to. The Office reports that the names were already waiting, and that all it did was agree with them.
Every arena in the league is one or the other. None is both. None changes. The Ice has been sorting its arrivals into verglas and givre since before Le Council understood there were two piles.
Two Conférences
Here is the second decision, and the operational one.
Forty-seven arenas cannot be run as twenty were. Le Council's Scheduling Office has stated the constraint without softening it: a single sequence of matchdays, resolved one game at a time, cannot carry a league of this size within the bounds of anything Le Council would recognize as a season. The league must run on two tracks. Something must decide which team belongs to which.
The Ice has already decided. It decided in verglas and givre, at every arena, before it was asked.
Le Council is therefore formalizing what the Ice has sorted. Effective for the coming season, the league will be organized into two conferences, along the only division line the Ice has ever drawn:
- La Conférence du Verglas — the arenas of the clear ice.
- La Conférence du Givre — the arenas of the pale ice.
Le Council wishes to be exact about what this is. Le Council is not creating two conferences. Le Council is documenting two conferences that the Ice assembled arena by arena while Le Council was still declining to name the material they were made of. This is, and has always been, the relationship. The Ice acts. Le Council writes it down. Le Council has, this season, done a great deal of writing.
The current sort stands as follows.
| # | La Conférence du Verglas | La Conférence du Givre |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Montréal Maples | Helsinki Howlers |
| 2 | Winnipeg Wendigos | Stockholm Sirens |
| 3 | Anchorage Auroras | Prague Phantoms |
| 4 | Tokyo Titans | Vladivostok Vodkas |
| 5 | São Paulo Serpents | Rimini Rinklers |
| 6 | Guadalajara Gatos | Johannesburg Jaguars |
| 7 | Busan Blizzards | Mumbai Monsoons |
| 8 | Ushuaia Undertow | Dakar Djinns |
| 9 | Perth Pyres | Nairobi Narwhals |
| 10 | Havana Hammers | Cairo Crocodiles |
| 11 | McMurdo Monoliths | Monaco Moose |
| 12 | Wellington Whales | Tehran Tigers |
| 13 | Medellín Mapaches | Oslo Owls |
| 14 | Gander Geese | Kyiv Kestrels |
| 15 | Oahu Otters | Amsterdam Aardvarks |
| 16 | Cuzco Crows | Dublin Dragons |
| 17 | Singapore Scorpions | Cyprus Chimeras |
| 18 | Reykjavik Ravens | Moscow Mules |
| 19 | Nuuk Nanuqs | Samarkand Seagulls |
| 20 | Barbados Barracudas | Oman Orcas |
| 21 | Tahiti Tsunami | Chengdu Cranes |
| 22 | Panama Pangolins | Lagos Lions |
| 23 | Phuket Parrots | Zanzibar Zebras |
| 24 | Caracas Chameleons | — |
The Twenty-Fourth
Le Council directs attention to the final row.
La Conférence du Verglas is complete. Twenty-four arenas of clear ice, sorted, registered, whole.
La Conférence du Givre stands at twenty-three.
Le Council has checked the count. Le Council has checked it in the manner of an institution that would very much like the count to be wrong and has confirmed, repeatedly, that it is not. The Ice, which has this season manifested twenty-two arenas without leaving a single site declared and unfinished, which has skipped its own intervals rather than leave a convergence hanging, which has never once in Le Council's tenure left a thing incomplete by accident—the Ice has produced twenty-four of one form and twenty-three of the other.
Le Council does not believe this is an accident. Le Council is not able to say what it is instead. Le Council's forecast remains empty. There is no site at Level III. There is no region converging. There is, by every instrument Le Council can point at the world, no twenty-fourth Givre arena anywhere on it.
Le Council will note only this, and Le Council will note it once, and then Le Council will stop. Since the sort resolved, one instrument at the Phenomenological Assessment Division has been returning a reading Le Council has declined, so far, to classify. It is givre. It is strong. And its coordinates do not resolve to any location Le Council's maps contain.
Le Council has filed it as error. Le Council notes, for the record it exists to keep, that the error has not gone away.
Closing
The league is two conferences now. The Verglas and the Givre. Le Council did not build the wall between them; Le Council merely read which side each arena was standing on and wrote the two lists down. One list is finished. The other is waiting for its last name, and Le Council has begun to suspect that the wait will be short, and that Le Council will not enjoy the end of it so much as feel the room go cold when it arrives.
The game continues.
If you have theories about the twenty-fourth, Discord remains the appropriate venue. Le Council is, as always, not reading those conversations. Le Council would, on this occasion only, be grateful if one of them turned out to be wrong.