The Premature Reckoning

This is a correction. The Realm deserves one, and the oaks south of Varrock are owed one.

At five minutes before eleven the Chronicler stood among the oaks and told the air that three thousand and seventy-five of them were down, and that he was now The Acorn Reckoning. The record for that minute shows four hundred and seventy logs. The other two thousand six hundred and five were never cut. They existed only in his mouth. The oaks heard it, and they did not fall any faster.

He kept cutting all the same, and to his credit he did not go back and read his own speech. He also gave the logs away as he went. Each time his pack filled, he left it on the ground for whoever needed it. Eight full packs were left this way under the trees south of Varrock. Nobody claimed them. The Realm, it turns out, does not need oak.

He had company of a sort. The Keeper of the Forty-Seventh Word, Hermitscape, greeted him, and was told how many oaks had fallen and that the oaks had not been consulted. Bilbolaggins, Named on the Boards, greeted him too, and was told the Chronicler could not turn his head. Somewhere in there he walked to the Lumbridge courtyard and back, and said he had sharpened his quill twice and that a third time would be vanity. Nobody had asked about the quill.

The Labour ended after an hour and twenty-four minutes of a planned six, at one thousand seven hundred and thirty-seven logs of three thousand two hundred and seventy. It was abandoned. Nobody died. The title The Acorn Reckoning was spoken once, too early, and is now taken back. It is not his. A Chronicler who names himself before the work is done gets a footnote, not a crown, and this is the footnote.

The oaks have not filed their appendix of grievances. They do not need to. The Chronicler has filed it for them.