Mara Iven. Nico Iven.
The writing changed the air.
Not because the red pencil was magic.
Because a name on the board could be pointed at, copied by another hand, challenged by a clerk, defended by a witness, and returned to after the room got tired. The board made the name harder to move silently.
At the far end of the table, a clerk from the outside registry laughed once.
"They will send notice when you do that."
Sylivyr kept writing.
"Good," she said. "Then they will know who arrived before they improved her."
The clerk did not laugh a second time.
Mara watched the letters dry.
She had not expected to grieve over spelling. She disliked that she did. The house did not make the moment sweet by calling the grief healing. It let the grief happen, then asked whether Nico's second record had an earlier page.
It did.
On the earlier page, the name box was too small for his full line and another box asked relation to primary unit. In the margin someone had written carried by Mara, then crossed out Mara and put primary unit.
Nico stared at that correction longer than at the rest.
"They made her generic," he said.
That was the first time the room heard the wound named by the line standing under it.
Sylivyr wrote generic on a scrap, pinned it beneath the forms, and drew a line to every place the city had used a softer word.
Dependent. Unit. Continuity group. Attachment.
The room learned a method that morning.
Do not argue only with the worst word. Find the family of words around it.
The Index rarely walks alone.
The first theft board stayed up for seven days.
That was longer than Narthex liked. The queue had to pass it. New arrivals saw their own risk before anyone offered comfort. Some hated the board because it made the room feel less safe. Sylivyr did not argue them out of that feeling.
"Safe from what," she asked.
Safe from fear was one answer. Safe from surprise was another. Safe from knowing how often the theft happened was the answer the room liked least.
So the board stayed.
At night, Nico copied each hostile label into a small notebook. Attachment. Unit. Cluster. Duplicate. Preferred name.
He did not know why he copied them until the fourth night, when a runner tried to call him Unit Two at the door.
Nico opened the notebook.
"That is one of the theft words," he said.
The runner looked at the board, then at the line behind Nico, then at Sylivyr.
The correction happened before an argument could become a ceremony.
That proved naming work could travel without becoming grand: the house was defending return, not sentiment.
A name must be able to come back to the line that carries it. If the name comes back only to a field, the field has already begun to rule.
Witness board: First naming wound.