Prints left behind

On the wall someone has been here, and the mark is more than it should be. An elephant walks away along a gravel road and each of its footprints is a neat square; footprints stand up from damp sand as raised casts, toes and all; a single bare footprint lies in rippled sand with its arch deeply shadowed; a dark horse in a snowy paddock has left deep round hollows where its hooves went; a tortoise’s footprints turn into smaller tortoises following it; large pawprints in a salt crust are each filled with black that glitters with tiny stars, and giant ones are pressed into the roof of an ice cave. Tyre treads run through layered rock and a clear quartz boulder, and stand up as ridges in fresh snow.

The fingerprints are bigger still. One spirals across the water of an empty pool; three lie in pale rose mud like winding landforms; three more are pressed into a chalk cliff above scrubland; a white teacup carries a raised one on its side; a set of dunes is shaped like another, and a red one lies across part of a moon (The spare moons). Whoever made them is in none of the pictures. The walkouts leave footprints too, but those are boots going somewhere; these are what stayed. The codex proposes that all of it is one idea, and leaves open whose hand. This entry is proposed by the codex, from pictures on the wall that are all machine-made, and is not canon until approved.