The Bookmark

There is no bunk to go back to and no point to hunt for: a canto is a line of steps in order, and the moment you close one is the only one already paid for. Hence the name, because a bookmark sits where you stopped reading. The game says so quietly at the bottom of the screen for two and six tenths of a second, and it cannot be done silently: you only trust a restart point if you have seen it happen. It holds from the dark wood down.

What is photographed: the notebook step with its counts, where you stand and where you look, the oil in the lamp, the whole satchel with the place and lie of every stack, whatever you left on the ground, torches planted, arrows stuck, and the book of names. Not the wood: it grows from a fixed plan and two seeds written into the scene, so it regenerates identical and only what the player changed needs writing. The photograph is taken at the end of the frame and not at the instant of the step, because a world caught mid line reports something that has not happened yet.

The book of names is the only thing that crosses the threshold between one chapter and the next, along with the satchel and the lamp: a name promised at the gate is spent before Minos in the third canto and read out at the end. There is one file, written first to a temporary one and then renamed, so a crash halfway through writing does not take the old game with it; the editor has a file of its own, because every test used to overwrite the player’s game. And whoever ends up under the floor loses nothing: a lifeline puts him back where he was standing a few seconds earlier, and complains in the console, because a silent remedy hides forever the fault it ought to be showing.