The pen was on the floor.
It had rolled off the desk sometime during the night, the desk's surface was not level, had never been level, tilted three degrees toward the eastern wall because the carpenter who'd built the furniture for the officer's quarters had measured the floor instead of the frame and the floor in the eastern wing of Morreth garrison was three degrees off true, a subsidence issue from Year 410 that nobody had corrected because correcting it would have required lifting the foundation stones and lifting the foundation stones would have required closing the eastern wing and closing the eastern wing would have required relocating six officers and the relocation paperwork sat in the compartment in the administrative office and the compartment was not locked and nobody had opened it in seventy-six years.
