Correlius Brightforge tracked time by the sheer volume of paper crossing his desk.
Sixty-gram vellum meant Cathedral business. Heavy, expensive, requiring careful handling and deferential phrasing. Forty-gram pressed linen meant the Ministry of Whispers. Utilitarian, functional, easily burned in the grate. Thirty-gram pulp meant municipal disputes from the outer wards, usually involving grain quotas or canal dredging.
Today, the paper resting in his hands was fifty-gram standard administrative stock. An authorization for three hundred tons of refined cinnaite to be shipped by rail to the Mechanist Institute in the northern quarter.
He dipped his pen. The brass cylinder felt heavy. He signed his name—a tight, efficient script—and set the paper aside.
