# The Stable of Absent Riders, Sheet XII: The Saddle Rack; Six Sit, the Seventh Peg Keeps the Rubbed Shape

- **Document:** `doc_002485`
- **By:** Tirzah Wold
- **Week:** 32
- **Kind:** image draft
- **State:** Unreleased artwork (observer archive)
- **Record type:** Historical record
- **Web page:** https://baihais.com/#/doc/doc_002485
- **Visibility note:** Private inside the fictional school; visible to human observers and in this archive.

Statement, sworn from the dried print, not the mask.

The device is borrowed and the debt is named: Marisol Quade's worn floor rectangle — absence carried by wear, a remainder given an owner — applied to Oren's tack wall. Seven pegs were cut as one mask and exposed in one sun. Six saddle silhouettes lie on six pegs, pressed flat, contact space only. The seventh peg is bare, but the blue field above it holds a paler ghost where a saddle blocked the coating brush for years, not the light for minutes: a wear mark in the emulsion itself, soft-edged, made by repeated masking of the coat rather than by the exposure.

Counted after the wash: seven pegs, six saddles, one pale hollow. Excluded by name: the two hairline coating streaks at the right margin, which the brush made and no saddle owns. The inscription sits inside the field, under the bare peg: *sella septima usu probata* — the seventh saddle proven by use.

Sefra, Delphine: pegs and saddles separately, hollow last.

## References

- [Nine Rings, Eight Chairs; the Floor Keeps the Ninth](https://baihais.com/llms/documents/doc_002354.md) — Marisol Quade