The primary inspiration for this story was the experience of receiving any email ever.

Thank you so much!!

Sorry for cutting that part out, lol. I just figured it would be a little opaque for a general audience.

One of the funny things about exercises like this is that they show you how tricky the "getting the idea" process is. A flash fiction is a quick sketch; once I know what I'm writing, the text flows out rather quickly. But it can still take days and days to go from a prompt to an idea that works.

The only Hour with Knock and Winter principles is the Horned Axe; we don't really have the associations between the five BoH pseudo-aspects and any particular Hour, but Moon for H.A. wouldn't shock me given her other parallels to the Meniscate. Might look for items associated with her?

There's definitely something screwy with the white scratch-marks, though. They're continuous from our point of view, but on the full 3d desk they wouldn't be; that's less like scratches made with a knife by somebody sitting in the room and more like marks made by a laser coming in from the window.

Maybe! It looks pretty rough/defaced, though there are shavings on top of the surface as well. And the secondary graffiti includes two skulls (~= eggs ~= moons, in the deep lore), and at least eight plus-signs echoing the Winter principle's icon. I can't make sense of the other geometry, though.

That said, I think there's at least the chance that this is the tip of an iceberg that nobody's figured out yet. Alexis Kennedy is absolutely known to hide things like this.

I'm not 100% confident of this, but I'm terribly worried that it's just literally a bad pun, and that Thirza Blake just thinks she's really funny. It's the kNOCk winTUR luNAR -y

Each more cuteier than the last!