Gilded Ruin

A record kept small cannot be used against you. I learned that the expensive way, and someone else paid the bill.

The short version

We do not harvest, store, or use your data. Ever. We do not sell it, rent it, trade it, profile you, or follow you about the internet like a bailiff.

I keep records. It is the entire thing I am for, so you may reasonably ask why the man with the archive is promising not to build one about you.

Because I have read what a kept record does to a person when the wrong institution holds it. The cathedral keeps a Register too. Theirs is a muster roll wearing a memorial's coat. A record can remember you, or it can own you, and the difference is entirely in whose hand it sits.

So this ledger stays deliberately, almost insultingly empty.

They will tell you the Register holds eighty-seven names. Go and count them yourself. I did. Twice. It is not eighty-seven.

When you are merely looking

Nothing is collected. No account, no advertising trackers, no analytics profile, no cross-site pixels, no fingerprinting, no brokers. We are not building a portrait of you. There is nothing here to sell about you, which does wonders for one's integrity.

Our host keeps ordinary server logs — addresses, request times — as every host on earth does, for security and for keeping the lamp lit. Those are the host's operational records. They are not read by us, not used to identify anyone, and not joined to anything else.

When you write to me

Use the contact form or the address below and I receive precisely what you chose to send: your subject, your message, and the address you would like the reply to reach. That is used to answer you. It is not published, not sold, not shared, and not folded into any mailing list. I do not have a mailing list. I have a channel, and you are already standing in it.

When you take up a relic

Purchases and memberships are carried by Ko-fi and processed by Stripe. They collect only what the transaction requires: an address to reply to, an address to send a parcel to, and the means to take payment.

That is used solely to put the thing in your hands, under those platforms' own policies. It is never sold, never rented, never used to sell you something you did not ask for.

We never see or hold your full card number, your security code, or your banking credentials. Those go straight to Stripe and never touch this site. I could not leak them if I tried, which is precisely the arrangement I wanted.

There is a place in this world where the faithful are made to confess. Speak the Choir greeting there and a door opens that the cathedral did not build.

Confessions and the story

Messages sent through the interactive parts of this world are read by me. They may inspire what comes later, but only anonymised and altered past recognition. Your name, your details, anything you were brave enough to put down — never published, never sold, never handed on.

If you would rather a message of yours was never used at all, say so, and it will not be. You will not be asked why. Whatever else the houses taught you, refusal is allowed here.

Cookies

This site sets no tracking or advertising cookies. The cathedral takes tithes. I do not even take crumbs.

Services we link outward to — Ko-fi, Stripe, streaming embeds, the fonts — run under their own policies the moment you touch them. I do not control the roads outside my own tunnel.

Count the years, not the names. The names were edited. The years are the only honest number in the whole cathedral.

The young

This project deals in dark material and is intended for adults. It is not directed at anyone under 18, and information is not knowingly collected from children. If you believe a minor has sent something here, tell me and it will be destroyed. That one is not a joke and I will not dress it up as one.

What you may demand of me

Depending on where you stand, the law may grant you rights to see, correct, delete, or restrict what is held about you, to object, or to carry it elsewhere. These are honoured regardless of where you live, because the answer to every one of them is identical: ask, and it is done.

Write to thegildedarchivist@proton.me. There is no form to fight, no retention period to outlast, no department to be transferred to. Nobody is punished for asking. Asking is the only sacrament I recognise.

The place they keep empty has a number. Ask yourself who a grave is dug for, before anyone has died in it.

Security, and what little there is to lose

This site is served over HTTPS. Beyond that, the defence is simply that there is almost nothing here to steal. That is deliberate. The safest record is the one nobody bothered to write.

If a breach ever touched something we do hold, you would be told directly and promptly. Not buried in an update. Not discovered by you, three years on, in a document someone did not mean to leave.

How long anything is kept

Correspondence is kept only as long as it takes to answer it and to remember an order. Ko-fi and Stripe keep transaction records under their own policies and whatever the tax authorities demand, since they are the one institution even I cannot argue with.

If this changes

The date at the foot of this page moves when the words do. The promise at the top does not move at all.

last updated · July 2026