The Tentacle

A segmented brass appendage attached to a traveler's coat by unknown means and, in defiance of every expectation, kept. The Tentacle is the Museum's clearest teaching object on adaptation: the story of a strangeness that was not rejected, but integrated.

It was not part of him when he arrived in Brassheart. By the second winter, it was.

How it came to be fastened to the shoulder of his duster is a question the traveler declined to answer in his lifetime. What is known is this: he did not hide it, he did not sever it, and after the first year he stopped apologizing for it.

He wrote with it. He worked with it. He drank his morning coffee holding the mug in its coils. When he died, the coat and the Tentacle were placed together in the Vault, exactly as he had worn them.