The register names the current holder of all forty-nine. It is updated when custody changes. It is not updated for any other reason.
FRAGMENT 12 — “the short one”
Custody transferred 04:11.
Previous holder: Aurenian colony 2:311:4. Standing at transfer: seven structures, one Listening Tower.
Current holder: not stated.
The Chorus has risen to 19.
Three things in that entry are worth reading slowly, because each of them is the register working correctly rather than failing.
“Current holder: not stated”
The register names holders. It does not name holders it cannot identify, and it does not guess. A Fragment in the hands of somebody who has surrendered their name is recorded as being in the hands of somebody who has surrendered their name.
That is the entry the Silence produces. It is occasionally also the entry the Drift produces, and the register does not distinguish between them, because it records custody and not intent.
“The Chorus has risen to 19”
It rose because the Fragment moved. It would have risen identically had the Fragment moved into our own hands. The Chorus does not record who is winning; it records how much of the set is gathered, and every gathering is the same size.
There is no entry, in three hundred years of registry, in which the Chorus went down.
What the entry does not say
It does not say whether the colony at 2:311:4 was defended. It does not say how long the transfer took, or whether anyone survived it. Those facts exist; they are in a different document, filed by a different office, and read by the people they concern.
A register that editorialised would be a register somebody had to trust. This one only has to be accurate.
Holding Fragments makes you findable. That is not a rule imposed on the game — it is a property of the objects, and the register is only the part of it you can read.