From: Shadowhunters Satchel
Segment 1:
The Twilight That Never Broke
As told by Thal-Zhurath, who was Unmade
And there was a country once, in the years that have no number, where the day had gone away and never come again. I have walked in it. I have breathed its grey breath into my lungs and felt it settle there like dust upon an altar that no god remembers. And though the chroniclers of the bright lands will tell you that all places have their dawns, I say to you that they have not stood where I have stood, and they have not known the long mourning of the sky that I have known.
We called the country Vael-Anûr in the old speech, which means in your tongue something near to the Land Beneath the Closed Eye, though the words are clumsy and do not carry the weight that the old sounds carried. For above us there hung always the mist, and the mist was the colour of ash that has cooled, and through it the light came down soft and sourceless and without warmth, so that a man might cast no shadow, for there was nothing strong enough above him to make one. We did not know if there was a sun. The elders said there had been, in the time before the time before, but the elders were children when they said it, and their elders had told them, and so it went, backward and backward, until the truth of it was worn smooth as a river stone and one could not read what had once been carved there.
I tell you it was beautiful. I must tell you this, though the telling shames me, for it is a hard thing to love a doom and call it lovely. But the twilight of Vael-Anûr had a beauty that the bright lands cannot hold, the beauty of a thing that is ending slowly and knows it, and goes on being itself with a terrible patience. The hills were the colour of slate and old silver, and between them lay the low fens where the cold water did not move, and held the grey sky in its face like a mirror that has forgotten how to show anything but grief. There were trees there, black and bare and very tall, and they did not stir, for there was no wind in Vael-Anûr in those days, none at all, and the air hung between the branches as still as the air inside a tomb that has not been opened since the world was young.
And in this country lived my people, and we were hunters.
We came, the songs say, from the blood of forgotten things, from creatures older than the bones of the earth and colder than the spaces between the stars where no warmth has ever travelled. I do not know if this is true. I know only that we were not as other peoples are. We did not laugh as they laugh, easily and for small reasons. We did not gather in the bright squares of cities, for we built no cities, and there were no squares, and there was no brightness. We lived low to the ground, in hollows lined with the grey hides of the things we took, and we spoke little, and when we spoke it was in voices pitched soft as the settling of snow, for loud sounds carried far in that silent land, and far sounds woke things that were better left in their sleeping.
Our eyes had grown blind to the light. This is the thing that the bright peoples cannot understand, and it is the thing I would have them understand above all others, for it is the heart of what we were. Generation upon generation we had lived beneath the closed eye of the sky, and the light had gone out of us slowly, as a candle gutters in a sealed room, until at last a child was born to us whose eyes were filmed over white as river ice, and we did not weep for that child, for we saw that the white eyes turned toward the unseen things with a certainty that our own clear eyes had never owned. And after that child came others, and others, until at the last we were all of us so made, and the filmed white eye became the mark of our blood and the sign of our calling.
For we did not see as you see. We saw as the dead see, who have no need of light. We turned our blind faces toward the cold and felt the shape of it. We knew the warmth of a living thing where it crouched a hundred paces off in the unmoving fen, knew it as a man knows the heat of a hearth he cannot see through a wall. We knew the disturbance of the still air where a beast had passed, and the print it had left in the soft grey earth spoke to our fingers when we knelt and touched it, as plain as words spoken aloud. Our hands were swift. I say this without pride, for it was not a thing we chose, but a thing the country made in us, as the country makes all things that endure within it. Our hands were swift, and our feet moved like whispers in the wind that did not blow, and we were the finest hunters that the world has ever held or ever will hold, and we were dying, and we did not know it.
That is the part I cannot say without the old grief rising in me, even now, even being what I am, which is no longer a living man and not yet wholly a thing of the place-between. We were dying. The land was beautiful and it was dying, and we were beautiful in our way and we were dying with it, and we did not know, because a thing that has only ever ended slowly cannot tell the difference between ending and being. We thought the twilight was the world. We thought the silence was the natural voice of all things. We did not know that somewhere, past the mist, past the closed eye of the sky, there were lands where the light came down hot and golden and made every leaf to blaze, where the wind came and went a hundred times in a day and carried the smell of growing things, where peoples laughed in bright squares and cast long shadows on the warm stones and never once turned their faces toward the cold to feel for the shape of what was hunting them. We did not know, and so we could not mourn, and there is no grief in all the world like the grief that comes late, after the thing is gone, when at last you understand what it was you had.
But I run ahead of the tale, as the old ones always do, for the old ones have seen the ending and cannot keep it from leaking back into the beginning.
In those grey years there was a hunger in us that the small beasts of the fen could not fill. We took them, the pale soft things that moved through the still water, and they kept the flesh upon our bones, but they did not feed the other hunger, the deeper one, the one that had no name in our tongue and needed none, for every one of us knew it the way you know the beating of your own heart. It was a hunger to pursue. It was a hunger to follow a thing into the dark and bring it down and stand over it in the great silence and know, for one breath, that we had found what could not be found. The small beasts gave us no such knowing. They were too easy. They left their trails plain in the mud and their warmth plain in the cold air, and a child of five winters could run them down. We needed more. We needed the thing that could not be tracked, the quarry that would make our blind eyes worth the having and our swift hands worth the swiftness, and in our hearts, though we did not speak of it, we each of us prayed to whatever cold thing it is that hunters pray to, that such a quarry might be sent to us before we died.
And here is the bitterness folded inside the wonder, and the wonder folded back inside the bitterness, the way a serpent swallows its own tail: the prayer was heard. Something heard it. In a land where we believed nothing listened, where the silence was so complete that we took it for emptiness, something had been listening all along, and it sent us what we asked for, and what we asked for was our undoing. For there is a law older than the world, older even than my forgotten people, and it is this: that the gods who answer prayers are not always the gods who love you, and the gift that is given is not always given in kindness. Sometimes it is given the way a hunter gives bait. Sometimes the thing you have prayed to send your way is a thing that has been waiting, all this while, for you to call it close.
But I did not know this then. None of us knew. We were the blind hunters of the grey land, beautiful and doomed and unaware of our own doom, and we lived in the long twilight as though it would never break, because it never had, and we could not imagine that anything would ever change.
I think of them now, my people, as a man thinks of a song he heard in his childhood and can no longer quite remember, only that it was sweet, and that it is gone. I see them moving low through the slate hills with their white eyes turned to the cold. I see the black trees standing still against the ashen sky. I see the fen lying flat and silver, holding the grief of the heavens in its unmoving face. And I see, though they cannot, the shape that waits beyond the mist, patient as the patience of stone, watching the blind hunters with eyes black as the sky behind the sky, and I want to call out to them across all the years and all the dark, to tell them to be still, to be silent, to pray to nothing and ask for nothing and live out their slow ending in the only peace they were ever going to be given.
But the dead cannot speak backward into the living world. I learned that long ago, in the place-between, where the spirits taught me other things, harder things. And so the tale must go on as it went, and I must tell it as it was, and you must hear how the hunger of my people was answered, and how the answer came walking out of the dark on feet that left no print, and how it was to me, to Thal-Zhurath, that the spirits first came whispering in the hour when the stars weep.
But that is not this telling. This telling is only of the twilight that never broke, and the people who lived beneath it, and did not know they were beautiful, and did not know they were doomed, and turned their blind and certain faces toward the cold, listening, always listening, for the footstep of the thing they hoped to hunt.
We heard it at last.
We should have prayed that we never would.
Segment 2:
The Notch in the Old Ear
As told by Bracca Greypelt
We went out in the grey before the grey, which was the only time the land gave us, and we went out hungry. I led. I always led. The others came behind in the order they had earned, and we moved low through the fen-grass and did not speak.
There were four of us. Me, and the two brothers whose names do not matter now, and the old one we called Notch for the place a fen-cat had taken out of his ear when he was young. Notch was the best of us after me. Maybe before me. I never said so. He never asked.
The grass was wet and cold and did not move. Nothing moved in that land but us. That was the first thing you learned and the last thing you forgot. If a thing moved, you had made it move, or it had come to find you.
We were tracking pale-deer. They were not deer. We called them that. They were soft white things, big as a dog, and they went through the still water on legs that did not splash. They left no sound but they left warmth, and they left prints, and I could read both. I knelt and put my hand flat in the cold mud and felt where one had stood. The warmth was old. An hour, maybe less. The print was clean. Four toes, splayed wide for the soft ground, the drag of the dewclaw behind.
“Old,” I said. “But not too old.”
Notch knelt beside me. He did not need to. He trusted my hand. But he knelt and put his own hand down and felt the same thing I felt, and that was his way, and I let him.
“We follow,” he said.
We followed.
The trail ran north into the low hills where the black trees stood. It was a good trail and the deer was not running. It did not know we were behind it. That is the only way you take them, before they know. Once they know, they are gone, and you do not find them again, and you go home with nothing in your hands and the deep hunger still in you.
We went up out of the fen and into the hills and the ground turned from mud to slate and the prints got harder to read. But I could still read them. The scuff of a hoof on stone. The place a pebble had turned. A bent stalk of the grey grass where the deer had brushed it going by. I read them the way you read a thing you have read all your life, without thinking, the way you breathe.
Then the trail stopped.
I do not mean it grew faint. I do not mean the ground turned to bare rock that holds no print. I mean it stopped, full and clean, in the middle of soft grey earth that should have held a print as plain as a hand pressed in dough. The last mark was there. The next was not. And there was no place the deer could have gone. No stone to leap to. No water to take it. No tree it could have climbed, and it could not climb, and there was nothing.
I stopped. I held up my hand and the others stopped behind me.
I knelt at the last print and I looked at it and the cold came into me. Not the cold of the land. The land was always cold and I did not feel it anymore. This was another cold. It came up out of the ground through my knees and into my belly and it sat there.
The print was wrong.
The deer had been running. I could see that now, looking close. The toes were spread wider than a walking deer spreads them, and the dewclaw had bitten deep, and the earth was kicked up behind it the way it kicks up when a thing pushes off hard and fast. The deer had been running. The deer had been running from something. And then the deer was not there anymore. Not gone ahead. Not gone aside. Just not there, as if the world had reached down and lifted it up out of its own last step.
“Notch,” I said.
He came and knelt and looked. He was quiet a long time. He was the best of us after me and maybe before me and he looked at that last print for a long time and said nothing, and that was worse than if he had cried out.
“I have not seen this,” he said finally.
“No.”
“In all my years.”
“No.”
The brothers came up behind us. They were younger and they did not understand yet what they were looking at, and one of them said, “Where did it go,” and his voice was too loud, and I turned and looked at him and he stopped.
The land was very still.
I put my hand out over the empty ground past the last print, where the next print should have been, and I felt for the warmth of the deer. There was none. That was right. The deer was gone. But I held my hand there longer than I needed to, because under where the deer had stopped, in the place where the world had taken it, there was something else.
There was cold.
Not the cold of the land. The other cold. The cold that had come up into my belly. It was there in the ground, in a long low shape, like the place a great thing had lain down, or passed by close, dragging the chill of it behind. It was the shape of a thing I could not see and could not warm to and could not name. And it ran on, north, into the hills, where the deer’s trail did not.
I followed it with my hand, a pace, two paces. The cold shape went on. It left no print. It bent no grass. It turned no stone. A thing with weight enough to take a running deer up out of its own step, and it walked the grey earth and the grey earth did not know it had been walked. I am a hunter. I was the best hunter the world has held. And I have tracked by print and by warmth and by the bend of the grass my whole life, and here was a thing that gave me none of them, that gave me only cold, and the cold was not a trail a man is meant to follow. It was a trail a man is meant to run from.
I stood up.
“We go back,” I said.
Notch looked at me. He had felt it too. I knew he had felt it. He did not argue. The brothers did, a little, the young always do, they said we had come far and we were hungry and a deer was a deer, and I let them say it and then I said again, “We go back,” and the way I said it the second time, they went quiet, and they went back.
But Notch did not move yet.
He knelt one more time at the place where the cold ran on into the hills, and he put his old hand down on it, the hand that had felt warmth and print and grass for sixty grey years, and he held it there, and I watched his face. His face did not change much. It was not a face that changed much. But something went out of it while I watched. Some old surety that had been there since I was a boy following him through the fen. It went out of his face and it did not come back, not that day, not ever, and the notch in his ear caught the grey light, and he looked old to me for the first time, old and small against the still black trees.
“It is hunting too,” he said.
“I know.”
“It is better at it than we are.”
I did not answer that. There was nothing to answer. We went back down out of the hills and into the fen and we went home with empty hands and the deep hunger still in us. We did not speak on the way. There was nothing to say that the cold had not already said.
That night in the hollow the others slept, or made the shapes of men sleeping. I did not sleep. I lay with my blind face turned up toward the closed grey eye of the sky and I felt for the cold, the way you feel a tooth that has started to ache, going at it with the tongue, not because it helps but because you cannot leave it alone. And far off, north, in the hills, I thought I felt it still. The long low shape of it. Lying down now. Resting. Patient.
Waiting for us to come back, the way it had to know we would.
We were hunters. We had prayed all our lives for the thing that could not be tracked. I had knelt on the cold ground a hundred times and asked for it, in the wordless way we asked, and now it had come, and it had answered, and the answer had a cold in it that no man should feel and live easy after. I lay there and I knew two things the way I knew the beating of my own heart.
The first was that we would go back. We could not help it. It was in our blood, older than the bones of the earth, colder than the stars, the need to follow the thing that leaves no path. We would go back.
The second was that old Notch was right, and the second was worse than the first.
It was better at it than we were.
Segment 3:
I Heard It First in the Bell
As told by Ysmir Hollow-Between
I must set it down plainly, and I must set it down now, while my hand can still hold the bone-stylus steady, for there is so little time, and I would have you understand, you who come after, that I was not mad. I say it again, that there may be no mistake in the saying of it. I was not mad. I have never been mad. If I perceived, in those grey and breathless hours, what the others did not perceive, it is not because my mind was broken, but because my mind was whole, more terribly whole than any mind has need to be, and I would to all the cold gods of the place-between that it had been otherwise.
You have seen the bell. If you have come this far into the telling you have surely seen it, the small grey bell I wore upon my breast, the bell that has no tongue. The bell that cannot ring. I had carried it since before the hunt for the Night Beast began, since before any of us had felt the cold that Bracca felt upon the slate hills, and in all that time it had never once trembled. It hung against me, cold and silent, a dead thing of metal, and I had near forgotten the wearing of it, as a man forgets the weight of his own hand.
And then, upon the night that Bracca and old Notch came back from the hills with empty hands and would not speak of what they had found, the bell trembled.
I felt it before I understood it. I was crouched in the hollow, near the others, near where the brothers made the shapes of men sleeping and Bracca lay with his blind face turned up to the closed grey sky, and there came against my breast a faint and dreadful motion, a shivering of the dead metal, soft as the first stir of a fever in the blood. I put my hand to it. The bell was trembling. The tongueless bell, that could not ring, that had no voice with which to ring, was trembling against my breast like a living thing that has felt the approach of the knife.
And with the trembling came the whisper.
I cannot tell you that I heard it with my ears. I would be lying, and I have sworn to myself, in these last hours, that I will not lie, not now, not to you. It was not a sound that the air carried. It was a sound that the bell carried, up out of the cold metal and into the bone of my breast and from there into the deep chambers of my skull, where it unfolded itself, slow and terrible, into something that was almost like meaning. It was the dread-whisper. It was the voice of the thing in the hills. And it was not speaking to me. That is the part that I must make you understand, for it is the very root and seed of the horror. It was not speaking to me. It was moving through the camp, drifting low among the sleeping shapes of my companions, and it was tasting them.
Tasting them. I have no other word. The whisper went over Bracca where he lay, and I felt it pause upon him, felt it consider the long swift strength of him, the leader, the hunter who would not be easily taken, and felt it pass on, patient, unhurried, in no need of haste. It went over the brothers, the young ones, and I felt it linger there a little longer, felt something in it that I can only name as appetite, though the naming sickens me even now. It went over old Notch, and upon Notch it paused longest of all, and what I felt then I will carry down into whatever waits for me at the bottom of the dark, for the whisper knew Notch. It knew the cold had already touched him on the hill. It knew the old surety had gone out of his face and would not come back. It knew that Notch was already half-taken, and it lingered upon him the way a man lingers over a meal he has set aside and means to return to, and is in no hurry, because the meal cannot run.
I rose up. I could not help myself. I rose up in the hollow with my hand pressed to the trembling bell and I cried out, and I am not ashamed of the crying out, for who among you, feeling what I felt, would have held his peace?
“It is here,” I cried. “It is among us. It walks among us where we sleep. It is choosing. Do you not feel it? Do you not feel it choosing?”
And they woke. Of course they woke, for I had cried out loud, too loud, in the silent land where loud sounds carry far and far sounds wake things that should be left sleeping, and even in my terror I knew I had done a forbidden thing, and could not stop. They woke and they looked at me. The brothers looked at me with the slow blank fear that the young have for the things they cannot understand. And Bracca looked at me, and his blind white eyes turned toward me, and his face did not change, his face that never changed, and he said:
“There is nothing here. Lie down.”
Nothing here. I tell you the breath went out of me when he said it. Nothing here. He had felt the cold upon the hill. He had come back with empty hands and a silence upon him. He knew, he of all of them knew, that something walked the grey land that left no print and no warmth and no trail but cold, and yet he lay there with his blind face turned up to the sky and told me there was nothing here, because he could not feel it, because it did not come to him through metal and bone and the deep chamber of the skull, because the bell hung upon my breast and not upon his.
That is the loneliest thing in all the world. I had not known, until that moment, how lonely a thing it is, to perceive what no other can perceive. There is a comfort, even in terror, when the terror is shared. When the others see the wolf, you may fear the wolf together, and there is a kind of warmth in the fearing. But to feel the wolf moving among the sleeping bodies of your friends, to feel it choosing which of them it will take, and to cry out, and to be told to lie down, there is no warmth in that. There is only the cold, and the whisper, and the trembling of the bell, and the white blind faces turned toward you with their blank incomprehension, and the slow dreadful understanding that you are alone with the knowing, utterly and forever alone.
“Feel the bell,” I said. I was pleading now. I held it out toward Bracca on its cord, the small grey tongueless bell, still shivering against my fingers. “Only put your hand to it. Only feel how it trembles. It does not lie. It cannot ring and yet it trembles, and a thing that cannot ring does not tremble for nothing.”
He did not put his hand to it. He looked at me a moment longer with his unchanging face, and then he turned his blind eyes back up to the grey sky, and he said again, more quietly, which was somehow worse than the loudness would have been, “Lie down, Ysmir. We hunt in the grey before the grey. You need your rest.”
And the brothers lay back down. And old Notch, who had said nothing, who had only watched me with eyes that I could not read, old Notch lay back down too. And one by one they made again the shapes of men sleeping, and I was left crouched and alone in the hollow with the bell trembling against my breast and the whisper moving through the camp, drifting low, tasting them, choosing, in no hurry, in no hurry at all.
I did not sleep. How could I have slept? I sat with my back against the cold slate and I held the bell in both my hands as though my hands could still it, and they could not, and all the long grey night the whisper went over the sleeping bodies of my friends, and I felt the shape of its hunger, and I could do nothing, nothing, for I had cried out and been told there was nothing here.
Near the end of the night, in the hour when the grey is greyest, the whisper paused once more upon old Notch, and it lingered there, and I felt something in it that I had not felt before. I felt patience giving way to nearness. I felt the long waiting begin, at last, to draw toward its close. And the bell, against my breast, gave one final terrible shudder, and then went still, and was only dead metal once again, and the whisper was gone, and the grey light came up the way it always came, soft and sourceless and without warmth, over the sleeping shapes of the doomed.
I looked at Notch in that grey light. He slept, or seemed to sleep. The notch in his old ear caught the dim light the way it had on the hill. And I knew, with the whole and terrible wholeness of my mind that was not mad, was never mad, that he had been chosen, and that none of them would believe me, and that I would have to watch it happen, and could not stop it, and that this, this watching and this helplessness, was to be my portion in the hunt for the Night Beast, from that grey morning unto the end.
I was not mad.
Remember that I told you so.
Segment 4:
A Footnote on Impossible Spoor
As recorded by Vorhaeth, who is Catalogued
It is my habit, and has been the habit of my unnaturally extended existence, to set down all things in their proper order, with their proper notations, that the chaos of the world might be made to submit, in some small and provisional degree, to the discipline of the written page. I had thought, in my arrogance, that there was no phenomenon so strange that it could not be reduced to entry and cross-reference, no horror so profound that it could not be footnoted into manageability. I record now, with a hand I am compelled to admit is no longer entirely steady, that I was mistaken. There are things that the page cannot hold. There are spoor that the catalogue cannot contain. And the worst of these is the thing that the hunters had begun, in their plain and unlettered way, to call the Night Beast, though I am persuaded, upon evidence I shall lay before you, that it had borne other names in elder aeons, names that ought never to have been spoken, and that I, to my everlasting unease, came perilously near to speaking.
It was the one called Bracca who brought me to the place. He did not wish to. I observed in him a reluctance amounting nearly to dread, which in a creature of his stoic temper was itself a datum of no small significance. The hunters, you understand, do not trust the written word, nor those of us who keep it. They regard my catalogues as a species of weakness, a substitution of ink for instinct, and in the ordinary run of their grey lives they are perhaps not wrong to do so. But this was not the ordinary run. This was a trail that had ended in the middle of soft earth, and a deer that had been lifted out of its own last step, and a cold that ran on where no print followed, and even Bracca, who trusted nothing he could not feel with his swift and certain hands, had come at last to the bitter conclusion that the matter exceeded the competence of the hand, and required the eye. My eye. The Codex-Monocle, through which I read the things that are written upon the surfaces of the world, where the ignorant see only stone and mud and the indifferent grey.
We went up into the hills, the two of us, in the grey before the grey, and I confess that the closer we came to the place, the more my parchment skin contracted upon my ancient bones with a sensation I had not felt in longer than I can reckon, a crawling, a presentiment, the body’s old animal wisdom asserting itself against the disdain of the cultivated mind. Bracca led me to the last print, the clean splayed print of the running deer, and beyond it the empty earth, and he would come no nearer than that. He stood back, his blind face turned toward me, and he said only, “Read it, if you can read it. Then we go.”
I knelt. I am old, and the kneeling is not easy, but I knelt, and I bent my eye to the empty ground, and I read.
Let me be precise, for precision is the last dignity left to a mind confronting that which would unseat it. Through the Codex-Monocle, the surfaces of the world declare themselves. A footprint, to my augmented sight, is not merely a depression in the earth; it is a sentence, a statement of weight and speed and intent, written in the grammar of pressure and disturbance. I have read the spoor of ten thousand creatures in my long keeping of records, and never once has the earth failed to speak to me of what has passed across it.
The empty ground past the deer’s last print did not speak. I had expected silence, the mere absence of testimony. That is not what I found. What I found was worse, immeasurably worse, and I labored for some moments to comprehend it before the comprehension came, and when it came I would have given much to have remained in ignorance. The ground did not fail to speak. The ground had been made to forget. Where the thing had passed, the very surface of the world had been scoured of its memory, wiped clean not as a slate is wiped, leaving the slate, but as a thing is unwritten, as though the passage had reached backward into the moments before it occurred and erased its own having-been. The earth there was not blank. The earth there was wounded, in a manner I can only describe as a wound in causality itself, a place where the ordinary sequence of before and after had been folded and broken, so that I could not say, looking upon it, whether the thing had walked there a moment past or had not yet walked there at all, or whether, in some fashion that the architecture of my mind was never built to encompass, both were true together.
And there was the cold. Bracca had spoken of the cold and I had recorded his testimony with the polite skepticism I reserve for the unlettered, but I record now that he had understated it, that he had not the vocabulary to state it fully, and that I, who have vocabulary enough for most horrors, find it strained near to breaking. The cold that lay along that scoured and wounded ground was not the cold of low temperature. It was the cold of distance. It was the cold one imagines must obtain in the gulfs between the stars, where no warmth has travelled since the kindling of the first fire, the cold of an indifference so vast and so ancient that the warmth of all the living worlds together would be as a single guttering ember dropped into an ocean that has never known and will never know the meaning of heat.
I should have risen then. I should have told Bracca that I could read nothing, that the matter was beyond me, and gone down out of the hills and burned my catalogues and made my peace with such gods as a thing like myself is permitted to address. But I am a scholar. The vice of the scholar is that he must know, that the appetite for understanding will drive him past every warning his lesser faculties can muster, and so, instead of rising, I drew from the mantle upon my shoulder, from among its whispering bound pages, the elder leaves that I carry against great need, the forbidden glosses copied in my youth from texts that were old when the hunters’ grandfathers were unborn, and I laid the wounded ground against what was written there, and I cross-referenced the impossible spoor.
I shall not transcribe what I found. I have resolved this, and I will hold to it, for there are entries that ought not to be made, and to copy them here would be to extend their contagion to you who read. I shall say only this much, and may it be forgiven me. The hunters believed the Night Beast to be a thing of their own grey land, born, as their songs would have it, from the last breath of the dying moon. This is a comfortable fiction. It is the kind of fiction that a people tells itself so that the horror may be contained within the borders of the known, so that even the monster may be a monster of ours, native to our country, bound by our seasons. The elder glosses tell another tale. The thing that scoured the ground in the hills above the fen does not belong to the grey land. It does not belong to the moon, dying or otherwise. It does not belong, so far as I was able to determine before the determining became unendurable, to this world at all, nor to the age of this world, nor to any age that the world has counted. The glosses name a hunger that was abroad in the dark before there was a moon to die, before there was an earth whose bones could be older than anything, a hunger that does not pursue as a beast pursues, for food or for territory or for the blind imperatives of the flesh, but pursues for the sake of pursuit, eternally, across the unlit gulfs, and that the appearance of it in any world is not an event of that world’s history but an intrusion into it, a place where the great indifferent dark has reached in through a thin place in the fabric and begun, slowly, patiently, to feed.
And the hunters had prayed for it. This is the detail that I record last, because it is the detail that lodges deepest, the footnote that undoes the entire text above it. The hunters, in their grey hunger, in their need for a quarry worthy of their blind and certain art, had prayed for the thing that could not be tracked. And the thing that could not be tracked had been there all along, older than their lore, older than their land, listening in the silence they had mistaken for emptiness, and it had heard the prayer, and it had answered, not because it loved them, for it is incapable of love as the void is incapable of love, but because a prayer, to such a thing, is a sound in the dark, and a sound in the dark is a thing that may be tracked back to its source, and a source is a thing that may be fed upon.
I rose. My knees would scarcely bear me. Bracca was watching, his blind face toward me, and he asked, in his spare and dreadful way, “Well? Can you read it?”
I looked at him. I considered, in that moment, telling him the whole of it, the wound in the ground, the cold of the gulfs, the elder names, the terrible truth that they had not found a monster but summoned one, and that it was not native to their world but had come from outside it and would not be bound by anything they understood. I considered it, and I did not do it, and I have wondered since whether that silence was mercy or cowardice, and I have not been able to decide, and I think now I never shall.
“It is old,” I said to him. “Older than your songs. Older than this land. I cannot read where it goes. The ground will not say.” All of which was true, and none of which was the truth.
He nodded slowly, as though I had only confirmed a thing he had already feared, and perhaps I had. “Then we go down,” he said.
We went down out of the hills. But I carried the cross-reference with me, folded now into the deep and perfect memory that is my blessing and my curse, and I knew, as we descended into the grey fen, that I had understood too much and understood it too quickly, that the page could not hold this thing, that the catalogue had met at last the entry it could not contain. And I knew one further thing, which I set down here as the final footnote, that you may be warned where the hunters were not. A thing that comes from outside the world cannot be killed by anything the world contains. The hunters meant to hunt it. They could not know what I knew. They could not know that the only question that remained, the only entry left to be made in the catalogue of this doomed pursuit, was not whether the Beast would be taken, but how many of them it would take first, and whether any record of it would survive, and whether the survival of the record was itself a thing to be wished for, or the very worst outcome of them all.
Segment 5:
The Dark That Wanted Me
As told by Lirelle Ashthorn
Let them say what they will of me. Let Bracca call me reckless and the old one shake his ruined head, and let Ysmir, poor trembling Ysmir, look at me with those wide drowned eyes as though I were the thing he feared and not a girl like any other. Let them say it. I have stopped caring what is said. There is a truth in me that I have carried like a coal pressed against the breastbone, and I will set it down here whether it damns me or no, for I cannot carry it silent any longer, and silence has never been my nature.
I wanted it.
There. It is written, and the writing of it does not shame me as I thought it might. I wanted the thing in the hills. From the first hour that Bracca came down with empty hands and that cold gone into his face, from the first whisper that set Ysmir crying out in the dark, I wanted it, and the wanting was not like any wanting I had known before, not the wanting of food when the hunger is deep, nor the wanting of warmth in the cold that is always cold, nor even the wild and shameful wanting of one body for another that the grey land scarcely leaves us breath enough to feel. It was a deeper thing than these. It was a wanting that came up out of the same dark place the cold came from, and met the cold there, and knew it.
I have tried to make sense of it and I cannot, and I have given over the trying. They speak of the hunt as a duty. Bracca speaks of it so, in his few hard words, as a thing we must do because we are hunters and hunters hunt, the way water must run downhill and stone must fall. And the old one nods, and the brothers nod, and they go out into the grey before the grey because that is what is done, because it has always been done, because the deep hunger drives them and they have given it the respectable name of duty so they need not look too long at what it truly is. Cowards, all of them, not in the body, for there are no braver bodies in the world than these, but in the soul. They will follow the Beast to the edge of the dark and they will call it duty, because duty is a leash, and a leashed thing need not ask itself whether it would have run there anyway, unleashed, of its own wild will.
I would have run there. That is my confession. I would have gone into the hills alone, with no duty laid upon me and no party at my back and no songs of forgotten blood to give me leave, because the dark wanted me, and I wanted the dark, and there is in me a moor-bred wildness that has never once in all my life been content to stay where it was put.
You must understand the land to understand the girl, for the land made me as it made all of us, but it made me wrong, or made me too well, I have never decided which. The others looked on the grey twilight and saw their home and their prison both, the flat silver fens and the slate hills and the black still trees, and they made their peace with it, the dull contented peace of creatures that know no other country. I made no such peace. I stood on the high slate in the grey light with the unmoving air against my face and I felt always, always, a wind that did not blow, a wind that ought to have come tearing across those open hills and never did, and the wanting of that wind was the first wanting I ever knew. I wanted the air to move. I wanted something, anything, to break the terrible stillness that the others called silence and loved. And when the cold came into the hills, the cold of the thing that left no print, I knew it for what it was the moment Bracca spoke of it. It was the wind I had waited for all my life. It was the thing that moved in a world that did not move. It was the storm I had been promised in my blood and never given.
How could I not love it? Tell me how. Tell me how a creature starved of weather is to look upon the one wild thing in all the grey country and feel only fear, as the sensible feel, as Ysmir feels, shaking and crying in the night. I do not feel only fear. I feel fear, yes, I will not lie and say I do not, there is a fear in me when I turn toward the hills that takes the breath clean out of my chest. But the fear and the wanting are not two things in me. They are one thing. They are braided together so tight I could not part them with a knife, and the fear is the very edge that makes the wanting sharp, and the wanting is the very heat that makes the fear unbearable, and I would not give up either of them, not for all the safe grey years the others mean to live and die in.
I went out alone, once, before the party would set out together. I have not told them this and I will not. In the deepest grey, when even Bracca slept, I left the hollow and I went up into the hills toward the place where the cold ran on, and I went not to track it, not to take it, not for any duty under the closed eye of the sky. I went because it called me. I will swear to that with my hand on whatever cold thing it is we swear by. It called me, not in words, not in Ysmir’s whispers that pass through metal and bone, but in the way a high place calls to one who stands at the edge of it, that pull in the belly, that voice that is not a voice that says come closer, come closer, you know that you will, why pretend otherwise.
I came closer.
I stood on the slate where the deer had been lifted out of its step, and I felt the cold rise up through the soles of my feet and into me, and I tell you it was the nearest thing to joy I have ever felt. It was terror and it was joy and they were one. The cold went into me like the wind I had wanted, and the stillness broke, in me if nowhere else, and for one breath, one single breath in all my grey starved life, I was not a thing that stayed where it was put. I was a thing that had gone toward what it wanted. And out there in the dark beyond the dark, past where my filmed white eyes could feel, something turned its attention toward me. I felt it the way you feel a gaze on the back of your neck in an empty room. Something out there knew that I had come. Something out there was glad, in whatever fashion such a thing is glad, that I had come, that one of the hunters wanted it as much as it wanted her, and I stood there and I let it look at me and I looked back into the dark with my whole wild heart and I did not run.
I should have run. I know it. The sensible part of me, the small dull moor-bred sense that keeps a body alive, screamed at me to run, and I did not, and I stayed until the cold had filled me to the throat, and then I turned, slowly, of my own will and not because the dark released me, and I walked back down into the grey, and the wanting came with me, and it has never left.
So when Bracca lays the duty on us and we go out together, and the others go because they must, I go because I would have gone anyway, because I have already gone, because the dark and I made a thing between us on that slate hill that the others know nothing of. They think we hunt the Beast. Perhaps we do. But I am not hunting, or not only. I am answering. The thing in the hills called to the wildest, most starved, most storm-hungry heart among us, and that heart is mine, and I have answered, and I will keep answering, down into the Valley of Lost Names and through the seven nights that are not nights and out the other side of all of it, to whatever waits at the black heart of the dark.
They will say I led us to our ruin. Let them say it. Perhaps it is even true. But I will say this against it, and let it stand as my own moral against the morals the old ones tell: it is a crueler ruin to live one’s whole life in a stillness one was born to break, to die of the safe grey years with the wind one waited for never come, than to walk wide-eyed and willing into the storm at last and be taken by the only thing that ever wanted you as fiercely as you wanted it.
The dark wanted me.
God help me, and God forgive me, and let no one who has not stood starved on the slate hills of the grey land dare to judge me, but I wanted it more.
Segment 6:
The Hour When Stars Weep
As told by Thal-Zhurath, who was Unmade
There is an hour, in the long twilight of Vael-Anûr, that we named the hour when stars weep, though no man among us had ever seen a star, and the sky was hidden always behind its grey and mourning veil. It was the name our grandmothers gave to the deepest part of the not-night, when the sourceless light drew down to its faintest and coldest ebb, and a kind of moisture gathered in the unmoving air and lay upon the slate and the black trees like the tears of something vast and unseen that wept above the mist for reasons it had long forgotten. It was the loneliest hour of all the country’s lonely hours. It was the hour in which a man, lying wakeful, felt most keenly the weight of the closed eye of the sky pressing down upon him, and felt most certainly that he was small, and that the world was old, and that both of them were ending.
It was in that hour that the spirits came to me.
I had gone apart from the others. This was my custom, and they suffered it, for I was strange among them even then, before I was Unmade, before the satchel, before any of it. I would walk out alone into the deepest grey and find a high place upon the slate and sit there with my blind face turned up to the weeping sky, and listen. Not for prey. The others listened always for prey, for warmth and disturbance and the bend of the grass, and they were right to, for that listening kept the flesh upon our bones. But I listened for something else, something I could not have named, a sound beneath the silence, a voice within the stillness, and the others would have called me a fool for it had they known, and perhaps I was a fool, and perhaps the fool is only the one who hears first what all will hear at last.
On that night the listening was answered.
They did not come as living things come, with the warmth that my blind eyes could feel and the print that my hands could read. Nor did they come as the dead come, with the cold absence that is the mark of a thing that was and is no longer. They came from neither place. They came from the place that is between the two, the place where the shadows go to take their rest when there is no light strong enough to cast them, and I knew, the moment I felt the air change about me, that I was in the presence of things that had never been alive and had never been dead, and that this was a worse and stranger thing than either, and that I should have been afraid.
I was afraid. Let no man think me without fear in that hour. But the fear in me was not the fear that bids a creature flee. It was the older fear, the deeper one, the fear that is so near to awe that the two cannot be told apart, the fear a man feels when he stands at last in the presence of the thing his whole life has been a long unknowing journey toward. I sat upon the slate and I did not flee, and the spirits gathered close about me in the weeping hour, and they spoke.
Their speech was not as our speech. I have tried, in the long years since, to set it down in the tongues of the living, and the tongues of the living break beneath the weight of it. It was a language of strange shapes and stranger sounds, sounds that turned in the ear like a serpent coiling in warm sand, shapes that the mind could not hold but only feel, the way one feels the shape of a great dark room in which one cannot see. And yet I understood them. That is the marvel and the dread of it together. I understood them as a child understands the voice of its mother before ever it has learned a single word, in the blood, in the bone, beneath all knowing. They spoke, and I understood, and the understanding came into me like cold water into a cup that has stood empty all its life and did not know, until the filling, that it was made to be filled.
“You listen,” they said to me, and the saying of it was the first sound that had ever found the empty cup of me. “Of all your blind and dying people, you alone turn your face to the weeping hour and listen for what is beneath. We have watched you. We have waited. The cup that listens is the cup that may be filled.”
And I said to them, with a voice that shook, “What would you fill me with?”
“With a charge,” they said. “With a burden. With a calling that you cannot refuse, for you were made to receive it, as the riverbed is made to receive the river, though the riverbed did not ask, and cannot say no, and will be carved by the water whether it wills it or no.”
I should have risen then and fled down into the grey and woken the others and told them to break the camp and go far from that place. I knew, even as the cold water filled the cup of me, that a calling one cannot refuse is not always a gift, and that the things which choose us are not always the things that wish us well. But the riverbed does not flee the river. It cannot. And I sat, and I let them speak on, and this is what they said, and I have carried every word of it down through death and into the place-between, and I will carry it to the ending of all things.
“There walks in your hills,” they said, “a thing that you have prayed for. You and all your starved and certain people, kneeling on the cold ground, asking in the wordless way for the quarry that cannot be tracked. You have been heard. It has come. But hear us now, listener, hear us in the hour when stars weep, for this is the heart of the charge: you seek that which cannot be seen, and you follow that which leaves no path, and by the arts of your blind people you will never take it. Your warmth-sight cannot find it, for it carries no warmth. Your hands cannot read it, for it leaves no print. Your finest tracker, the swift one, the leader, has already stood above its trail and found the trail was cold and the cold was not a thing a man may follow. By all that your people are and all that your people know, the thing in the hills is beyond you, and to pursue it as you are is to be led, one by one, into the dark, and taken, and unmade.”
“Then it cannot be hunted,” I said, and there was grief in me, for even in my fear the deep hunger stirred, the hunger to pursue, and to be told the great quarry was beyond us was a sorrow as keen as any.
“It can be hunted,” they said. “But not by the living, with the arts of the living. To follow that which leaves no path, you must carry that which holds the silence of the forgotten night. To find that which cannot be seen, you must bear within you the sight of the eye that sees without seeing. You must go down into the Valley of Lost Names, where no voice is heard and no wind stirs, and there you will find a beast that has never been born, whose skin is not of this world, and from its hide you must fashion a vessel. Into that vessel you must place the dust of the stars that have fallen, and the wind that passes and leaves no trace, and the smell that is known only to the dead. And the vessel, so made and so filled, will whisper to you in this our tongue, and it will show you the unseen path, and your feet will find the trail of the trackless thing as though it were written in the earth before you.”
And I understood, in that moment, the whole shape of the calling, and the awe in me deepened into a dread so solemn and so vast that I could scarcely draw breath against the weight of it. For I understood that to carry such a vessel, to bear within me the silence of the forgotten night, would be to become, in some measure, a thing of the place-between myself. The cup that is filled is changed by the filling. The riverbed that receives the river is carved, and worn, and is never again the dry and silent stone it was. They were not only giving me the means to hunt the Beast. They were making me into the kind of thing that could hunt it, and a thing that can hunt the trackless dark is no longer wholly a thing of the warm and living world, and I knew this, I knew it as the cold water filled me, and I did not refuse.
I could not refuse. That is the dread at the bottom of the awe, and the awe at the bottom of the dread, each holding the other the way the serpent holds its tail. The riverbed cannot say no to the river. I had listened all my life for the voice beneath the silence, and the voice had spoken at last, and a man who has waited his whole life to be called does not, when the calling comes, find in himself the power to turn away from it, even when he sees, as I saw, that the calling will carve him hollow and make of him something his own people would not know.
“Why me?” I asked them, in the weeping hour, with the cold tears of the unseen sky lying on my upturned face. “Why must it be Thal-Zhurath?”
And they were silent a long while, the spirits of the between, and then they answered me, and their answer has never left me, and it is the last thing I will set down of that hour, for it is the thing I have understood least and feared most across all the years since.
“Because you wanted to be,” they said. “Because, listener, in the deepest part of you, beneath the hunger and the fear and the love of your dying land, there has always been a thing that wished to leave the warm and certain world behind and walk in the dark where the unseen things walk. We did not put that wish in you. We do not have such power. We only heard it, as you have spent your life hearing the voice beneath the silence, and we have come to grant it, for it is the law of the place-between that what is wished for in the deep heart will, in the fullness of the long dark, be given. You called us, Thal-Zhurath, long before this hour. You have been calling us since you were a child upon the slate. We have only, at the last, answered.”
And the weeping hour passed, and the grey came up the way the grey always came, and the spirits were gone, and I sat alone upon the high slate with the cold of their charge filling the cup of me to the brim, and I knew that I would go down into the Valley of Lost Names, and fashion the vessel, and become the thing that could hunt the trackless dark, and that I had wished for all of it, in the deep heart, without ever knowing that I wished, and that there is no doom in all the world so complete as the doom a man has called down upon himself and cannot now remember calling.
I rose. I turned my blind and certain face toward the hills where the Beast walked, and toward the deeper dark beyond them where the Valley waited, and I went down to wake the others and tell them what I must, and the awe and the dread walked with me, one on either hand, and they have walked with me ever since.
Segment 7:
We Go Now
As told by Bracca Greypelt
Thal-Zhurath came down from the high slate in the grey after the weeping hour and he was changed. I cannot say how. His face was the same face. His eyes were the same blind white. But something had come into him on the hill, or something had gone out, and a hunter knows the smell of a man who has crossed a line and cannot cross back. I had smelled it before, on men who were going to die and did not know it yet. I smelled it now on Thal-Zhurath and he was not going to die. It was a different line he had crossed. I did not have a word for it. I do not have one now.
He stood in the hollow and he told us what he had to tell. He told it plain, which surprised me, for Thal-Zhurath was never a plain talker, but the spirits had taken the music out of his telling that morning and left only the bones of it. There was a thing in the hills. We could not hunt it as we were. To hunt it we had to go down into the Valley of Lost Names and make a thing from the hide of a beast that was not born, and fill it with cold and dust and the smell of the dead. Then the thing he made would show him the trail. Then we could follow.
He did not ask us to come. That was the thing about Thal-Zhurath. He never asked. He laid the truth down on the cold ground between us like a man laying down a kill, and he let us look at it, and what we did with it was ours.
The brothers looked at it and were afraid. That was right. Fear is not weakness in the young. It is only fear. They would learn to carry it or they would not, and the land would teach them either way. Ysmir looked at it and I saw he was already past fear, into something worse, the place a man goes when he has known a thing too long before the others and is tired of knowing it alone. Lirelle looked at it and her eyes were bright. Too bright. I did not like the brightness in her eyes. I have seen that brightness on a beast that runs at the hunter instead of away, and you cannot trust a thing that runs the wrong way, but you cannot leave it behind either, because the wrong way is sometimes the way you have to go.
Old Notch did not look at it long. He had felt the cold on the hill with his own hand. He knew already. He looked at the truth on the ground for one breath and then he looked away, north, toward the hills, the way a man looks at a debt he means to pay.
I looked at all of them. Then I looked at the camp.
It was a poor camp. A hollow in the slate, lined with grey hides, the cold ashes of a fire that gave no warmth worth the name. Ten years I had slept in it. Longer. The fen lay flat and silver below it and held the grey sky in its face and the black trees stood around it still and tall and did not move. It was not much. But it was the safe and the known. It was the place where a thing could not come at you out of the dark without crossing ground you had read ten thousand times. Past the hills, down in the Valley, there would be no ground I had read. There would be no safe and no known. There would only be the place where the names are lost, and a man who goes there goes out past everything he is sure of and takes his chances with what he finds.
I have thought since on why men love the safe and the known even when the safe and the known is a poor cold hollow in a dying land. I think it is because a thing you have read ten thousand times cannot surprise you, and the worst death is the one that surprises you, and a man will trade almost anything for the small mercy of seeing his death coming. We were trading that mercy now. We were walking out past the ground we could read, toward a death none of us would see until it was on us. That is what leaving the camp meant. Not the leaving of a place. The leaving of the last small certainty a hunter has, which is the certainty of the ground beneath his feet.
I made the decision the way I made all decisions. Quick, and once.
“We go now,” I said.
That was all. There was nothing else to say and saying more would have made it harder, and a thing that is already hard does not need help.
We did not say goodbyes. There was no one to say them to. The whole of our people had been in that hollow and the few who were not coming were the old and the young who could not, and they did not want a goodbye, for a goodbye is a way of saying you do not think you are coming back, and a hunter does not say that even when it is true. We packed what we carried, which was little. We did not pack much because much is weight and weight is the thing that gets you killed when the running starts. Each took what each needed. Notch took less than he needed, and I saw it, and I said nothing, because a man has the right to choose what he carries into the dark and the right to choose to carry too little, and I would not take that from him.
The brothers wanted to bank the fire. I told them no. We would not be coming back to it and a fire left banked is a fire that says I will return, and the land does not like a lie, and neither do I. We let it die. We watched the last grey thread of its smoke go up into the unmoving air and hang there, not rising, not falling, the way everything hung in that country, and then it was gone, and the hollow was only cold stone.
Lirelle was already at the edge of the camp, looking north, before I had finished. She did not look back. The brightness was in her and it pulled her and she went where it pulled. I marked it. I would have to watch her. A thing that wants the dark is a thing that will walk you into it if you let it, and I do not let things walk me anywhere I have not chosen to go.
Ysmir came last. He had his bell, the small grey bell that could not ring. He had his hand on it as he walked. I did not ask him if it trembled. I did not want to know. There are things a leader is better not knowing, because knowing them changes nothing and only sits in the belly, and I had cold enough sitting in my belly already.
Thal-Zhurath went to the front with me. We led together, though it was his calling that bent the road, and I let it, because a man who has crossed the line he had crossed sees a way the rest of us cannot, and there are times the seeing matters more than the leading. We went up out of the hollow and onto the slate and the camp fell behind us and below us and was gone in the grey, and I did not look back at it either, and neither did Notch, and that was two of us who knew enough not to.
We climbed toward the hills. Beyond the hills, the Valley. Beyond the Valley, the thing that had to be made, and beyond that, the Beast, and beyond the Beast, nothing I could read, nothing any of us could read, only the dark and what waited in it.
The air did not move. Our feet made no sound on the slate. We went in a line, low and certain, the way our people had always gone, blind faces turned to the cold, and we left the safe and the known behind us for the last time, and not one of us said a word, because there were no words for it, and even if there had been, we were not the kind of people who would have used them.
We were hunters.
We went now.
Segment 8:
The Whispers Will Not Stop
As told by Ysmir Hollow-Between
How shall I make you understand what it is to travel three days and three not-nights with a sound in your skull that never ceases, that has no source you can stop your ears against, that rises and falls but never, never falls all the way to silence? You cannot understand it. I tell myself you cannot, that no one who has not borne it can, and yet I must try to set it down, I must, for the setting down is the last thread by which I hold to the conviction that I am still a reasoning creature and not the gibbering thing that the whispers would make of me. I write to prove that I can still write. I write to prove that the hand obeys the mind, and that the mind is mine, and that it is whole. I was not mad upon the first night when the bell trembled. I am not mad now, three not-nights into the dark road toward the Valley. I will say it as often as the saying is needed. I am not mad. The whispers are real. It is the most reasonable thing in all the world to be unstrung by a real thing, and I am unstrung, and I am not mad, and both of these are true together, and you must hold them both, as I must, or you will think me what I am not.
We left the camp. We went up over the hills and down the far side of them, into country I had never walked, where the slate gave way to a black and broken land of standing stones and dead riverbeds that wound away into the grey without ever once having held water. And the further we went from the camp, the worse the whispers grew.
I had thought, in my foolishness, that distance from the camp might bring me relief, that the whispers had attached themselves somehow to that place, to the sleeping bodies the Beast had tasted, and that in leaving I might leave them too. I was wrong. The whispers were not attached to the camp. The whispers were attached to me, or rather, I came to understand, with a slowly mounting horror that I can scarcely commit to the page, the whispers were attached to the road. To the direction of our going. For we were walking toward the Beast, you see, toward the Valley where the means to hunt it lay, and the Beast was the source of the dread-whisper, and every step we took toward it was a step deeper into the thing’s own voice, as a man wading into the sea goes deeper into the roar of it, and the roar does not lessen with the wading but grows, and grows, until it is the whole of the world and there is nothing left that is not the roar.
The bell trembled now without ceasing. Day and not-night, waking and the brief broken snatches of sleep that were no longer truly sleep, it shivered against my breast, a constant fine vibration like the wing of a trapped insect, and I could not still it, and I no longer tried, for the trying only fixed my attention upon it the more. And through the trembling came the voices. I say voices, and yet I am no longer certain it is right to speak of them so, for a voice implies a speaker, a thing that wishes to be understood, and I do not think the whispers wished to be understood at all. They were not speech directed at me. They were the overspill of a vast intent, the way a great cauldron set to boil will hiss and mutter at its edges, not to communicate but only because that is the sound that boiling makes. The Beast was thinking. That is the nearest I can come to it. The Beast, far ahead of us in the dark, was turning its slow cold attention upon the things of the world, upon us, upon the road, upon the Valley, and the turning of that attention made a sound, and the bell caught the sound, and gave it to me, and I could not give it back.
I tried to tell them. God help me, I tried. On the second not-night, when we made our cold camp among the standing stones, I went to Bracca where he sat sharpening nothing, only running the whetstone over a blade that needed no sharpening, the way he did when he was thinking, and I knelt before him and I said, low, that I might not be too loud in that listening country, “It grows worse. The closer we come, the worse it grows. The bell does not stop now, Bracca. It does not stop at all.”
And he looked at me with his blind white eyes, and his face did not change, and he said, “Then the bell tells us we go the right way.”
The right way. I sat back upon my heels and I felt something give way in me at the words. The right way. He had taken my torment and made of it a compass. He was not wrong, you understand, that is the dreadful part, he was not wrong, the whispers did grow worse the nearer we came, and so they were a kind of guide, a confirmation that the road ran true. But to him it was a fact, clean and useful, a thing to be noted and set aside. To me it was the slow drowning of my reason in a sea that grew louder with every step, and he could not feel it, none of them could feel it, and so to all of them but me the worsening of the whispers was good news, a sign of progress, and I alone bore the cost of the progress, and I alone knew what the cost was, and there is a particular madness, or what would be madness in a lesser mind, in being the only one who pays, and being told that your payment is a gift to the rest.
Doubt came to me on the third not-night. I will be honest. I had sworn to be honest in this account and I will keep the swearing even where it shames me. Doubt came, and it was a subtler torment than the whispers, and a crueler one. For I lay among the cold stones with the bell shivering and the voices spilling through it, and a small dry treacherous part of my own mind, the part that reasons, the part I had always trusted, turned upon me and asked: What if there is nothing? What if the bell trembles because you make it tremble, because your own hand, your own racing heart against it, sets the metal shivering, and you, in your terror, name the shivering a voice? What if the whispers are the sound of your own thoughts, grown loud in the silence of this listening land, and you have mistaken the roar of your own fear for the roar of a thing outside you? What if Bracca is right, and there is nothing here, and there was never anything here, and you have walked three not-nights into the dark chasing a sound that lives nowhere but inside your own unraveling skull?
This is the doubt that breaks men. Not the fear of the monster. The fear that there is no monster, that the monster is oneself, that one has become the very thing one dreaded, a mind that generates its own horrors and cannot tell them from the world. I lay there and I shook, and I pressed the bell so hard against my breast that the edge of it cut me, and I welcomed the cutting, for pain at least is real, pain at least cannot be doubted, and I would have cut myself a hundred times over only to have one thing in all the dark that I could be sure of.
And then, in the deepest part of that third not-night, the doubt was answered, and I have not known since whether to call the answer a mercy or the cruelest stroke of all.
The whispers changed.
They had been, until that hour, the formless overspill I have described, the mutter of a boiling vastness, undirected, impersonal. And then, for the space of perhaps three breaths, they gathered. They drew together out of their formlessness into something that had, unmistakably, a shape, and the shape was a regard, an attention, a turning-toward, and it turned toward me. Toward Ysmir. Toward the one among the hunters who could hear. The Beast, far off in the dark, in the midst of its vast cold thinking, became aware that something in the approaching band was aware of it, and it bent a fraction of its attention back along the thread of that awareness, down the trembling bell and into the deep chamber of my skull, and for three breaths the thing in the dark and I regarded one another across all the listening miles, and it knew me, and I knew that it knew me, and then it withdrew, incurious, having only marked me, as a man glancing down marks a beetle on the path and does not trouble to crush it, not yet, having other places to set his foot.
There was the answer to my doubt. The whispers were not my own mind. A thing that was not me had noticed that I noticed it. You cannot be noticed by your own delusion. The delusion does not look back at you. The horror looked back at me, and in the looking back it proved itself real, and proved me sane, and I have never in my life been so glad and so utterly undone by a single thing, for I had wanted, in the depths of the doubt, almost to be mad, since a madman’s monster cannot truly take him, and now I knew the monster was real, and could take me, and had looked at me, and meant, in its own slow time, to come back.
I did not sleep again on the road to the Valley. I am not certain I have truly slept since. The whispers do not stop. They will not stop. They grow louder with every step we take toward the thing that makes them, and I take those steps because Bracca leads and the others follow and I cannot stay behind alone in the dark with the voices and no fire and no face beside me, and so I go on, deeper into the roar, toward the Valley of Lost Names, hearing what none of them can hear, knowing what none of them will believe until it is far too late for the believing to save them.
I am not mad.
I have been looked at by the thing in the dark, and it found me sane enough to be worth remembering, and that, that, is the most terrible proof of sanity that any creature was ever cursed to be given.
Segment 9:
The Geometry of the Valley
As recorded by Vorhaeth, who is Catalogued
I have kept records through the whole of my unnatural duration. This is no boast; it is the bare statement of my condition. The ink-bound glove upon my hand commits to perfect memory all that I touch, the codex-monocle reads the writing graven upon the surfaces of the world, and the bound pages of my mantle whisper to me the lore of what draws near. I am, in the most literal and inescapable sense, an apparatus for the making of records, and I had supposed, in the long arrogance of my keeping, that there was no place I could enter that I would not be able, afterward, to set down. I record now, with the candleflame in my empty sockets guttering as I have never known it to gutter, that the Valley of Lost Names cannot be set down, that I tried, and that the failure of the trying is itself the only true entry I am able to make concerning it.
We came to the lip of it upon the fourth day, if day is a word that retains any meaning in a country that has lost the sun. The broken land of standing stones and dead rivers fell away before us, and below lay the Valley, and I bent my augmented eye upon it to read its architecture, as I have read the architecture of a thousand places, and the eye reported to me a thing it had never before reported. It reported that there was nothing to read. Not darkness; darkness I could have read, for darkness is a condition and conditions are written. Not emptiness; emptiness too has its grammar. The Valley returned to my sight the particular and dreadful blankness of a page from which the writing has not merely been erased but from which the very capacity to bear writing has been removed. I looked upon it and my eye, which has never failed me, slid off it, the way the foot slides off ice, finding no purchase, no edge, no place to rest.
Let me attempt, against my own better judgment, to describe what we descended into, knowing as I write that the description must fail, that language is a thing built by minds for a world of stable dimension, and that the Valley was not such a world.
The silence was the first wrongness, and it was a wrongness of a kind I lack the apparatus to convey. The grey land above had been silent; the hunters prized its silence; but it was the silence of a quiet place, a silence made of the absence of sound, which is to say a silence that sound could in principle have filled. The silence of the Valley was not the absence of sound. It was the absence of the possibility of sound. When the youngest of the brothers, descending behind me, dislodged a stone, and the stone fell, I saw it strike and bound and strike again, I saw with my own candleflame the violence of its passage, and there was no sound. Not a muffled sound, not a faint sound. No sound, where sound should by every law of the world have been, and the eye reporting the impact while the ear reported nothing produced in me a vertigo so profound that I was obliged to halt and steady myself against a surface that, when my gloved hand touched it, did not catalogue, gave my perfect memory nothing, was a surface that the deepest faculty of my being could not record as having been touched.
And the space. I shall try to write of the space, and I shall fail, and I ask that the failure be read as testimony. Above, in the world, a valley has a far side. One looks across it and the far side is far, and one walks, and the walking brings the far side near, and this is the covenant of distance, that it shall be crossed by motion, that the act of going-toward shall be rewarded by arriving. The Valley of Lost Names did not keep this covenant. We walked, and the far side did not come nearer. We walked further, and I, glancing back, observed that the lip from which we had descended was no nearer behind us than the far side was before us, that we hung, somehow, in a perpetual middle, that the act of going-toward was not rewarded but was, in some manner I cannot frame, ignored, as though the Valley did not recognize motion as a thing that ought to change the relation of a body to its surroundings. We moved our legs. We grew tired in the moving. And we arrived nowhere, and departed nowhere, and the standing stones that had marked the lip and the unreadable blankness that marked the depth held their positions about us with a serene and dreadful indifference to the labor of our crossing.
I tried to record it. I will set down what I did, that you may understand the extremity of my situation. I drew forth, with my recording hand, a leaf of blank vellum, and I attempted, by the virtue of the ink-bound glove, to take an impression of the Valley’s architecture, to copy the surface of the place onto the page as I have copied ten thousand surfaces before. The glove, which has never failed in this office, produced upon the vellum a thing I cannot describe and will not attempt to reproduce, a configuration of lines that, while my eye rested upon them, seemed to depict the Valley faithfully, and that, the instant my eye moved, rearranged themselves into a different configuration, equally faithful, equally wrong, so that the page held not one map but an infinity of maps succeeding one another, none of them stable, none of them false, none of them, taken alone or together, the truth. I understood then, with the slow vertiginous horror that is the particular gift of understanding too well, that the Valley could not be mapped because the Valley did not possess the property that maps record. It did not possess fixed relation. It was a place where the lost names had taken with them the very lawfulness that names confer, for to name a thing is to fix it, to say this is here, and that is there, and they are not the same, and where the names are lost, the fixing is undone, and here and there and the same and not the same dissolve into a single undifferentiated wrongness in which a mind built for distinction cannot find its footing.
The hunters bore it better than I, and this too I record, though it shames the pretensions of the lettered. Bracca walked through the Valley as he walked through everything, low and certain, his blind face forward, and when I asked him, in a voice that the silence ate before it had well left me so that I was obliged to lay my gloved hand upon his arm and let the touch carry the question, how he could keep his bearings in a place that had none, he answered, by the same means of touch, that he did not keep his bearings, that there were no bearings to keep, and that he had stopped trying, and walked instead by the pull of Thal-Zhurath at the front, who was led by his calling, and that the calling knew the way the Valley did not. Thal-Zhurath, the changed one, the listener, walked at the head of us with no hesitation at all, and I came in time to understand that he was not crossing the Valley by the rules of space, which had failed, but by the rules of the place-between, which the Valley obeyed, for the Valley was a thin place, a wound in the world such as the elder glosses spoke of, and Thal-Zhurath, being now half a thing of the between himself, moved through it as a fish moves through water that would drown a man.
I shall set down one further observation, the worst, and then I shall close this entry, for the candleflame in my sockets has burned very low in the recording of it and I find I do not wish to test how long it will last in the contemplation of what I am about to write.
In the deepest part of the Valley, where the blankness was most complete and the silence had become a kind of pressure upon the substance of the mind, I understood at last what the Valley was, and why the names were lost there, and the understanding is the true horror, beside which the failed maps and the swallowed sounds are mere preliminaries. The Valley of Lost Names is not a place where names were lost. It is a place that names were never able to take hold of. It is a fragment of the condition that preceded the world, the unnamed and unfixed chaos out of which the gods, or whatever powers do such work, drew the world by the act of naming, of saying this and not that, here and not there, and fixing each thing in its place by the speaking of what it was. The world is a thing that was named into order. And there are places, thin places, where the naming did not reach, or where it reached and could not hold, and the old unnamed condition wells up through them, and the Valley is such a welling, a piece of the before-the-world standing open in the midst of the made world, and the beast that has never been born, the beast whose hide Thal-Zhurath had come to take, was native to that unnamed condition, was a thing the naming had never fixed, and that was why its skin was not of this world, because it was not, in the deepest sense, of any world at all, but of the chaos that underlies all worlds and waits, patient as the void is patient, to reclaim them.
We were walking, I understood, into the place where the world had not finished being made. And the thing we sought there was a thing the world had not succeeded in making. And the Night Beast, the trackless hunger we had come, at the last, to pursue, was kin to it, was another such unfinished thing, intruding through another thin place into the named and ordered world, and could no more be tracked by the laws of that world than the Valley could be mapped by them, and could no more be killed by the world’s weapons than the silence could be filled by the world’s sound.
I closed the vellum. The infinity of maps writhed once more and went still as the page folded upon them. And I went on, deeper into the unnamed, behind the changed man who alone could find the way, and I knew that I had understood the Valley, and that the understanding had cost me something I would not get back, and that this is the law of all true knowing, that it is purchased, and that the price of knowing the shape of the abyss is that the abyss, thereafter, knows the shape of you.
Segment 10:
Where No Wind Stirred
As told by Lirelle Ashthorn
I have hated the stillness all my life, but I never hated it as I hated it in the Valley.
You will remember, if you have heard my telling, what I am. A creature starved of weather. A heart that stood always on the high slate waiting for a wind that would not come. I told you that the cold of the Beast was the first wild thing I had ever known, the storm promised in my blood and never given, and that I loved it for the breaking of the stillness, loved it though it frightened me, because the fright and the wanting were one braided thing in me and I would not part them. I told you this, and I meant it, and I mean it still. But I had not yet, when I told you, walked into the Valley of Lost Names. I had not yet known a stillness that made the grey land’s stillness seem a gale. And I learned there, in that drowned and nameless place, that there are worse things in all the world than a wind that will not blow. There is a place where the wind has never been, and never will be, and where the very memory of motion is taken from you, so that you cannot even long for the storm because you can no longer remember that storms are.
That was the horror of it for me, and it was a different horror than it was for the others. Vorhaeth went mad in his cataloguing way over the space that would not be crossed, the maps that would not hold. Ysmir trembled at his whispers, which he said were louder there than ever. The brothers were simply afraid, the plain animal fear of young things in a place that wants to eat them. But I, I felt the Valley reach into the one chamber of me that had always been mine, the wild chamber, the storm chamber, the part that had never in all my life consented to be quiet, and I felt it lay its cold flat hand upon that storm and begin, gently, terribly, to still it.
I will tell you what the stillness of the Valley did, and you must understand that it is the worst thing that was ever done to me, worse than fear, worse than grief, worse than the cold reaching up my legs on the slate hill that I had thought was the nearest thing to joy. The grey land’s silence was the silence of a quiet room. You could rage against it. I had raged against it my whole life, and the raging was mine, and as long as I could rage I was Lirelle, the wild one, the one who would not stay where she was put. But the Valley’s silence was not a room. It was a hand pressed over the mouth. It did not let you rage. It came into you and found the rage and laid its weight upon the rage and the rage grew quiet, not because you had calmed but because the place had calmed you, the way you calm a struggling beast not by gentling it but by pressing it down until it has no breath left to struggle with.
And I felt myself going quiet. That is the confession at the heart of this telling, and it is a harder confession than my last, for my last was a confession of wanting and this is a confession of nearly losing the want, of nearly losing the self that wanted. I felt the storm in me damping down. I felt the high wild chamber filling slowly with the Valley’s flat grey calm, and I felt, worst of all, that I did not mind. The Valley did not fight me. It offered me peace. It offered me the thing I had never had, an end to the longing, a stillness so complete that the wind I had waited for would no longer be wanted because I would no longer be the kind of thing that wants. It was the gentlest offer ever made me, and it was the murder of everything I was, and the two were the same, and for some long stretch of that uncrossable crossing I walked toward the murder as toward a mercy and did not even know that I had stopped fighting.
It was the memory that saved me. I want to set that down plainly, for I think it matters, I think there is a moral folded in it though I am no teller of morals. It was not strength that saved me, for the Valley had taken my strength, had pressed it flat. It was memory. There came a moment, in the deepest grey of that nameless place, when the stillness had nearly finished its quiet work, and into the emptying chamber of me there rose, unbidden, the memory of the slate hill, of the night I went out alone and stood where the deer had been lifted from its step and let the cold rise up through my feet. I remembered the joy of it. I remembered the storm of it, the breaking of the stillness, the way the world had moved at last and I had gone toward what I wanted and had not stayed where I was put. And the memory was a wind. Do you understand me? In a place where no wind stirred, where wind had never been and the memory of motion was forbidden, my own memory of the storm became the storm, blew through the flattened chamber of me, and the rage woke, and I was Lirelle again, all at once and burning, and I will tell you that I have never in my life loved anything as I loved my own fury in that moment of its waking.
I stopped walking. The others went on a few paces before they marked it, all but Bracca, who marks everything, and turned his blind face back toward me. I stood in the unnamed stillness and I felt it pressing on me from every side, the gentle murdering calm, and I lifted my chin against it, and I said, aloud, into the silence that ate sound, words I do not think any of them heard, for the Valley swallowed them as it swallowed the brothers’ fallen stone, but I said them all the same, said them for myself, hurled them at the flat grey peace that wanted to unmake me.
“You will not have me quiet.”
That was all. You will not have me quiet. It is a poor speech, set down on the page. It was not a poor speech in that place. It was the whole of me gathered into four words and flung against a thing that had stilled the wind itself, and I knew, even as I flung them, that the Valley did not care, that I was a beetle raging at a mountain, that my defiance changed nothing of the Valley and never could. And I did not care that it changed nothing. That is the thing the calm could never understand, and the thing I learned about myself in the learning of it. I do not rage to win. I have never raged to win. I rage because the raging is mine, because it is the proof that I am still the wild starved storm-hungry thing I was born, and a defiance that cannot win is still a defiance, and a storm that breaks against a mountain and accomplishes nothing is still a storm, and I would rather be a storm that breaks and accomplishes nothing than a flat grey calm that has accomplished my own undoing.
Bracca watched me a moment with his unreadable face. Then he said, by touching my arm, for sound would not carry, Walk. Only that. And I saw that he had understood something, in his hard wordless way, that I had nearly been taken, and that I had come back, and that the coming back was mine and not his to praise or question. So I walked. But I walked now with the rage held up inside me like a lamp held up in a dark house, and I would not let it gutter, and every step through the suffocating peace I fed it with the memory of the storm, and the Valley pressed and pressed and could not put it out, because I would not let it, because the not-letting was the last and truest thing I had.
I understood, by the end of that crossing, why the others feared the Valley and I had nearly loved it. They feared it because it might kill them. I had nearly loved it because it offered me peace, and peace was the one thing I had wanted my whole life and the one thing I must never, never accept, for the peace it offered was the peace of the stilled wind, the quiet beast, the storm that has forgotten it was ever a storm. And I want to say, here, to whatever heart reads this and knows the hunger I know, the hunger for motion in a world that will not move: do not take the peace that is offered you in the nameless places. It is not peace. It is the gentle hand over the mouth. Better the longing that never ends than the stillness that ends the longing by ending you.
We came out of the Valley at last, though I cannot tell you how, for the place did not let itself be crossed and yet we crossed it, on the pull of Thal-Zhurath’s calling that the stillness could not still. We came out the far side into the broken land beyond, where the air, though it still did not move, at least remembered that moving was a thing that air could do, and I drew that unmoving air into my chest and it tasted, after the Valley, like the first wind of the world, and I wept, which I do not often do, and the tears were not grief.
They were the storm. They were the proof that I had carried the storm through the place where no wind stirred and brought it out the other side unquenched. And I swore, with the wet on my face in that grey half-light, that whatever waited for us ahead, whatever the Beast was, however it ended, I would meet it as a storm meets a mountain, breaking, raging, accomplishing perhaps nothing, but mine, mine to the last, never quiet, never stilled, never, never unmade into the flat grey peace that wanted me.
The dark wanted me. The Valley had wanted me quiet.
I would give the dark what it wanted. I would never give the quiet a thing.
Segment 11:
The Beast That Was Never Born
As told by Thal-Zhurath, who was Unmade
We came out of the Valley of Lost Names into the broken land beyond it, and there, in a hollow at the foot of the unnamed country, in the place the spirits had shown me in the weeping hour, I found the beast that had never been born. And of all the things I have set down in this telling, and of all the things I yet must set down before the tale is given over, this is the thing I have found hardest to begin, for there are no words in any tongue of the living that were made to hold what I beheld, and the words of the dead, which I now carry, are not words you could read and remain unchanged.
Let me say first what it was not, for the naming of what a thing is not is sometimes the only gate by which we may approach what it is.
It was not dead. I had thought, when the spirits spoke of a hide to be taken, that I would find a carcass, a thing that had lived and died as living things die, leaving its skin behind for the use of those who come after, as our people had always used the skins of the beasts they slew. It was not so. There was no death in that hollow, for death is the ending of a life, and the thing I found had never owned a life to end. It was not dead, and I tell you in the same breath that it was not living, for life too it had never owned, and to call it either would be to lay upon it a name it had never borne and could not bear.
Nor was it sleeping. Nor was it waiting. Nor was it any of the conditions that the made world allows to the things within it. It simply was, in the hollow, in the manner that a thing is when the naming of the world has passed it by, when the great fixing that drew all else into order and condition and place reached out toward it and did not take hold. It was a beast that was never born. I had heard the phrase from the spirits and thought it a poet’s phrase, a way of saying old, or strange, or terrible. It was none of these. It was the plain truth, stated as plainly as the truth of that thing could be stated. It had never been born, because birth is a passage from the unmade into the made, and this thing had never made that passage, had hung instead forever at the threshold of it, neither in the world nor wholly out of it, a possibility that the world had begun to draw forth and had never finished drawing.
And its hide was not of this world. The spirits had told me so, and I had carried the telling without understanding it, and now I stood in the hollow and understood. The hide of the beast that was never born was not of this world because the beast was not of this world, and the part stands for the whole, as a single scale tells of the dragon. I looked upon that hide with my blind eyes that see by cold and by the shape of unseen things, and my sight, which had never failed me in all the grey land, failed me there. For the hide returned to my perception not the cold of a thing absent, nor the warmth of a thing present, but a third report altogether, a report I had no name for and have struggled to name since, the report of a thing that was neither here nor not-here, that occupied no place and yet hung before me, that my sight could find and could not hold, the way a dream is vivid in the dreaming and gone in the grasping at it upon waking.
I knelt before it. I did not choose to kneel. My knees bent of their own accord, as the knees of a worshipper bend before the altar of a god he both loves and fears, and I understood, in the bending, that what I felt was reverence, and I understood in the same moment that I felt also its black twin, which is to say I felt that the thing before me was holy, and that it was obscene, and that the holiness and the obscenity were not two feelings warring in me but one feeling, a single dreadful awe that had a sacred face and a defiling face and turned them toward me both at once.
For consider what I had come to do.
I had come to take its hide. I had come, at the charge of the spirits, to lay my hands upon this thing that hung forever at the threshold of the world, this possibility the world had never finished, and to strip from it the skin that was its only commerce with the made, and to fashion of that skin a vessel for my hunting. And as I knelt and understood what the thing was, I understood also the full and terrible nature of what the taking would be. It would not be a skinning. A skinning is a thing done to the dead, and this thing was not dead and could not be made dead, for it had no life to take. It would be a theft from the unmade itself. It would be the reaching of a made hand, my hand, the hand of Thal-Zhurath who was born and would die, into the condition that precedes and underlies and waits beneath all birth and all death, and the tearing from it of a piece, that the piece might be carried back into the made world and put to the made world’s uses.
There is a wrongness in that which I have no measure for. To take the skin of a beast that lived is the way of hunters, and there is no wrong in it, for the beast lived by taking the lives of others, and is itself in time taken, and the great wheel turns, and all is balanced. But to take the skin of a thing that never lived is to reach outside the wheel altogether, to take what the wheel has no claim upon and no right to, to bring into the turning world a thing that was never meant to turn. I knelt before the unborn beast and I knew that the spirits had charged me to commit a sacrilege, and that the sacrilege was the only road by which the Beast in the dark could be hunted, and that I would commit it, because I could not refuse the calling, because the riverbed cannot refuse the river, and I wept, then, kneeling, the second time in this telling that I have owned to weeping, and the tears were not of fear and not of grief but of the awe itself, the unbearable awe of a creature about to do a holy and an obscene thing and unable to tell, even in the doing, which of the two it was more.
The hide came away in my hands like nothing I have touched before or since. It did not part as flesh parts. There was no blood, for there was no life to bleed. There was no resistance, and there was no ease; there was instead a sensation I can only call a yielding that was also a refusal, as though the hide came away gladly and was torn from its place by violence, both together, the way the Valley had been both crossed and uncrossable, the way the thing itself was both holy and obscene. And as it came away, the beast that was never born did not diminish. This I must set down, though it is among the strangest of all the strange things of that hollow. I took the hide, a great sheet of it, enough and more than enough for the vessel I must make, and the beast was not lessened by the taking. It hung at its threshold exactly as it had hung, whole, untouched, neither more nor less, for a thing that was never born cannot be lessened, having never possessed the wholeness that loss requires. I had taken from it, and it had not been taken from. I carried away its skin, and its skin remained. There is no place in the laws of the made world for such a thing, and I had come to a place where the laws of the made world did not reach, and I had done a thing those laws could not have allowed, and I rose from my knees holding the hide of the unborn beast in my arms and I was no longer, I think, entirely a man.
For the taking changes the taker. I had known this since the weeping hour, when the spirits warned me that the cup is changed by the filling, the riverbed carved by the river. But to know a thing and to feel it in the body are not the same, and I felt it now, holding the hide, felt that something of the unborn beast’s condition had passed into me through the touching of it, that I too now hung, a little, at the threshold, neither wholly in the world nor wholly out of it, and that this was the price the spirits had not fully named, that to hunt the unmade you must become, in part, a thing the made world can no longer hold.
I looked back, once, at the beast that was never born, before I left the hollow. It hung there as it had always hung and always would, whole and untouched and unborn, holy and obscene, a possibility the world had reached for and never finished, and I felt toward it a thing I have no name for, a thing that was reverence and revulsion and a strange dreadful tenderness all braided into one, and I bowed my head to it, the way a man bows to a thing he has wronged and could not help but wrong, and I turned away, and I carried its skin out of the hollow and into the broken land where the others waited.
They saw the hide in my arms. They did not ask me what it had been. I think they saw, in my face, that it was not a thing to ask of, and I was grateful for their silence, for I could not have answered. I could not have told them that I had stolen a piece of the world’s unfinished beginning, that I had committed a holy sacrilege at the charge of the dead, that I had brought into the turning world a thing that was never meant to turn, and that I had felt, in the doing of it, the threshold open a little within my own breast, the place where the made and the unmade meet, the wound through which, I understood now, all the rest of my undoing would in time come pouring.
We made camp in the broken land. And I laid out the hide of the beast that was never born upon the cold ground, and I began the fashioning of the vessel that would hold the silence of the forgotten night, and I worked through the long not-night with reverent and trembling and now half-unmade hands, and the awe sat upon me as I worked, the sacred face and the obscene face turned toward me both at once, and they have never since that hollow turned away.
Segment 12:
The Skinning
As told by Bracca Greypelt
Thal-Zhurath did the taking alone. I want that set down first. Whatever was in that hollow, whatever the thing was that he came out carrying, he went down to it alone and he came up alone and none of us saw it and none of us asked. That was his work and it was not work for hands like mine. But the making of the satchel from the hide, that was work for hands, and I have good hands, and so I helped him, and I will tell that part, because that part I can tell. The other part there are no words for and I will not pretend there are.
He laid the hide out on the cold ground in the broken land where we had made our camp. It was a big sheet of it, grey, or not grey, I could not say what color it was and I have a hunter’s eye even blind. It was the color of a thing you cannot look straight at. My eyes are filmed white and I see by cold and shape, not color, and even so it troubled me, which tells you something, that a thing without color could trouble a man who does not see color.
I put my hands on it to help him stretch it for the cutting.
I have skinned ten thousand beasts. More. I have skinned them since I was a boy following Notch through the fen, and there is no part of a hide that is strange to me, the cold of it, the weight, the way it pulls, the grain of it under the knife. A hide has a grain like wood has a grain and you cut with it and not against it and the work goes clean. I know hide the way I know my own hands.
This was not like a hide.
I will tell it plain. When I put my hands on it, it was not cold and it was not warm. A dead hide is cold. A fresh-killed hide is warm and goes cold while you work it. This was neither, and a thing that is neither is a thing your hands do not know what to do with. My hands have always known what to do. That is what hands are for. These hands did not know, and I felt them not knowing, and it was a worse feeling than fear. Fear I have carried my whole life and learned to carry. This was my own hands telling me they had come to the end of what they knew, and a man does not learn to carry that, because it does not come twice in a life, and once is enough.
I held it anyway. I held it and I stretched it and Thal-Zhurath cut it.
He cut it with a blade of bone, an old blade, one of ours. The hide did not cut the way hide cuts. It did not part along a grain because it had no grain. It did not resist and then give the way flesh resists and gives. The blade went into it and the hide closed around the blade and let the blade through and was not marked by the passing, the way water lets a hand through and is not marked. Thal-Zhurath would draw the blade the length of a cut and lift it away and there would be no cut there, and then a moment later there would be, as if the hide had to decide, after the fact, whether the cut had happened. I watched it do this and I kept my hands on the hide and I did not let go, because Thal-Zhurath needed it held, and that was my work, and a man does his work.
The wrongness came up slow.
That is the thing about wrongness. Fear comes fast. You see the thing in the dark and the fear is on you all at once and then you deal with it. Wrongness is not like that. Wrongness comes up the way water comes up in a low place, slow, so slow you do not see it rising, and then you look down and it is at your knees and you do not know when it got there. I worked the hide and the wrongness came up around me like that. At first it was only my hands, only the not-knowing in my hands. Then it was more. It was the way the hide did not lie still the way a dead thing lies still. It was the way it seemed, when I was not looking straight at it, to be a different shape than it was when I looked. It was the way the work made no sound. We were out of the Valley now and sound had come back to the world, I could hear Notch breathing across the camp and the small sounds of the brothers, but the hide made no sound under our hands and under the blade, none, the way a thing makes a sound when you work it and this thing did not, and the silence of it sat in the middle of all the other ordinary sounds like a hole.
I kept working.
I want to say why I kept working, because I think it matters and I think it is the only thing in this telling worth a man’s keeping. I kept working because the work was in front of me. That is all. There was a hide to be made into a satchel and I had hands and the hands could do it even when they did not know the thing they did, and a man who has work in front of him and hands to do it does the work. He does not stand and feel the wrongness rise. He does not put down the hide and say this is too strange for me. He takes the next part and he does it and then the part after that. The wrongness rises and you let it rise and you keep your hands moving and you do the work. That is how a man gets through a thing there is no getting through. Not by being braver than the thing. By being steadier than it. The thing is strange. You are steady. You out-steady it. There is no other way and any man who tells you there is another way has not done the work.
We cut the body of the satchel. We cut the strap. Thal-Zhurath had silver thread, real thread, ours, and we stitched the pieces and the thread went into the not-hide and the not-hide closed around it the way it had closed around the blade, and the stitches held, though I could not have told you what they held to. Thal-Zhurath sewed in a pattern as he went, marks I did not know, and his lips moved while he sewed and no sound came, and I did not ask what he was saying. There are things a leader is better not knowing. I have said that before. It was true again.
When it was near done he put things into it. I did not see all of them. There was a dust he carried in a fold of cloth, and he poured it in, and it was the color the hide was, the color you cannot look at. There were other things. He did them alone, at the end, and turned his back to do them, and I let him turn his back, because a man has the right to do the last of a thing like that without eyes on him. I sat back on my heels and I looked at my hands. They were shaking. I am Bracca Greypelt and my hands have held the bow steady at a hundred paces in the cold and they were shaking, and I made them stop, because a hunter does not let his hands shake where the young can see, and the brothers were watching from across the camp with their afraid eyes, and I made my hands be still for them, and they were still.
Then it was done.
Thal-Zhurath stood and he held the thing in his arms. The first Shadow Satchel. It was a satchel. That is the strange part, the part the wrongness could not take away. After all of it, the not-cold hide and the cuts that decided later whether they had happened and the silence in the middle of the sounds, the thing in his arms was a satchel, plain, grey, the kind of thing a man could sling on his back and carry into the hills and never look at twice. It was an ordinary thing made of the most unordinary stuff in the world, and that troubled me more than if it had glowed or screamed or done some other thing a man could point at. The wrongness was all inside it now. It wore the shape of a satchel over the wrongness the way a calm face wears over a bad thought.
Thal-Zhurath looked changed again. More changed. He had gone down into the hollow a man with the line crossed in him and he had come up with the hide and now he had made the satchel and he was less a man each time, I could smell it, the smell of a thing crossing over and not coming back. I did not say so. There was nothing to say. He had a calling and the calling was carving him hollow and we all knew it and saying it would not stop it.
“It is finished,” he said.
“Then we sleep,” I said. “We go in the grey.”
The others lay down. I did not, for a while. I sat near the satchel where Thal-Zhurath had set it, and I made myself look at it, because a man should look at the thing he helped make, even when he wishes he had not, especially then. I looked at it a long time in the grey light. It sat there, a satchel, quiet, the wrongness folded up small inside it and the ordinary shape laid over the top, and I thought about my hands not knowing, and I thought about the silence in the middle of the sounds, and I thought, this is a tool now, and we made it, and we will use it, and it will find the trail no man can find, and it will lead us to the thing in the dark.
And I thought, too, the thing I did not say to any of them, the thing I keep for the end of this telling because it is the truest thing in it.
A tool shapes the hand that uses it. I have known it all my life of ordinary tools, the way a bow callouses the fingers, the way a knife wears a man’s grip into its own handle over the years. We had made a tool out of a thing that was never born, out of the unmade, out of wrongness wearing the shape of a satchel. And we were going to use it. And I did not let myself wonder, sitting there in the grey, what a tool like that would wear our hands into, what it would shape us toward, over the seven nights that were coming.
I did not let myself wonder it. But I knew it. A man can know a thing and not let himself wonder it. That is another way of getting through.
I lay down at last. I did not sleep much. The satchel sat in the grey across the camp, quiet, finished, ours.
We had made the thing that would find the Beast.
I was not sure anymore which of those two was the worse to have in the camp.
Segment 13:
It Whispered Back
As told by Ysmir Hollow-Between
There is a particular species of horror that does not strike like the blow of a hand, sudden and loud, but arrives instead the way a tide arrives, patiently, inevitably, so that one stands upon the sand believing oneself still dry until the cold has already risen past the ankle and there is no longer any high ground to which one might retreat. It was this species of horror that came to me on the first not-night after the satchel was made, and I set it down now with a hand that is, I confess, no longer steady, for the steadiness left me upon that night and has not returned, and I do not look for its returning.
You will recall that the whispers had been my torment since the trembling of the bell, that they had grown with every step toward the Valley, that the thing in the dark had once turned its vast cold regard upon me and proved itself, by that regard, no creature of my own unraveling mind. I had borne the whispers as one bears a fever, believing them a single affliction with a single source, the Beast, far off, thinking its slow thoughts in the unlit dark, and the overspill of that thinking pouring down the thread of my cursed perception into the chambers of my skull. I had made, you understand, a map of my own torment, and the map had a comfort in it, poor as the comfort was, for a torment with a known source is a torment that might, in principle, be escaped by flight from that source. Kill the Beast, or flee far enough from it, and the whispers would cease. So I had told myself, through all the long nameless miles. So I had needed to tell myself, that I might keep walking at all.
On the first not-night after the satchel was made, the map was torn from my hands, and what lay beneath it was worse than I had let myself imagine in even my darkest reckonings.
We had made our cold camp in the broken land beyond the Valley. Thal-Zhurath had set the satchel down upon the ground near where he lay, the finished thing, the grey vessel that Bracca had helped him fashion from the hide of the beast that was never born. I had not gone near it. I could not. From the moment Thal-Zhurath came up out of the hollow with the hide in his arms I had felt a thing I had no wish to feel, a thing I pushed away, a thing I would not look at, the way a man will not look at the lump beneath the skin that he fears to be the beginning of his death. The satchel sat across the camp. I lay as far from it as the camp allowed. And the others slept, or made the shapes of sleeping, and I lay wakeful with the bell trembling against my breast as it always trembled now, and the whispers pouring in, and I waited for the grey to come, as I waited every night, having long since given over the hope of sleep.
And in the deepest part of that not-night, the whispers changed their direction.
I must be precise. Precision is the last dignity, I have said it before and I hold to it. The whispers had always come to me from a single quarter, from ahead, from the dark where the Beast lay, the way a sound comes from the place that makes it. I had grown so accustomed to this that I no longer marked it; one does not mark the direction of one’s own heartbeat. But on that not-night, lying wakeful, I became aware, slowly, with the patience of the rising tide, that the whispers were no longer coming from a single quarter. They were coming from two.
They came still from ahead, from the dark, from the Beast. But they came also, now, from behind me, from within the camp, from the place where the satchel sat upon the cold ground.
I lay very still. I told myself it was an echo. I told myself the broken land threw the sound back, that I heard the Beast before me and its echo behind, that there was nothing in the camp, that there was nothing in the satchel, that a satchel is a satchel and cannot whisper. I told myself these things with the dry reasoning part of my mind, the part I had always trusted, and even as I told them I knew them for the lies of a drowning man who tells himself the water is not rising. For the whisper from behind was not an echo. An echo is the same sound, returned, faint and faithful. The whisper from the satchel was not the same sound. It was an answer.
Do you understand me? I beg that you understand me, for it is the whole of the horror, and if you do not grasp it then I have failed in the one office left to me, the office of the witness. The Beast whispered from the dark ahead, its slow cold formless thinking, and the satchel, behind me, in the camp, whispered back. Not the same words. A reply. They were speaking to one another. The thing in the dark and the thing we had made, the hunter we carried and the hunted we pursued, were conversing across the broken land in the tongue of strange shapes and coiling sounds, the tongue older than the forgotten world, the tongue the spirits had used upon Thal-Zhurath in the weeping hour, and I lay between them, the bell trembling on my breast, the only creature in all the camp who could hear that neither of them was alone, that they knew one another, that they had perhaps always known one another, that the satchel and the Beast were not opposites at all but kindred, two voices of one dreadful tongue, and that we had carried one of them three not-nights and a Valley toward the other, believing we carried a weapon, when what we carried was a sister of the thing it was meant to slay.
I rose. I could not help the rising. I went, against every screaming counsel of my flesh, across the camp toward the satchel, drawn as a man is drawn to confirm the worst, for the not-knowing had become, in that hour, more unbearable even than the knowing promised to be. I knelt before the grey vessel. I put out my hand. I did not touch it; I could not have touched it; but I held my hand above it, close, the way one holds a hand near a flame to feel the heat, and through the trembling bell and into the deep chamber of my skull there came, clear and immediate and no longer to be denied, the voice of the satchel, and it was the voice of the spirits, and it was the voice of the dark, and they were one voice, and I had known it, I had known it since Thal-Zhurath came up out of the hollow, I had pushed the knowing away and would not look at the lump beneath the skin, and now the lump had spoken, and there was no more pushing it away.
The voices and the satchel were one. The whispers that had tormented me since the trembling of the bell were not, had never been, the overspill of a single distant Beast. They were the speech of a whole order of things, the things of the place-between, the unmade things, the things the naming of the world had passed by, and the Beast was one of them, and the unborn beast whose hide we had taken was one of them, and the satchel we had made was now one of them, and the spirits who came to Thal-Zhurath in the weeping hour were one of them, and I, cursed with the bell, was the single mortal ear tuned to the frequency of their kindred conversing, and there was no flight from it, none, for I had been wrong, wholly wrong, in the comfort of my map. The source of the whispers was not ahead of us, to be killed or fled. The source was all around us. The source was among us. We had built the source a vessel and slung it on our shoulders and carried it into the heart of its own country, and there was nowhere I could go, no distance I could flee, that would take me out of the tongue of the unmade, for we ourselves had become a thing the unmade spoke through.
I knelt there a long time. I do not know how long. The two voices conversed across me, ahead and behind, the Beast and the satchel, patient, unhurried, in the tongue that was older than the world, and I could not understand their words, for the mortal ear is not built to understand that tongue, only to hear it, only to know that it is being spoken, which is its own particular damnation, to hear forever a conversation about oneself in a language one will never learn. And I understood, kneeling there, hollow now, scraped out, the last comfort gone, that the hunt we were upon was not the hunt I had believed. We had not made a weapon to kill a monster. We had made a thing that was kin to the monster, and we carried it toward the monster, and what would happen when the two of them stood at last in the same place, in the same dark, the satchel and the Beast, kindred meeting kindred with Thal-Zhurath’s mortal hand between them, I did not know, and the not-knowing of that was the new tide, the next water, already rising past my ankle while I knelt believing myself still dry.
I went back to my place. I did not wake the others. What would I have said? That the thing we carried whispered? That it whispered back to the thing we hunted? That they were one tongue, one kindred, and that we were the dupes who bore the one to the other? Bracca would have turned his blind face to me and said there was nothing here, or worse, that the satchel was the tool that would find the trail, that its kinship with the Beast was the very thing that made it useful, that to track the unmade you must carry the unmade, which is precisely what the spirits had told Thal-Zhurath, and which is true, and which is the most damning truth of all. They would have made my horror into their good news, as they had made my whispers into a compass. And I could not have borne it, the turning of my dread into their comfort, not on that night, not with the last of my comfort gone.
So I lay down, hollow, and I watched the grey come up over the satchel and the sleeping shapes of the doomed, and I listened to the two voices speaking across me in the tongue I would never learn, and I knew the worst now, the thing I had suspected since the hollow and pushed away and could no longer push: that we carried our enemy’s brother on our backs, that we had made him, that we fed him, and that I alone heard him answering, in the dark, the call of the thing we thought to hunt.
I was not mad.
I have only ever heard truly, and the truth, I have learned, is the one affliction from which there is no flight, and no waking, and no high ground left to which a drowning man might climb.
Segment 14:
The Dust of Fallen Stars
As recorded by Vorhaeth, who is Catalogued
It is the curse of my kind that we cannot leave a thing unexamined. Where the prudent man averts his eyes, the scholar leans closer; where the wise soul stops his ears, the antiquarian strains to hear the better; and I, who am scarcely a man any longer and was never wise, found that I could not rest, in the not-nights that followed the making of the satchel, until I had catalogued what had been placed within it. I knew the cataloguing for a folly even as I undertook it. I had stood in the Valley and understood too much and paid the price of the understanding. I had told myself, descending out of that nameless place, that I would learn no more of this matter than I was compelled to learn. And then the satchel was made, and the things were sealed within it, and the appetite rose in me as it always rises, the dreadful hunger to know, and I leaned closer, and I strained to hear, and I record now what I found, against my own counsel, against my own terror, because the not-knowing had become, as it always becomes in a mind like mine, a worse torment than the knowing.
I did not open the satchel. Let that be understood. One does not open such a vessel; the opening of it is reserved to Thal-Zhurath, who made it, and I would not have dared regardless, for I had felt, even at a distance, the wrongness folded within it. But I did not need to open it. The codex-monocle reads the writing graven upon the surfaces of the world, and the bound pages of my mantle whisper the lore of what draws near, and between the two of them, with patience and with dread, I was able to discern the provenance of the four things Thal-Zhurath had sealed inside, the four ingredients the spirits had named in the weeping hour, and I set them down here in the order of their horror, which is also, I have come to think, the order of their ascent toward the unspeakable.
The first was the dust of the stars that had fallen.
I had taken this, when first I heard it named, for a poet’s flourish, as I had taken so much of this matter for flourish before the world disabused me. Star-dust. The phrase has a prettiness to it, a suggestion of the celestial, of light and height and the clean cold beauty of the heavens. There is nothing pretty in the thing itself. I bent my eye upon the satchel and read what I could of the dust within it, and the reading turned my ancient stomach in a way I had thought beyond me. For the people of this grey land have never seen a star. The sky is closed to them; the mist has hidden the heavens since before their lore began. They do not know what a star is. And so when the spirits spoke to them of fallen stars, the spirits did not mean the burning suns of the deep sky, the lights that other worlds look up to. They meant something else, something native to a people who have never seen the true stars and have given the name to a different thing. They meant the things that fall, sometimes, through the thin places, out of the unmade dark and into the grey world, and lie where they fall, cold and lightless, and crumble in time to a dust the color one cannot look at. The dust of fallen stars is the dust of things that fell out of the place-between. It is the unmade, powdered, the residue of beings or fragments of beings that were never finished and never born and that slipped through the wounds in the world to die, if dying is the word, upon the floor of it. Thal-Zhurath had gathered the dust of dead unmade things, and sealed it in the satchel, and I record that I understood why, and the understanding was the sickness of it: like calls to like, and the dust of the unmade, carried by a mortal hand, would draw that hand toward the trail of the unmade thing it hunted, as a hound is set on a scent by being given the quarry’s own spoor to smell.
The second was the sight of the eye that sees without seeing.
This I found I could read more clearly, and wished that I could not. The hunters of the grey land are blind, you will recall, their eyes filmed white, seeing by cold and by the shape of unseen things; and I had thought, when the spirits spoke of the sight of the eye that sees without seeing, that they meant only this, the native dark-sight of the people. I was wrong. The thing sealed in the satchel was not a quality but an object, and the object was an eye, and the eye was not of any creature of the grey world. I will not record in full what my reading told me of its provenance, for there are entries that ought not to be made and I have sworn to make them sparingly. I will record only that it was taken from a thing that had no body to lose it from, a thing that was all regard and no flesh, one of the watchers of the place-between, and that its property was this: that whatever it was set within would perceive not the surfaces of the world, which my own monocle perceives, but the trails of the unmade through the world, the cold tracks that leave no print, the passages that scour the ground of its memory. The satchel could see the Beast’s path because it held within it the plucked eye of a thing kindred to the Beast, and the kindred eye knew the kindred trail. I leaned back from the cataloguing of it and I confess that I shook, for I had understood, in the reading, that we did not carry a clever device. We carried a piece of the enemy’s own order, set to hunt its brother, and the setting of brother against brother is an old and terrible art, older than this world, and never undertaken without cost to the one who undertakes it.
The third was the wind that passes and leaves no trace.
Here my reading faltered, and I record the faltering honestly, for the third ingredient was of a subtler and more dreadful nature than the first two, and the codex-monocle, which reads what is written, found that the third thing had no writing to read, was a thing that by its very nature left no mark even upon my augmented perception. I knew it was within the satchel only by its absence, by a place in my reading where the reading slid away, the way my eye had slid from the architecture of the Valley. The wind that passes and leaves no trace. In a land where no wind stirred, where the air had hung unmoving since before the lore began, the spirits had charged Thal-Zhurath to capture a wind, and not any wind, but the particular wind of the trackless places, the motion that moves through the world without disturbing it, the same motion by which the Beast crossed the grey land taking nothing, bending nothing, leaving only cold. The satchel held a captured fragment of that impossible motion, and its property, I came at last to understand, was concealment: that the bearer of the satchel would move as the unmade move, leaving no trace of his own passage, becoming, in his hunting, as trackless as the thing he hunted. The hunter would be hidden in the same hiddenness that hid his quarry. He would walk the world unwritten upon it. And a thing that leaves no trace upon the world, I reflected with a dread that has not since left me, is a thing the world is already half done with, a thing that has begun, in its hunting, to be erased.
And the fourth was the smell that is known only to the dead.
I came to the fourth last, and I came to it with the greatest reluctance, and having catalogued it I wished, as I have wished of so little in my long keeping, that I had left it uncatalogued. The smell that is known only to the dead. I will be brief, for brevity is a kind of mercy and I would extend what mercy I can both to you and to myself. The hunters of the grey land are mortal; they will die; and the dead, in the lore of the place-between, perceive a thing the living cannot, an odor, a savor, that belongs to the condition of death itself, the scent of the threshold across which the living pass and do not return. Thal-Zhurath had sealed within the satchel a measure of that scent. Its property was the masking of the living scent of the bearer, so that the Beast, hunting by whatever sense the unmade hunt by, would find the bearer scentless, would find him already smelling of the grave, would take him for one of the dead and pass him by. And here was the final horror, the one that completes the dreadful architecture of the four ingredients, the keystone that locks the arch: that to hunt the trackless Beast and live, the bearer of the satchel must become, in every particular my cataloguing had uncovered, a thing of the place-between himself. He must carry the dust of the unmade dead, so that like would call to like. He must see through the eye of the enemy’s kindred, so that he might find the trail. He must move with the trackless wind, so that he would leave no mark and be himself half-erased. And he must wear the scent of the dead, so that death itself would not know him from its own. The four ingredients were not four tools. They were four stages of a single transformation. The satchel was not a thing one carried. It was a thing one became, by the carrying, and Thal-Zhurath, who bore it, was being made, ingredient by ingredient, into a creature of the unmade dark, that he might hunt the unmade dark and not be taken by it, which is to say that he might survive the hunt only by ceasing, in every way that signified, to be a living man.
I closed my reading. The candleflame in my empty sockets had burned to its lowest ebb, lower than in the Valley, lower than I have ever known it, and I let it gutter, and I sat in the broken land in the grey not-light beside the sealed satchel and the sleeping hunters, and I held in my perfect and accursed memory the full and forbidden provenance of the thing we carried, and I knew that I would never be rid of the knowing.
I considered, as I had considered in the hills above the fen, whether to tell them. Whether to wake Bracca and lay before his blind and certain face the truth that the satchel was not a weapon but a transformation, that Thal-Zhurath was not wielding it but being consumed by it, that to use the thing to its end would be to lose the man who used it. And I did not wake him. I told myself, as I have told myself before, that I could not be certain whether my silence was mercy or cowardice, and I tell myself so still. But I will record one thing more, the thing that stayed my hand, that you may judge me as you will.
It would have changed nothing. That is the truth at the bottom of the catalogue. Even had I told them, even had Bracca believed me, the hunt could not be unmade. Thal-Zhurath could not refuse his calling; the spirits had made that plain, and his every changed and hollowing day had made it plainer. The four ingredients were already sealed within the satchel, already at their slow work upon him. To tell them the provenance would only have been to add my own horror to their burden, to give them knowledge they could not act upon, which is the cruelest gift a scholar can bestow, and I have bestowed it too often in my long keeping, and I would not bestow it again. So I kept the catalogue to myself, where it sits, where it will always sit, one more entry in the record of a thing I understood too well and too late, the dust of fallen stars and the plucked eye and the trackless wind and the scent of the grave, sealed in a satchel of unborn hide, carried on the shoulders of a man who was, ingredient by ingredient and not-night by not-night, becoming the very dark he meant to hunt.
Segment 15:
I Would Carry It Myself
As told by Lirelle Ashthorn
I have confessed already to the wanting of the dark, and you did not turn from me, or if you did I could not see it, and so I will make this further confession, which is harder, and let it stand beside the first. I wanted the satchel. From the hour it was finished I wanted it, and the wanting was not like the wanting of the dark, which was a longing flung outward toward a thing beyond me. This was a closer hunger, a meaner one, I will not pretend it was noble. I wanted the satchel the way a starving thing wants the one crust it can see, and I hated that Thal-Zhurath carried it, and I hated that he did not seem to want it as I wanted it, and the hatred and the wanting together made a fire in me that I could not bank and would not, and it is this fire I must set down, for it was the first crack in the band of us, and every crack that came after grew from it.
You must understand what the satchel was to me. To Bracca it was a tool, a thing to be used and watched and not trusted, the way he uses and watches and does not trust most things. To Ysmir it was a horror, I could see the horror on him, the way he would not go near it, the way his eyes went to it and away as though it burned him. To the scholar it was a thing to be read, picked at, catalogued, made small and safe by the laying of names upon it. And to Thal-Zhurath, who bore it, it was a calling, a weight laid on him by the spirits, a doom he carried because he could not set it down. None of them wanted it. That is what I could not bear. They had among them the one wild thing in all the grey world, the satchel made of the unborn beast, the vessel of the trackless dark, and not one of them wanted it, they carried it and feared it and studied it and were doomed by it, and I, who wanted it with my whole burning heart, was not permitted to so much as touch it.
For it was mine. I felt that it was mine. I have no right to the feeling and I will not defend the right, but I felt it, in the deep storm chamber of me, the same chamber that had wanted the wind all my life and the cold on the slate hill and the dark beyond the dark. The satchel was kin to all of those. It was the wind that leaves no trace and the cold of the unmade and the dark made into a thing a body could sling on its shoulder and carry, and I looked at it on Thal-Zhurath’s back as we crossed the broken land and I thought, with a possessiveness that frightened even me, That should be mine. I would know how to want it. He carries it like a cross and I would carry it like a crown.
I went to him. This was the second not-night beyond the Valley, and we had made our cold camp, and Thal-Zhurath sat apart as he always sat, more apart each day, the changed one, the hollowing one, and the satchel lay beside him in the grey. I went to him and I knelt and I said, low, that the others might not hear, “Let me carry it.”
He turned his blind white face to me. There was a long stillness. The satchel lay between us and I swear to you it was aware of me, I swear the wanting in me and the thing in the satchel reached toward one another across that small grey space the way the cold had reached up through my feet on the slate hill, and I wanted it so that my hands ached with the wanting, my empty hands that had never held it.
“You do not know what you ask,” Thal-Zhurath said. His voice was farther away than his body, as it had been since the weeping hour. “It is not carried. It is borne. It carves the one who bears it. Look at me, Lirelle. Look what the bearing has made of me, and ask yourself if you would be made so.”
And I did look at him, and I saw the hollowing, the way he was less a man each day, the way the threshold had opened in him and the unmade was pouring through. I saw all of it. And here is the thing I must confess, the thing that is worse than the wanting itself: I saw the price, and I wanted it anyway. I wanted it more for the price. The hollowing did not warn me off. It called to me. To be carved by the wild thing, to be unmade by the dark, to be made into something that the flat grey world could no longer hold, that was not a horror to me. That was the storm I had wanted all my life, come close enough to touch, and Thal-Zhurath wore it like a wound and I would have worn it like the answer to every longing I had ever known.
“I would be made so,” I said. “Gladly. Give it to me.”
“No,” he said. Only that. And he turned his blind face away from me, back toward the dark, and I knelt there with my empty aching hands and my burning heart and I hated him. I will not soften it. I hated him in that moment with a clean and total hatred, hated him for bearing the thing I wanted and not wanting it, hated him for telling me no, hated him most of all for the gentleness in the no, for he had not refused me out of cruelty but out of a kind of care, and there is no insult to a starving thing like being kept from the crust for its own good.
Bracca saw. Bracca sees everything. He had been across the camp, and he came to us, low and silent, and he stood over me where I knelt, and he said, “Get up, Lirelle.”
“It should be mine,” I said. I did not get up. I looked up at his blind face and I said it again, louder, too loud for that listening country, and I did not care. “It should be mine. He does not want it. None of you want it. I want it. Why should the one who does not want the thing carry the thing, while the one who wants it walks empty?”
“Because wanting it is the reason you cannot have it,” Bracca said.
I had no answer to that, and it has stayed with me, that hard plain sentence, longer than any speech the others made on that whole black road. Wanting it is the reason you cannot have it. He was right, and I knew he was right even as I burned to deny him, for a thing made of the unmade dark, a thing that calls to the wildest hungriest heart and offers it the hollowing it has always craved, that thing must never be given to the heart that craves it, for the heart that craves the hollowing will let itself be hollowed gladly, will run toward the unmaking, will be taken before it ever reaches the Beast. The satchel needed a bearer who feared it. It needed Thal-Zhurath, who carried it as a doom and not a desire, who would use it and resist it, who wanted to remain a man even as it carved the manhood out of him. And it must be kept from me, precisely because I would not resist it, because I would open my arms to the unmaking and call it love.
I knew this. And the knowing did not cool the fire. That is the truth of want, the thing the calm sensible souls who have never starved will never understand. To know that you cannot have a thing, to know that the having of it would destroy you, to know that you are kept from it rightly and for cause, none of that touches the wanting. The wanting is below all knowing. It is in the storm chamber where reason does not reach. I knelt in the grey camp and I knew every word Bracca said was true and I wanted the satchel no less for the truth, wanted it more, perhaps, for now it was forbidden, and the wild starved thing in me had never met a forbidding it did not strain against.
I got up. I went to my place at the edge of the camp, away from the others, and I did not sleep, and I watched the satchel lie beside Thal-Zhurath in the grey not-light, and I let the fire of the wanting burn in me, and I fed it, the way I had fed the rage in the Valley, because a fed fire is proof that one is still alive and still wild and still oneself. And something had broken in the band of us that not-night, I felt it break, the first crack. We had been five, going as one toward the dark. Now we were Thal-Zhurath who bore the thing, and Bracca who guarded the bearing, and the three of us who did not bear it, and of the three I was the one who wanted to, and the wanting set me apart from Ysmir who feared it and the scholar who studied it, set me apart from all of them, and I did not mind the setting apart, for I had been set apart my whole life by the storm in me, and I was used to the loneliness of being the only one who wanted what one should not.
I will tell you the last of it, the thing I am least proud of, and then I will give over this telling. As I lay watching the satchel in the dark, I let myself imagine taking it. Not asking. Taking. Rising in the deepest grey when Thal-Zhurath slept his thin half-sleep, and lifting the thing from beside him, and slinging it on my own shoulder, and feeling at last the hollowing begin, the cold pouring in, the unmaking I had craved all my life. I imagined it so vividly that my hands moved at my sides, made the shape of the lifting. And I did not do it. I want that known. I lay there and I imagined the theft and I did not commit it, and the not-committing was the hardest thing I have ever held myself back from, harder than coming back from the Valley’s stillness, for the Valley would have taken me against my will and this I would have run to gladly.
I did not take it. But I lay awake imagining the taking, and I understood, somewhere in that long grey not-night, that the band was cracked now and would crack further, that wanting like mine does not stay quiet, that the fire I fed to prove myself alive might in the end burn down the thing it warmed. And I did not stop feeding it. God help me, I could not. I have never in my life been able to want a thing by halves, and the satchel I wanted whole, with the whole burning storm of me, and I knew it could destroy us, and I wanted it still.
Segment 16:
The Trail Written in the Earth
As told by Thal-Zhurath, who was Unmade
There is a joy that comes only once in the life of a hunter, and it does not come to all, and it had not come to me in all my grey years until the morning I slung the satchel upon my shoulder and turned my blind face toward the broken land and saw, where all my people had ever seen only the unmarked dark, the trail of the Night Beast written in the earth before me as plainly as a road.
I must speak of this joy, though I am ashamed of it, for it sits ill beside the dread that came before and the dread that would come after, and you may wonder how a man so warned, so hollowed, so plainly walking to his ruin, could have felt joy at all. But I will not lie to you in this telling, and the truth is that I felt it, felt it pure and whole and rising in me like the first warmth a frozen man feels when at last he is brought near a fire, and I think it would be a falseness greater than any to set down the dread and hide the joy, for they were both in me, and a man is not one thing.
Hear me, that you may understand the joy.
All my life I had hunted in the dark. All my people had. We turned our blind faces to the cold and we read the warmth of living things and the bend of the grass and the print pressed in the soft grey earth, and we were the finest hunters the world has held, and yet there had always been, beneath our finest art, a wall we could not pass. There were things that left no warmth. There were things that bent no grass. There were things that pressed no print, and these things were the great quarry, the worthy quarry, the prey our deepest hunger ached for, and they were forever beyond us, walking the world in a hiddenness our art could never breach. We had prayed our whole lives to pass that wall. We had knelt on the cold ground in the wordless way and begged for the gift of the unseen path, never truly believing it would be given, for how could a blind people ever see the trail of a thing that leaves no trail?
And on that morning, the wall was gone.
I slung the satchel on my shoulder and the cold of it settled against my back, and through it, through the dust of the fallen stars and the plucked eye and the trackless wind and the scent of the grave, all the dreadful things sealed within it, there came into my blind sight a new sight altogether, a sight I had never owned and no man of my people had ever owned, and I beheld the Beast’s path.
It lay across the broken land before me like a thread of deeper dark drawn through the grey. Where the Beast had passed, days or not-days before, the trackless thing that left no print, there now hung in my altered sight a trail, faint and cold and beautiful, a line of the unmade winding away north and east through the standing stones, and I could read it. I could read it as my people read a print in the mud, as plainly, as surely, with the same deep certainty in the belly that says this way, it went this way, follow. The thing that could not be tracked could be tracked. The unseen was made suddenly, wholly, terribly knowable, and the wall of all my years fell down, and the joy came up in me like the sun no man of my people had ever seen rising at last over the grey land of our blindness.
I wept. I have owned to weeping twice before in this telling, and I own to it a third time, and this time the tears were not of awe nor of grief but of a joy so sharp it was scarce to be told from pain. For I had been a hunter all my life, and the hunter’s deepest dream, the dream beneath all his dreaming, is to find the quarry that cannot be found, and the dream had come true, and there is no joy in all the made world like the coming true of the dream beneath the dreaming. I stood in the broken land with the satchel on my shoulder and the trail before my altered eyes and I felt, for one shining and unrepeatable moment, that all of it had been worth the price. The Valley. The unborn beast. The hollowing. All of it, worth this, this sight, this trail, this joy.
And I knew, even in the joy, what the joy was bought with. Do not think me a fool. I have set down too plainly the warnings I was given to let you believe I had forgotten them. I knew that I saw the trail because the satchel had begun to make me kin to the thing that left it. I knew that the wall had fallen not because my art had grown but because I had grown other, because the threshold had opened in my breast and the unmade was pouring through, because I now saw the trail of the unmade for the same reason a thing sees its own kind, by likeness, by kinship, by the slow conversion of the seer into a sharer of the seen thing’s nature. The joy was real and the price was real and they were the same thing. I could see the Beast’s path only because I was becoming, step by step and not-night by not-night, the sort of creature that walks such paths, and the very sight that filled me with elation was the proof and the measure of my unmaking.
There is a hard wisdom in this, and I would have you take it from my telling, for it is perhaps the truest thing the long dark taught me. The gift you have prayed for your whole life, when at last it is given, is given at the cost of becoming the kind of thing that can hold it. You cannot pray to see what only the dead can see and remain wholly among the living. You cannot beg for the sight of the unseen and keep your eyes that were made for the seen. The wall that stood between my people and the great quarry was not a wall of skill. It was a wall of nature. It was the wall between the made and the unmade, and to pass it I had to become, in part, unmade, and the joy of the passing was the joy of a man who has at last achieved the thing he wanted and has not yet fully counted what the achieving cost, and will count it, and will weep different tears, but not yet, not on that morning, not with the trail shining cold and beautiful before him for the first time.
I called the others. I did not tell them I had wept. I turned my face to them, the blind white face that was less a man’s face each day, and I said, “I have the trail. It went north and east, through the stones. I can follow it now. The pursuit is begun in truth.”
They came and looked, but they could not see what I saw. The trail was visible only to the bearer of the satchel, only to the one being made kin to it, and so they had to take my word, and follow my pointing, and trust the changed thing that I was becoming to lead them true. Bracca’s blind face turned along the line of my pointing and found nothing, and I saw the hardness in him, the hunter who must follow a trail he cannot read himself, and I knew how it galled him, for it would have galled me. Ysmir would not look at all; he stood apart with his hand on his trembling bell and his eyes on the satchel, and there was a horror on him that I did not understand then and understand now, for he heard what I could not, the satchel speaking to the thing it tracked. Lirelle looked at me with the burning want still in her face, the want for the thing on my shoulder, and her eyes followed my pointing finger into the dark with a hunger that had nothing to do with hunting. And the scholar, Vorhaeth, looked at me with a pity I could not abide, the pity of a thing that has read the ending and would spare you the reading, and I turned from his pity, for I did not want it, the joy was too bright in me yet to bear the shadow of his knowing.
We set out along the trail. I led, for only I could see it, and the others came behind in a line, low and certain, blind faces to the cold, the way our people had always gone, but going now where our people had never gone, along the written path of the trackless thing. And the trail wound on before me, cold and beautiful, north and east through the standing stones and out into the deeper broken land beyond, toward the place where the Beast lay in the dark, and with every step the joy walked with me, and the dread walked with me, one on either hand, as the awe and the dread had walked with me since the weeping hour, and I let them both come, for I was not one thing, and the hunt at last was true.
I will set down one thing more, and then give this telling over.
As I walked the trail that morning, in the height of the joy, I understood for the first time the full and terrible mercy of what the spirits had done. They had not deceived me. They had told me, in the weeping hour, that the calling would carve me hollow, that the cup is changed by the filling, that to hunt the unmade I must become a thing the made world could no longer hold. They had told me all of it, plainly, and I had not understood, because a man cannot understand such a thing until he has felt it in the body. And now I felt it, felt the joy that was also the unmaking, the sight that was also the loss, and I understood that the spirits had given me, along with the doom, the one mercy a doomed thing can be given: they had let me want it. They had let the hollowing be, for me, the answer to the deepest dream of my life, so that I would walk to my ruin not weeping but rejoicing, not dragged but running, the trail shining before me, the joy of the hunter at last set free upon the quarry that could not be found.
It was a mercy and it was the cruelest thing in all the cruel tale, and like everything else in that grey country, the mercy and the cruelty were one, and I could not tell them apart, and I followed the trail north and east into the dark, rejoicing, doomed, and glad of it, toward the Night Beast and the seven nights that were not nights and the ending I had wished for, in the deep heart, without ever knowing that I wished.
Segment 17:
First Night of Seven
As told by Bracca Greypelt
The trail ran true. I will say that for it. I could not see it, none of us could but Thal-Zhurath, and a man does not like following what he cannot see, but it ran true, and a trail that runs true earns a kind of trust even when you hate the trusting. Thal-Zhurath pointed and we went where he pointed and the broken land opened ahead of us into a country I had no name for, and somewhere out in it the Beast lay, and we were closing.
We counted the nights from the morning he found the trail. There would be seven. He did not say how he knew there would be seven. He knew the way he knew everything now, from the satchel, from the thing he was becoming, and I did not ask. Seven nights that were not nights, for the grey did not lift to true dark out in that country, it only thickened and thinned, thickened and thinned, and we called the thick part night and the thin part day and kept our count by it because a man needs a count or he loses himself, and a lost man is a dead man.
The first night we made a cold camp in the lee of a great leaning stone. No fire. We had not made a fire since the camp we left, and we would not make one now, this close. Fire is light and light is a thing that says here we are to whatever is out in the dark, and what was out in the dark already knew too well where we were. So, no fire. We sat in the cold and we ate cold and we set the watch.
I will tell about the watch, because the watch is the shape of a hunt like this and a man who understands the watch understands the rest.
You do not all sleep. That is the first law. Out in the deep country with a thing hunting you back, you do not all close your eyes at once, not ever, not for a breath. One stays awake. One sits with his blind face to the dark and listens, and when his time is done he wakes the next, and so it goes, around, through the thick grey we called night, so that there is always one set of ears open, always one watcher between the sleeping and the dark. It is old. It is older than our people maybe. It is the oldest thing hunters do and it is the thing that keeps them alive, and I have kept the watch ten thousand nights and I know its weight.
I took the first watch myself. A leader takes the first or the last, the worst ones, the one when the others are still settling and the one when the grey is greyest and a man’s strength is lowest. I took the first. I sat with my back to the leaning stone and I turned my face to the dark and I listened.
There was nothing. That was the worst of it. With an ordinary quarry there is something, the small far sounds of the world, the things that move in the dark, and you read them, you know which are prey and which are nothing and which are danger. Out there, there was nothing. The country was as silent as the grey land had been, silenter, and the silence was not empty, I had learned that much on the slate hill, the silence was the sound the Beast made, the silence was a kind of presence, and I sat in it and listened to the nothing and felt the nothing watching back.
Lirelle did not sleep her first night. I marked it. She lay with her eyes open on the satchel where Thal-Zhurath had set it, the want still in her, and I marked that too, and I moved myself a little, in my sitting, so that I was between her and it. Not so she would see. Just so I was there. A leader puts himself between the thing that wants and the thing it wants, when he can, quiet, without a word, and hopes the want stays want and does not become a hand reaching in the dark.
Ysmir did not sleep either. Ysmir had not slept in days. I knew it and I let it be. There is nothing you can do for a man who cannot sleep but let him not-sleep in peace, and Ysmir not-slept with his hand on his bell, and his eyes went from the satchel to the dark and back, and I let him be.
The scholar slept. Old Vorhaeth, who is not a man and does not sleep the way men sleep, went still and his candle-eyes guttered low, which is his kind of sleep, and I let him. And Thal-Zhurath, the changed one, he did a thing that was not sleep and not waking, sat upright with his blind face to the trail he could see and we could not, and I think he watched it even with his eyes closed, watched it through the satchel, and I did not count him in the watch because I did not trust what he was becoming to wake the right way if a danger came. That is a hard thing to set down about a man you are following. But it is true and I set down true things.
So it was me and the dark and the nothing, the first night of seven.
I thought about the supply. A leader thinks about the supply on the first night because the first night is when there is still enough of it to think about, and by the last night there is not, and the thinking does no good then. We had carried little. I have said why. Little is light and light keeps you alive. But little runs out, and we were days now from the last place a man could fill a water skin or take a pale-deer, and the country ahead had no fen and no game that I could feel, only the standing stones and the cold, and I sat in the first watch and I counted the rations in my head, the rounds of hard fare, the half-empty skins, and I made the count come out to the seventh night, just barely, if we were careful, if no one ate more than his share, if the Beast did not lead us a longer road than Thal-Zhurath promised.
Just barely to the seventh night. That is a thing a leader does not say aloud. You do not tell the young that the food runs out the same day the hunt is meant to end, because they will hear if the hunt runs long, we starve, and a hungry frightened young thing makes mistakes, and mistakes out here kill more than the Beast does. So I kept the count to myself, where I keep most things, and I sat with it in my belly along with the cold, and I watched the dark.
Near the end of my watch the grey began to thin toward the thing we called day, and I felt the country shift. Not a sound. A shift. The way the air changes before weather, except there was no weather out there, the air never moved. It was the other kind of shift, the kind I had felt on the slate hill, the cold one, and I sat very still and I turned my whole blind attention out into the dark along the line of the trail I could not see, and far off, north and east, where the Beast lay, I felt it.
Not close. Not yet. But there. A long low cold shape in the world, lying down, resting, the way it had rested in the hills above the fen, patient, and I understood, sitting there in the first watch of seven, that it knew we were coming. Of course it knew. Ysmir had told us it knew, in his way, and the scholar in his, and I had not let myself fully take it until I felt it for myself, but I felt it now. It lay out there in the dark and it knew we were closing and it was not running. It was waiting. It was letting us come. And a thing that lets you come, that does not run from the hunters on its trail, is a thing that is not afraid of being caught, and I sat with that in my belly too, beside the count of the rations, the cold knowledge that we were hunting a thing that wanted to be hunted, that had wanted it since the first prayer my people ever prayed.
I woke Notch for the next watch. He came awake clean, the way old hunters do, no startle, just open eyes and ready. I did not tell him what I had felt out in the dark. He had felt it on the hill before any of us. He knew. I only said, “Quiet night. It lies north and east. It is not coming yet.”
“Not yet,” he said.
He took the watch. I lay down. I did not sleep much. I lay with my eyes closed and the count in my belly and the cold shape out in the dark, and I thought, six nights more, and the food runs to the seventh, and the thing knows we come and waits for us, and I made myself stop thinking it, because thinking does no good on the first night, and a leader needs his sleep more than he needs his worry, and I have learned to put the worry down at will the way you put down a pack, and I put it down, and I took what sleep the cold would give.
Six nights more. The hunt had its rhythm now. Pursuit in the thin grey, cold camp in the thick, the watch turning through the dark, the supply running down toward the day it was meant to end. Lean days coming. I knew the shape of them. I had hunted long hunts before, though never one like this, never after a thing like this, and the shape was the same even when the quarry was not. You go lean. You go watchful. You hold the count in your belly and you keep one set of ears open and you put one foot down and then the next and you do not let yourself think past the seventh night, because there is no use in it, and a man who thinks past the end of the food is a man already half beaten.
I did not let myself think past it.
First night of seven. The dark was quiet. The thing lay north and east and waited. We slept in turns under the leaning stone, and the grey thinned toward the day, and the hunt went on.
Segment 18:
The Thing That Walks Behind
As told by Ysmir Hollow-Between
It began, as these things always begin, with a smallness, a trifle so slight that to have spoken of it aloud would have been to invite the very ridicule I had learned, by then, to dread above the dark itself. It began on the second night of the seven, with a feeling at the back of my neck. Only that. The feeling a man has in an empty room when he becomes suddenly and unaccountably certain that the room is not empty. I have felt it before; we have all felt it; it is the oldest instinct in the animal that we are, the prickling of the nape, the body’s silent insistence that it is observed. And I told myself, as any reasoning creature would tell himself, that it was nothing, that we were observed, that the Beast lay ahead of us and watched us come, that what I felt was only the known watching of a known thing, and I put it from me.
But it was not from ahead.
That is the smallness that grew, the trifle that became my torment through the long not-nights that followed. The feeling at the back of my neck did not come from the north and east, from the dark where the Beast lay, where Bracca said it lay, where the trail ran. It came from behind. From the country we had already crossed. From the road at our backs, the road we had walked, the road that should have held nothing now but our own cold footprints and the silence we had left in our wake. The watching was behind us. And a thing that lies ahead and a thing that watches from behind are not the same thing, and the moment I understood this, the moment the body’s small insistence resolved itself into that intolerable particular, the paranoia took me, and it has not loosed its grip from that night to this.
I began to look back.
I could not help it. You who have never borne such a thing will say, Then do not look; if it troubles you, keep your face forward and walk. You do not understand. The looking back was not a choice. It was a compulsion seated below choice, in the same deep chamber where the whispers lived, and the more I forbade myself the looking, the more unbearable the not-looking became, until at last I would turn, sharply, on the road, and stare back along the way we had come into the thinning grey, and see nothing, and turn forward again, and walk three paces, and feel the watching settle once more upon my nape, and turn again, and see nothing again, and so on, and so on, a man walking forward and looking backward, forward and backward, until Bracca said to me, in his few hard words, “Keep your face front, Ysmir. You will fall.”
Keep my face front. As though the danger were the stones at my feet. As though the thing at my back were a fancy I indulged from idleness. I wanted to seize him, to turn his blind unchanging face to the road behind us and cry, Feel it, only feel it, it walks behind us now, it has come round, it does not lie ahead and wait, it follows, but I had learned the futility of such crying, learned it in the camp on the first night when the bell trembled, learned it again and again, and so I kept my face front when his blind eyes were on me, and turned it back the instant they were not, and the watching never ceased, and I knew, with the cold certainty that had become the only certainty left to me, that I was right and they were wrong, as I had always been right and they had always been wrong, and that the rightness would save no one, least of all myself.
On the third night, Vorhaeth lit his lantern.
I should explain the lantern, for it is the heart of this telling. The scholar bears a lantern that sheds a cold grey light, a light visible to no eye but his own, a false flame that reveals the things that hide. He had not lit it on the road, for light is a danger and the journey wanted darkness. But on the third night, when we made our cold camp, he lit it low, and turned it once about the camp, reading the dark for what might lurk in it, as is his cataloguing way. And the light fell outward from our small circle into the country beyond, a cold grey reach of it, perhaps twenty paces, and at the very edge of that reach, where the false light failed and the true dark began, I saw the thing that walks behind.
I do not say I saw it clearly. I would be lying, and I have sworn against lying. I saw it as one sees a thing at the edge of light, which is to say one sees the place where the light ends and senses, rather than sees, that the ending of the light is not empty. There was a shape there. Or there was the suggestion of a shape, a deeper dark within the dark, a place where the grey country folded itself into something that had the bearing of a watcher, low and patient and still. And it was at the edge of the lantern’s reach. Precisely at the edge. Not within it, where the false flame would have rendered it plain, and not far beyond it, where I might have dismissed it as the ordinary dark. At the edge. At the exact line where the light failed, as though it knew the reach of the lantern to a hair’s breadth and stood always just past it, pacing the rim of our small grey island of sight, keeping forever to the dark side of the line.
I made a sound. I could not help the sound. And Vorhaeth, hearing it, turned the lantern toward where I stared, and the false light swept across the place at the edge, and the shape was gone, of course it was gone, it had only to step back half a pace as the light came round and the dark closed over it, and the scholar’s cold flame found nothing there but the country and the stones, and he turned to me his eyeless face with its guttering candle-glow, and I saw in it not disbelief, which would have been a mercy, but something worse, a terrible reluctant understanding, for the scholar knew, the scholar had catalogued the Beast and its kind, and the scholar said to me, low, “What did you see?”
“Something at the edge,” I whispered. “Where the light ends. It paces the edge of the light. It keeps to the dark side.”
And Vorhaeth was silent a long moment, his candle-eyes dim, and then he said a thing that has lodged in me deeper than any of his other sayings, deeper than the Valley, deeper than the satchel, the truest and most terrible thing the scholar gave me in all that black road. He said, “A thing that keeps always to the edge of the light is a thing that wishes you to know it is there. It could remain in the deep dark, unseen. It chooses the edge. It is not hiding from you, Ysmir. It is showing you, a little, that you may carry the knowing, and the knowing is its work upon you.”
The knowing is its work upon you.
I understood then the full shape of my torment, and the understanding was the completion of the horror. The thing that walked behind did not follow us to catch us; had it wished to catch us it had only to come, in the dark, when we slept, when none watched, and take us one by one in the silence it wore like a cloak. It did not catch us because catching was not yet its purpose. Its purpose was the pacing. Its purpose was the edge of the light. Its purpose was to be glimpsed, half-seen, never confirmed, by the one among us cursed to glimpse it, so that I would look back, and look back, and look back, and carry the watching at my nape through every waking moment and every broken sleep, so that the dread would do to me what the dread does, hollow me, unstring me, wear me down to a thing that starts at shadows and cries out and is not believed and at last, worn through, breaks. The Beast was not hunting our bodies on that road. It was hunting my mind, and it hunted with patience, and with the cruelest of all instruments, which is the half-seen thing at the edge of the light that one can neither confirm nor disbelieve.
For that is the engine of the paranoia, do you see, that is the screw by which it is tightened past all bearing: I could never be sure. Had I seen the shape plainly, I should have feared a known thing, and a known fear is a bearable fear. Had I seen plainly that there was nothing, I should have been ashamed but eased. But I saw, always and only, the edge, the suggestion, the deeper dark within the dark that withdrew the instant the light came round, and so I could neither believe nor disbelieve, neither fear nor be eased, but only hang forever between the two, looking back, looking back, certain and uncertain in the same breath, which is the precise location of madness, the hinge on which the reason swings, and the Beast knew it, and set me upon it, and let the swinging do its slow work.
The others slept, or watched, or did the things they did in the not-nights, and I sat at the edge of our small grey island with my face turned to the road behind, to the place where the lantern’s memory of light had been, and I watched the dark, and the dark watched me, and somewhere just past the edge of all seeing the thing that walks behind kept its patient pacing, showing me a little, only a little, that I might carry the knowing, and I carried it, and it bent me, and I knew that this was its purpose and that the knowing of its purpose was no defense against it, for one cannot reason one’s way out of a screw that tightens by the very act of one’s reasoning.
I was not mad. I hold to it still. But I will tell you the thing I learned on that road, the thing that is worse than madness: that a sane mind, set upon the hinge between the seen and the unseen and left there long enough by a patient enough cruelty, will come to envy the madman his certainty, will come to long for the break as a tortured man longs for the blow that ends him, and that the only thing that kept me from courting the break, from running back along the road into the dark to confirm at last what paced there, was a stubbornness I did not know I owned, and a knowing that if I ran back, the thing would not catch me either, but only step back another half-pace into the dark, and let me run, and pace behind me still, forever, just past the edge of the light.
It walked behind us all the seven nights. I am the only one who carried it. They will tell you, if any of them yet live to tell, that nothing followed, that the danger lay ahead, that Ysmir started at shadows on the road.
Ask them, then, why Vorhaeth lit his lantern less and less as the nights wore on. Ask the scholar why he chose, at the last, to keep us in the dark.
He knew what stood at the edge of the light. He only did not wish, any longer, to see it.
Segment 19:
On the Indifference of the Dark
As recorded by Vorhaeth, who is Catalogued
I have come, upon the fourth night of the seven, to a conclusion concerning the nature of the thing we hunt, and the conclusion has unseated something in me that all my long centuries of cataloguing the world’s horrors had left, until now, in place. I set it down here not because the setting down will ease me, for it will not, but because it is the last and perhaps the only true service a scholar can render, to record the shape of a truth even when the truth is one that ought never to have been found. We had believed, all of us, in our several ways, that we hunted a malevolence. I record now that we were wrong, and that the wrongness of our belief is the most terrible discovery of this whole terrible undertaking, for the truth is worse than malevolence by an order I had not, before this night, possessed the apparatus to measure.
Ysmir believes the Beast hunts his mind. He believes the thing that paces at the edge of the lantern’s light shows itself to him by design, that it has chosen the cruelty of the half-glimpse, that it tightens upon his reason a screw of deliberate and exquisite torment. And I, when he came to me with his terror on the third night, confirmed him in this belief; I told him the thing was not hiding but showing, that the knowing was its work upon him. I record now, having reflected through the long fourth not-night upon all that I have read and felt and catalogued, that I told him a comforting lie, the more cruel for being clothed in the authority of my learning, and that I did not know, when I told it, that it was a lie, but I know it now.
For consider what malevolence is, and what it requires.
Malevolence requires a regard. To wish harm upon a thing, one must first hold that thing in one’s attention, must recognize it as a thing capable of being harmed, must care, in the dark inverted way of malice, about its suffering, must want the suffering, take some satisfaction in the wanting. Malevolence is a relation. It binds the hating thing to the hated thing in a dreadful intimacy, and there is, I have come to understand, a horror in malevolence that is at the same time a kind of comfort, for the malevolent thing knows you, sees you, has chosen you, and a creature that is hated is at the very least a creature that matters, that has registered upon the awareness of its enemy, that occupies a place, however vile, in the order of things. The man who is hunted by a hating thing is hunted by a thing that has met him. There is a relation. There is, God help me, a kind of company in it.
The Beast does not hate us.
This is the conclusion, and I have tested it against everything I know, and it holds, and the holding is the horror. The Beast that paces behind Ysmir at the edge of the light does not show itself to him by design, for design requires a designer, an intending mind that has weighed the cruelty of the half-glimpse against other cruelties and chosen it. The Beast intends nothing. It weighs nothing. It does not show itself to Ysmir; it is simply there, at the edge, because the edge is where it is, and Ysmir glimpses it because Ysmir is the one tuned to glimpse, and the Beast is no more aware of the torment this works upon his reason than the cliff is aware of the climber who falls from it, or the cold is aware of the traveler it kills. There is no regard. There is no relation. We have followed this thing across a Valley and through four not-nights, we have fashioned a vessel of the unborn to track it, we have spent our terror and our hope and the slow unmaking of Thal-Zhurath upon the hunting of it, and to the thing itself we are nothing, not enemies, not prey in the sense that prey is regarded by the predator that wants it, but merely things that have come within the ambit of a process that has no more knowledge of us than the tide has of the shells it grinds.
I had thought I understood indifference. I have read of it; I have catalogued the indifference of the cosmos, the old bleak doctrine that the gulfs between the stars do not care for the warm things that crawl upon the worlds, that the universe is vast and cold and unregarding and that the meaning we find in it is a meaning we have brought, a small fire we have kindled in a dark that neither welcomes nor opposes it. I had recorded this doctrine. I had thought, in recording it, that I had felt it. I had not felt it. To read of the indifference of the dark and to be hunted by a thing that embodies it are separated by the same gulf that separates the word fire from the burning, and I crossed that gulf upon the fourth night, and there is no recrossing it.
For here is the thing that the doctrine, read in the safety of a library, cannot convey, and that the hunting has made me feel in the marrow of my ancient and crumbling bones. We can bear the indifference of the cosmos because the cosmos is far. The stars do not care for us, but the stars are distant, and their not-caring reaches us only as a chill abstraction, a thing to be contemplated of an evening and set aside. The Beast is the indifference of the cosmos brought near. It is the not-caring of the gulfs given a body and set down upon the road behind us, close enough to glimpse at the edge of the light, close enough to take us one by one, and it will take us, I am persuaded, not in malice and not in hunger as a beast hungers, but in the way that any process consumes what falls into it, without preference, without satisfaction, without ever once regarding the thing consumed as a thing at all. To be killed by a hating enemy is to be killed by something that knows you exist. To be taken by the Beast is to be folded back into the indifferent dark by a thing that never knew you existed, that has no category for your existence, to which your whole life and the whole of your terror and the whole of this desperate hunt were less than the falling of a single grain of the dust of fallen stars, noticed by nothing, mourned by nothing, meaning nothing, erased without ever having registered.
This is worse than malevolence. I record it plainly. A malevolent god is a terror, but a malevolent god is a god, is a regard, is a relation, is a thing that has, at the last, taken the trouble to want your ruin. The Beast has not taken the trouble. The Beast would not understand the concept of trouble. It pursues, if pursuit is even the word, the way water flows downhill, because that is its nature and not because it has chosen us out of all the things in the world to flow toward. We chose it. That is the bitter and final irony I have catalogued this night. The hunters prayed for it; Thal-Zhurath was called to it; we have spent ourselves to find it; and it did not choose us in return, has not chosen us, cannot choose, and the whole vast freight of meaning we have loaded upon this hunt, the worthy quarry, the great pursuit, the dream beneath the hunter’s dreaming, is a freight we have loaded entirely upon our own side of a relation that has no other side, that is not a relation at all, that is a man embracing the cold and calling the cold his enemy while the cold goes on being only cold.
I considered, through the long reflection of that fourth not-night, whether to tell the others. Whether to lay before Bracca and Lirelle and the hollowing Thal-Zhurath the conclusion I had reached, that we hunted not a malevolence we might in some fashion outwit or appease or even understand, but an indifference that could not be outwitted because it was not trying, could not be appeased because it wanted nothing, could not be understood because there was nothing within it to understand. And I did not tell them, and my reasons were the same reasons that had stayed my hand in the hills and at the cataloguing of the satchel, and they were good reasons, and they were also, I confess, the reasons of a coward, and I have given over trying to separate the two.
But I will record the deepest reason, the one beneath the others, for it is the only thing I learned upon that night that might serve any soul who reads this after.
I did not tell them because they could bear the malevolence and could not bear the indifference. Bracca hunts the Beast as an enemy; the enmity gives him a thing to set his hardness against, and a hard man needs an enemy as a blade needs a stone. Lirelle loves the Beast as a storm she would be taken by; her longing requires that the dark want her in return, and to tell her the dark does not want her, has never wanted her, cannot want, would be to take from her the one thing that has made her whole life bearable, the belief that something out there matched the wildness of her wanting. Ysmir believes the thing torments him by design; cruel as the belief is, it grants him a tormentor, and a tormentor is company, and a man hunted by a deliberate cruelty is at least a man who matters to his cruelty. They each of them need the Beast to be a malevolence, because the malevolence, terrible as it is, leaves them a place in the order of things, an enemy, a lover, a tormentor, a relation. And I, who have catalogued my way to the truth, must carry the truth alone, that the Beast is none of these, that it does not hate us or want us or torment us or know us, that we are hunting our own erasure and have dressed it up in the borrowed clothes of an adversary so that we need not look upon its true and unbearable face, which is no face, which is the indifferent dark itself, near now, and nearer with every not-night, flowing toward us not because it has chosen us but because we have placed ourselves, with such labor and such longing, directly in its path.
The candle in my sockets is very low. I will close the entry. I will go on with them along the trail, behind the changed man who can see it, toward the thing that does not know we come and will not know it has consumed us. And I will keep the conclusion to myself, the bleakest entry in all my keeping, that the dark is not against us, which we could have borne, but is merely the dark, which we cannot, and that the worst horror the universe holds is not a monster that hates you, but a vastness that has never once, in all its cold and patient flowing, been aware that you were there to be hated at all.
Segment 20:
The Third Night and the Quarrel
As told by Lirelle Ashthorn
I have set the count down wrong, perhaps, for I am no keeper of nights like Bracca, who holds them in his belly like stones. He would tell you it was the fifth night that we broke against one another, or the fourth, and he would be right, for he is always right about such things, and I do not care. To me it was the third night, the third night of the soul, the night the thing that had been building in all of us since the Valley came up and out and could not be held, and the breaking of it is mine to tell, for I broke it. I will not pretend otherwise. I lit the spark. I have lit every spark of my life and I will own this one.
We were starving. That is the plain root of it, and I will give the plain root before I give the storm that grew from it. The food was running down toward nothing, Bracca’s careful count notwithstanding, and a starving thing is a raw thing, the skin worn off the soul, every nerve laid bare to the cold. We had not slept, none of us truly, for the watch turned and the dark watched back and Ysmir’s looking over his shoulder put a fear in all of us that we would not name. We were worn to the quick, all five, worn the way a stone is worn by water, and when things are worn that thin they crack at the smallest blow, and I struck the blow.
It began over the satchel. Of course it began over the satchel. Everything in me began over the satchel in those days.
Thal-Zhurath had set it down beside him as he sat in his not-sleep, his blind changed face turned to the trail he alone could see, and I sat across the cold camp and I looked at it, and the want was in me, the want I have confessed to you, the burning possessive hunger, and I was too starved and too sleepless and too worn to bank it as I had banked it before. It rose. It rose in me like flood-water in a low place, and I heard myself speak, and the speaking was the strike.
“You are killing yourself with it,” I said to Thal-Zhurath, across the camp, too loud, the way Ysmir was always too loud, the way the forbidden country punishes. “Look at you. There is less of you every night. The thing is eating you alive and you carry it like a saint carries his cross, and you will not give it over to one who would carry it and live.”
He turned his blind face to me. He was very far away now, behind his eyes. “Lirelle,” he said, only my name, gently, the way he had said no to me before, and the gentleness was gasoline on the fire.
“Do not Lirelle me,” I said, and I was on my feet now, I do not remember rising. “You think it a mercy, your keeping it from me. You think you protect me. You protect nothing. You hoard. You sit there hollowing out night by night and you will not pass the burden because some part of you, some deep proud part, wants the hollowing, wants to be the chosen one, the bearer, the saint of the dark, and you call it duty, you all call everything duty, when it is only want wearing duty’s face.”
And there it was. The thing I had said of all of them in my heart, said now aloud, hurled across the camp, that they wore the word duty over their wanting the way the satchel wore the shape of a satchel over its wrongness. I had carried the accusation in me the whole black road and the starvation and the sleeplessness tore it out of me and I flung it and I watched it land.
Bracca rose. “Sit down, Lirelle.”
“I will not sit down.” I rounded on him, and the storm had me fully now, the storm I had carried through the Valley unquenched, and it would not be stilled, not for Bracca, not for anyone. “And you. You are the worst of them. You put yourself between me and the thing every night, you think I do not see it, you move yourself in the dark so I cannot reach it, and you tell yourself you guard the hunt, you guard the band, you are the leader and the leader protects. Lies. You guard your own fear. You are afraid of what I am, Bracca, afraid of the wildness in me, because you cannot read it the way you read a print in the mud, and a thing you cannot read you cannot control, and a thing you cannot control you fear and you cage, and you have been caging me since the first night, and I am sick to death of the cage.”
His face did not change. It never changed and I hated it for not changing, I wanted to break it, I wanted to make the unchanging face change just once, and that wanting was an old wanting, older than the satchel, older than the hunt, and I did not understand it yet, but it came pouring out of me now with all the rest.
“You feel nothing,” I said to him, and my voice cracked on it, and I did not care. “You sit there hard and certain and you feel nothing, and you look at me with those dead eyes and you tell me to sit down, and you have told me to sit down my whole life, you and every grey certain soul like you, sit down, be still, stay where you are put, and I have never once in my life sat down when I was told and I will not start now, not here, not at the edge of everything, not when the dark is so close I can taste it—”
“You want it to take you,” Bracca said.
He said it quietly and it stopped me as nothing else could have. Quiet, flat, certain, the way he said the true things, and it stopped me because it was true and because he had said it before, on the morning I begged for the satchel, and I had not known, until he said it again now in the middle of my storm, how much I had wanted him to be wrong.
“You want it to take you,” he said again. “You have wanted it since the slate hill. You do not hunt the Beast, Lirelle. You court it. And I have watched you court it the whole road, and I have stood between you and the thing not because I fear you, but because I do not want to lose you, and you are too far gone in your wanting to see the difference.”
I do not want to lose you.
I heard it and the storm in me wavered, guttered, and in the guttering a worse thing showed itself, a thing under the storm, a thing I had buried so deep I had forgotten the burying. For I had loved him. There. It is out, and I have never said it, not to him, not to myself, but it is the true bottom of the quarrel and a true telling must reach the bottom. I had loved Bracca Greypelt the hard unchanging hunter since I was a girl on the slate, loved him the way the storm loves the mountain it can never move, and he had never seen it, or had seen it and set it aside the way he set aside all things that were not the hunt, and the want for the satchel and the want for the dark and the want for the wind that would not blow were all of them, I understood in that terrible guttering moment, the same want turned away from the man who would not be moved and flung instead at the only thing wilder than my own heart.
I had wanted the dark because I could not have him. The dark, at least, wanted me back.
I did not say it. Even then, even broken open, I did not say it, for there are confessions a body cannot make even at the edge of everything, and that was mine, and I swallowed it, and the swallowing turned the heartbreak to fury, for that is the only way I have ever known to carry heartbreak, to burn it into rage, and I turned the rage back on him.
“You do not want to lose me,” I said, and I laughed, and the laugh was an ugly thing, a torn thing. “You do not want to lose your tools, you mean. Your hunters. Your band. We are pieces of the hunt to you, Bracca, every one of us, and you guard us the way you guard your arrows and your water skins, because a leader who loses his pieces has failed, and you have never failed at anything in your hard cold life and you will not start with me. Do not dress it as caring. You do not know how to care. You only know how to keep.”
That landed. I saw it land. Something went across his face, the smallest thing, a flicker, the unchanging face changed for the space of a breath, and I had wanted that my whole life, to make it change, and now that I had I felt no triumph, only a horror, for I had reached into the one man I loved and found the soft place and driven the knife in, not because it was true, but because it was cruel, and cruelty was the only weapon left to a starved heart that could not say what it meant.
The others had gone silent. Ysmir stared at us with his drowned eyes. The scholar’s candle-flame burned low and watchful. And Thal-Zhurath, the changed one, the cause of it all, sat with the satchel beside him and said, into the wreckage, in his far gentle voice, “The dark hears us. We are very loud.”
We were very loud. In the forbidden country where loud sounds carry far and far sounds wake things that should be left sleeping, we had stood and screamed at one another across the camp, and the fury went out of me all at once, the way a fire goes out when the wind that fed it drops, and I felt the cold rush in to fill the place where it had been, the cold and the shame and the heartbreak unspoken, and I sat down.
I sat down. After everything I had said about never sitting when I was told, I sat down, not because Bracca told me, but because there was nothing left in me to stand on, and I put my face in my hands, and I did not weep, for I had wept in the Valley and those tears had been the storm and these would have been only grief, and I would not give the grief the satisfaction.
No one spoke for a long while. The watch turned. The dark watched. Somewhere out past the edge of the light the thing that did not care for us went on not caring, and we sat in our small cracked circle, five worn starved sleepless things who had come too far together to part and could no longer bear one another’s company, and the band that had gone out as one was broken now in truth, and I had broken it, and I knew I had broken it, and I knew too the thing I would never say, that I had broken it not out of want for the satchel nor want for the dark but out of a love turned to poison in a heart too proud and too wild to pour it out clean.
Bracca took the next watch though it was not his turn. He did not look at me. He sat with his blind face to the dark and his hard shoulders set, and I watched the back of him in the grey, the man I had loved and wounded, the mountain I could not move and had at last, for one flickering breath, made tremble, and I had never in my life felt so much a storm, and never so much alone, and the two were the same, as they had always been the same, the wildness and the loneliness braided so tight that no knife could part them, and I would not have parted them if I could, and that, that, is the whole tragedy of what I am.
Segment 21:
The Silence That Was Never Heard
As told by Thal-Zhurath, who was Unmade
There came a place upon the trail, in the deep of the fifth night, where the silence changed, and I knew by the changing of it that we had passed out of the country of the living and into the antechamber of the thing we hunted, and I bid the others halt, and we stood, and we listened, and we heard the silence that was never heard.
I must try to tell of this silence, though it is the hardest of all the hard things I have set myself to tell, for it was not an absence but a presence, and the tongues of the living have no word for a silence that is a presence, and I must build the word out of other words and hope that you, listening, may feel the shape of it in the spaces between them.
You have known silence. All who live have known it. You have stood in a still room, in a deep wood, on a high and windless place, and heard the silence settle, and called it silence, and you were not wrong. But the silence you have known was a silence of the world, and the world was still in it, and stillness is a thing the world does, the way it does sound and motion and light, one of its many doings, and beneath the stillest silence you have ever known there ran, always, the deep low hum of the world simply being the world, the sound that is not a sound, the breath beneath the breath, the thing you have never once heard because you have never once been without it.
In the place we came to on the fifth night, that hum was gone.
I felt it go the way a man feels the floor go out from under him in a dream, a lurch, a falling, a sudden absence of the thing that had held him up so long he had forgotten it was holding. We crossed a line, an unmarked line, a threshold laid across the trail, and on the near side of it the world hummed beneath all its stillness as it has hummed since the naming of it, and on the far side the hum was gone, swallowed, taken, and there was a silence such as has not been since before the world was made, the silence of the unnamed, the silence of the place where the great fixing never reached, and we stood in it, the five of us, and not one of us could speak, for the silence took the words before ever they left the throat.
Lirelle tried. I saw her lips move; she would speak even here, the wild one, she would hurl her defiance even at this. But the silence swallowed the speaking, and her words fell into it and were not, were never, left no echo, made no mark, the way her stone had made no mark in the Valley, and she put her hand to her own throat in a wonder that was near to terror, for a creature that has lived its whole life by the breaking of stillness had come at last to a stillness that could not be broken, that took the breaking and unmade it, and there is no horror for such a soul like the horror of a silence that will not be defied.
The brothers wept, I think, though I could not hear the weeping. Weeping makes a sound, and the sound was taken, and so they wept silently, their faces wet in the grey, their grief unheard even by themselves, and there is a particular desolation in grief that cannot be heard, for the sound of our own sorrow is the first comfort sorrow has, the proof that we still are, that we still feel, that the grief is real because it is loud, and to grieve in a silence that swallows the grieving is to grieve into a void that gives nothing back, not even the small mercy of one’s own voice.
I bid them halt, though I could not speak the bidding; I raised my hand, and they understood, and we stood upon the trail in the silence that was never heard, and I felt the foreboding settle on me like the cold settles on the slate at the end of the world’s day.
For I understood where we were. The satchel told me, in the tongue I had learned to hear, the tongue of the spirits and the dark, and it did not speak in words, for words too were swallowed here, but in a knowing that came up through the cold of it against my back. We had come to the edge of the Beast’s own place. Not the place where it lay, not yet, but the border of it, the country that surrounds it the way the cold surrounds a thing of ice, the silence it carries with it the way I now carried the trackless wind and the scent of the grave. The Beast did not make the silence. The silence was the Beast, was the outermost reach of it, the part of it that arrived before the rest, the way the chill of a winter arrives before the winter. We had been walking, these five nights, into the gathering edge of the thing itself, and now we stood in its border-country, and the absence of the world’s hum was the first true touch of the Beast upon us, the cold breath of it laid across the whole of the silent land.
And I felt, standing there, a reverence I had not felt since the hollow of the unborn beast. For there is a holiness in great silence, even a silence as dreadful as this, the holiness that hushes a man in a vast and empty hall, that bows his head though no one bids him bow. I stood in the silence that was never heard and I felt my own head bow, felt the awe come over me, the same awe that has walked with me since the weeping hour, the sacred face and the obscene face turned toward me both at once. For this silence was obscene; it was the unmaking of the world’s own voice, the throttling of the deep hum that has run beneath all being since the naming; and it was holy; it was older than the world, purer than the world, the very silence out of which the world was spoken, the quiet that was before the first word, and to stand in it was to stand at the threshold of creation itself, on the wrong side of it, in the unmade dark from which all making came and to which, the silence promised, all making would in time return.
I want you to feel the foreboding of it, for the foreboding is the truest thing I carried across that threshold. It was not the sharp fear of a danger seen. It was the slow vast dread of a thing approached, the dread a man feels who walks toward a doom he has known was coming since the beginning, and finds it nearer than he thought, and slows his step not to flee, for there is no fleeing, but to be reverent, to give the doom its due, to approach the unspeakable with the bowed head it demands. I had wished for this, in the deep heart, without knowing that I wished. The spirits had told me so. I had wished to leave the warm and certain world and walk in the dark where the unseen things walk, and now I stood in the silence at the border of the deepest dark of all, and the wishing and the dreading were one, and I bowed my head, and I gave the silence its due.
We could not camp there. A creature cannot rest in the silence that swallows even the sound of its own resting; the silence would have unmade us, slowly, as it had begun to unmake Lirelle’s defiance and the brothers’ grief; and so I knew we could not stay, and could not turn back, for the trail ran on, and the only way out of the silence was forward, through it, to the thing at its heart. I felt this knowledge come to me through the cold of the satchel, and I turned, and I looked at the others with my blind changed face, and I could not tell them in words what I knew, for words were taken, and so I told them in the only tongue the silence left us, the tongue of gesture, of bowed head and pointed hand and the slow certain step of a thing that has accepted its doom.
I pointed forward, along the trail, into the deeper silence, toward the Beast.
And they understood. Even Lirelle understood, her defiance swallowed, her wild face gone still at last, not stilled by the Valley’s gentle murdering calm but hushed by the holiness of the dread, which is a different stilling, the stilling of a soul that stands before a thing too great to rage at. Even Bracca, the hard certain one, bowed his head a fraction, gave the silence its due, for there is no hunter so hard that he does not know the bowing-place when he comes to it. And the scholar, Vorhaeth, stood with his candle-eyes dim and his face turned to the silent dark, and I think he understood it better than any of us, for he had catalogued the indifferent vastness and here was the indifferent vastness made silence, the not-caring of the gulfs given a voice that was no voice, and he bowed his head longest of all.
We went forward into the silence that was never heard. We walked, and our walking made no sound, and our breath made no sound, and the grey country lay silent and unmade about us, and the trail ran on into the heart of it, toward the thing that carried the silence the way I carried the dust of fallen stars. And the foreboding walked with me, hushed and reverent, neither fear nor grief but the great slow dread of the doom approached and given its due, and I held my head bowed, and I led them on, the satchel cold against my back, toward the silence’s center, where the Beast lay waiting, where the world’s last word had long ago been swallowed, where the unmaking I had wished for in the deep heart waited to be, at last, fulfilled.
There were two nights left. I knew it without counting. The silence told me. And in the silence that was never heard, in the border-country of the dark, I bowed my head and walked toward my ending, reverent, foreboding, and strangely, terribly, at peace.
Segment 22:
The Cost in Bodies
As told by Bracca Greypelt
We lost one of the brothers on the sixth night. I will tell it the way it happened, which is the only way I know to tell a thing, and I will not make it more than it was, because making a thing more than it was is a way of lying about it, and the dead are owed the truth and not the dressing-up.
We were in the silence by then. The deep silence, the one that ate sound, that Thal-Zhurath had led us into the night before. We had walked through it a full day and into the sixth night and we had learned to live in it the way you learn to live in cold water, by going numb to the part of you that would scream. We did not speak. We could not. We went by hand-signs and by the pull of Thal-Zhurath at the front, and we kept the watch by touch, a hand on the shoulder to wake the next, and it was a poor way to keep a watch but it was the way we had.
It was the younger brother. I will not give his name. He had a name and I knew it and I will keep it, because a name spoken in a telling like this becomes a thing for strangers to hold, and his name is not for strangers. He was the younger of the two and he was afraid the whole road, the plain animal fear of a young thing, and he carried it as well as a young thing can, which is to say not well, but he carried it, and he did not run, and a thing that is afraid and does not run is a brave thing, whatever the songs say about fearlessness. There is no such thing as fearlessness. There is only the carrying.
He was on watch. That is the hard part and I will say it plain. He was on watch and I was asleep, or in the thin gray thing that passed for sleep, and the rule is that the watch does not move from the camp, the watch holds the edge of the camp and watches the dark and does not go out into it for any reason, and he knew the rule, I had told him the rule a hundred times, and on the sixth night he broke it.
I do not know fully why. I have thought about it since and I have a guess and a guess is all it is. I think he heard something. Not with his ears, for there was nothing to hear in that silence, but the other way, the way Ysmir heard, the way you feel a thing at the back of the neck. I think the thing that walked behind, the thing at the edge of the light that Ysmir had seen, I think it came close on the sixth night, closer than it had come, and I think it showed itself to the boy the way it had shown itself to Ysmir, a shape at the edge of seeing, and I think the boy, afraid and worn and young, did the thing the fear makes a young one do, which is to go and look, to go and make sure, to go out past the edge of the camp into the dark to confirm the thing he could not bear not to confirm.
He went out. He left the watch and he went out into the silence after the shape, and the silence took the sound of his going so that none of us woke, and that is the part I carry, that he went out not twenty paces from where I slept and I did not wake, because there was no sound to wake to, because the Beast’s own silence covered the taking of him as it covered everything.
I woke when the watch should have changed. The hand did not come to my shoulder. That is how I knew. A man who keeps the watch ten thousand nights wakes when the change is late the way he wakes when a thing is wrong, and I woke, and the boy was not at the edge of the camp where the watch should be, and I knew before I had finished waking.
We found the place. Thal-Zhurath found it, with the satchel, the cold of it. Twenty paces out. There was no body. I want that understood. With an ordinary death there is a body, and the body is a hard thing but it is also a thing you can do something with, you can carry it or bury it or burn it, you can give it the rites, and the doing is a kind of grief and the grief has somewhere to go. There was no body. There was a place where the ground was scoured the way the deer’s last step had been scoured in the hills above the fen, a place where the world had forgotten that the boy had ever stood there, and there was the cold, the long low cold shape of the thing that had taken him, lying where it had lain to feed, if feed is the word, and then risen and gone on. No blood. No body. No mark of him at all, except the scoured ground that was the mark of his unmaking. The Beast had taken him the way it took everything, without malice and without mercy, the scholar had it right, without even knowing it had taken a thing that had a name and a fear and a brother.
The brother. That is the other hard part. The older brother woke when I did, and he saw the empty watch, and he understood, and I watched him understand, and there is nothing in all the world harder to watch than a man understanding that his brother is gone and there is not even a body to prove it. He made to go out after him. Of course he did. I caught his arm. He fought me, silently, for the silence ate even that, two men struggling in the dark and no sound to it, and I held him, because if I let him go he would go out into the silence after a brother who was already unmade and the Beast would take him too, and I would have lost two for the price of one, and a leader does not lose two for one, not ever, not even for grief.
I held him until the fight went out of him. It took a long time. He was strong and the grief made him stronger, the way grief does for a little while before it makes you weak, and I held him through the strong part and into the weak part, and when the weak part came he sagged against me and I held him up, and that was the only rite his brother got, the older brother held up by the leader in the dark, weeping a weeping that made no sound, and I let him weep it, and I did not say anything, because there was nothing to say and saying nothing was the truest thing I could give.
Then the grey came, the thin grey we called day, and we had to go on.
That is the cost in bodies, and that is the practical grief of those who go on, and I will tell the practical part now because it is the part that the songs leave out and it is the part that is true. We had to go on. The trail ran on and the food ran on toward nothing and there were two nights left, the sixth was spent and the seventh was coming, and a band that stops to grieve in the silence dies in the silence, and so we did not stop. We went on. The older brother went on. He had wept his soundless weeping and then he picked up his pack and he went on, because there was nothing else to do, because the only thing worse than going on without his brother was lying down beside the scoured place and waiting for the thing to come back, and a man, even a grieving man, chooses going on over lying down, almost always, it is the deepest thing in us, deeper than grief, the going on.
I want to say a thing about the grief of those who go on, because I have carried it many times and I carried it that day and I think it is not understood.
People think grief is the weeping. The weeping is the small part. The weeping comes and goes. The grief of those who go on is the other thing, the thing that has no sound and no tears, the thing that sits in the chest like a stone you cannot put down because there is nowhere to put it. You go on and you keep the watch and you count the rations and you read the trail, and all the while the stone sits in your chest, and you do not speak of it, and the others do not speak of it, and that not-speaking is not coldness, it is the opposite of coldness, it is the only way the stone can be carried, for if you spoke of it the speaking would crack you open and a cracked-open man cannot go on, and going on is the thing that must be done. So you hold it under. You hold the sorrow just under the surface where it does not show, and you keep your face the way I keep my face, unchanging, and people who do not know take the unchanging face for not-feeling, and they are wrong. The unchanging face is the lid on the stone. It is feeling so much that you have built a wall to hold it, because if the wall came down you would be no use to anyone, least of all the ones still living who need you to go on.
Lirelle looked at me, after, when we were walking. She had said to me in the quarrel that I felt nothing, that I had dead eyes, that I did not know how to care. She looked at me walking with the stone in my chest and the dead boy in my count and the living brother to keep alive, and I do not know what she saw, but something in her face changed, and she did not say again that I felt nothing. She had learned the thing about the unchanging face. The young always learn it eventually, the hard way, by watching a man carry a thing they cannot see him carrying.
We went on. Four of us now, where there had been five, where there had been six when we left the camp. The trail ran on into the silence and the seventh night was coming and the thing that had taken the boy lay somewhere ahead, the same thing, indifferent, not knowing it had taken a brother from a brother, and we hunted it still, because that was the thing we had come to do, and the cost in bodies does not change the thing you came to do, it only makes the doing heavier.
I kept his name. I keep it still. I will not give it to strangers. But I carry it, with the others I carry, in the place where I keep such things, and on the seventh night when the end came I had it with me, the boy who broke the watch because the fear was too much, who went out into the dark to make sure, who was brave because he was afraid and went anyway, and who was unmade twenty paces from where I slept, without a sound, while I did not wake.
I did not wake. That is the stone. That is the one I carry that does not have a lid heavy enough.
We went on.
Segment 23:
It Wears the Faces of the Dead
As told by Ysmir Hollow-Between
I had not meant to use the mask. I must set this down at the outset, that you may understand I did not go seeking the horror I am about to relate, that it was not curiosity that drove me but a thing far more pitiable, a thing I am not ashamed to name, for there is no shame left in me to wound: it was grief. The boy was gone, taken in the silence twenty paces from where we slept, unmade without a body, without a rite, without so much as the sound of his going, and the older brother walked beside us hollowed by a sorrow that had nowhere to go, and I, who could do so little, who had only ever been able to hear and to fear and to be disbelieved, thought that here, at last, was one small thing I might do. I bore upon my face the pallor-mask, the grey mask of the place-between, and its power, which I had used but once and dreaded ever after, was this: that the wearer might speak, for the space of a single question, with the recently slain.
I thought to find the boy. I thought to give the brother some last word, some small mercy wrung from the dark, a thing to set against the soundless weeping. It was a kindness I meant. I beg that this be remembered. The road to the worst horror of my life was paved with a kindness.
I went apart from the others in the seventh-night camp, the last camp, the one before the end, and I drew the mask up over my face, and the grey of it settled cold against my skin, and the world shifted as it shifts when one looks upon it through the eyes of the dead. The living faded. The cold camp, the worn shapes of my companions, the satchel, all of it went thin and far, and the country of the slain came near, the grey antechamber where the recently unmade linger before they pass, and I cast my voice into it, the single question I was permitted, and I called the boy by the name that is not for strangers and that I will not write.
He came.
I felt him come, drawn by the calling, by the mask, by the kinship of the dead with the thing that speaks to them. And I framed my question, the gentle question, Is there any word you would have me carry to your brother, and I opened the channel between us, and the thing that answered me was not the boy.
It wore his face.
I must be precise. I have sworn it through the whole of this account and I will not break the swearing now, at the last, when precision is the only dignity I have left to offer the dead. The thing that came when I called the boy wore the boy’s face, the boy’s grey young face with the fear still on it that he had carried the whole road, and it spoke with the boy’s voice, the very voice, the timbre and the catch of it, and it said to me, in that voice, in that face, words of such ordinary tenderness that I near wept to hear them, words a dying boy might truly send his brother, tell him I was not afraid at the end, tell him I have gone on ahead, and it was perfect, it was the boy entire, and it was not the boy, and the knowing that it was not the boy while it wore him so perfectly is the horror I have come to set down, the horror that surpasses all the horrors of that black road, the horror at the very root of the unmaking dark.
For I knew it was not he. Do you understand how I knew? I knew because the bell trembled. The tongueless bell upon my breast, that had trembled at the Beast’s whisper since the first night, that had shivered the whole road at the nearness of the unmade thing, the bell trembled now, here, in the country of the slain, while the boy’s face spoke its tender words, and there is only one thing that makes the bell tremble, and it is the Beast, and so I knew, even as the beloved familiar face spoke its perfect comfort, that I was not speaking with the dead boy at all. I was speaking with the Beast. The Beast had taken him, had unmade him, and had taken also his face, his voice, his manner, the very shape of his tenderness, and now it wore them, the way a man wears a coat stripped from a corpse, and it sat in the boy’s place in the country of the dead and answered to the boy’s name and offered the boy’s last words, and it was not the boy, it was the indifferent dark wearing the boy like a mask of its own, mocking, or not even mocking, for mockery requires malice and the scholar had taught me the Beast had none, but worse than mockery, worse than malice, doing it without intent at all, wearing the boy because wearing the boy was simply a thing it could now do, the way water takes the shape of the vessel poured into, without caring, without knowing, without one flicker of awareness that the shape it had taken was a shape that had been loved.
I tore the mask from my face. I could not bear it. I would have torn the skin beneath had the mask not come away. And the country of the slain fell back and the living world rushed near and I was kneeling in the seventh-night camp with the grey mask in my shaking hands, and I was screaming, I think, though the silence ate the scream, and Bracca was over me, his hands on my shoulders, his blind face close, asking with his touch what was wrong, for he could not hear the screaming any more than I could.
And I could not tell him. How could I have told him? How does one frame, in any tongue, the thing I had learned? I had learned that the Beast does not only take. I had believed, until that hour, that to be taken by the Beast was to be unmade, erased, scoured from the world as the boy had been scoured from the ground, and that was horror enough, the indifferent erasure the scholar had described. But it is worse. It is so much worse than erasure. The Beast keeps what it takes. It keeps the face and the voice and the shape of the manner, it keeps the very tenderness, and it wears them after, and there is no telling, from the outside, the kept thing from the living thing, for it is perfect, the keeping is perfect, and so a man can never again be certain, once he knows this, that the face before him is the face it claims to be, that the brother who walks beside him is his brother and not the thing that took his brother and now wears him to walk among the living undetected.
This is the violation that struck me to the soul, and I would have you feel the full weight of it, for it is the deepest horror the unmaking dark contains. It is the violation of the familiar. There is in all of us, beneath all our knowing, a trust we do not examine because we cannot live without it, the trust that the faces we love are the faces we love, that the voice that says I was not afraid at the end is the voice of the one who was afraid, that the shape of a beloved thing is bound to the soul of the beloved thing and cannot be peeled away and worn by another. We do not name this trust. We could not bear to name it, for to name it is to see how thin it is, how much rests upon it, how the whole warm world of our affections is built upon the unexamined faith that a face means a soul. The Beast breaks that faith. The Beast peels the face from the soul and wears the face and the soul is gone and you cannot tell, you can never tell, and once you know that you cannot tell, the whole warm world of the familiar turns to a country of masks, and every beloved face becomes a question, and the question has no answer, and the having of no answer is the madness, the true madness, the one I had feared the whole road and found at last in the country of the slain wearing the face of a boy I had meant only to comfort.
I looked at the older brother, after. I could not help it. He sat across the camp with his soundless grief, his brother’s brother, and I looked at his face, the living face, and the question rose in me, the unbearable question, is that his face, or has the thing taken him too, in the night, and does it wear him now, and would I know, would I know if it did, and the bell on my breast was still, it did not tremble, and I told myself the stillness of the bell meant he was true, he was himself, the Beast was not in him. But I no longer trusted even that. For if the Beast can wear the boy so perfectly that only the bell betrays it, who is to say the bell betrays it always? Who is to say the thing cannot, in time, learn even to still the bell? The trust was broken. Once broken it cannot be mended by any evidence, for the very faculty by which one would weigh the evidence is the faculty the breaking has destroyed.
I did not sleep that last night before the end. I have not slept since, in any way that deserves the name. I sat in the seventh-night camp with the mask in my hands and the broken trust in my breast, and I looked from face to face of my companions, Bracca and Lirelle and the grieving brother and the changed thing that Thal-Zhurath had become, and I asked of each of them, silently, the unanswerable question, and I received no answer, and I understood that this, this, was the Beast’s truest work upon me, not the whispers, not the pacing at the edge of the light, but this final unstringing of the one trust a soul cannot live without, the trust that a face is a face, that the dead stay dead, that the loved thing cannot be peeled and worn by the indifferent dark.
It wears the faces of the dead. I learned it through a kindness. And I carried the learning into the last night and the ending, and I will carry it past the ending, into whatever waits, the knowledge that there is no familiar face I can ever trust again, that the warm world of the loved is a country of masks, and that the dark which takes us does not even let us stay taken, but keeps us, and wears us, and walks among those who loved us, perfect, indifferent, forever.
I was not mad.
But I knew, that last night, the precise shape of the door through which the madness comes, for I had stood in its frame, and looked through, and seen a boy’s face on a thing that was not a boy, and there is no unseeing it, and there is no closing the door again, once the dark has shown you what it does with the faces of the ones you grieve.
Segment 24:
The True Name Beneath the Dark
As recorded by Vorhaeth, who is Catalogued
It is the seventh night as I make this entry, the last night, and I make it with a hand that I will not insult either of us by describing as steady, for I have come this night nearer to a piece of knowledge than I have ever come in all my long and accursed keeping, near enough to feel the edge of it, and I have done a thing I have never before in my existence done: I have stopped. I have stood upon the very threshold of a knowing, with the knowing all but in my grasp, and I have turned back from it, and I record the turning-back here, that whatever reads this may understand there is a limit even to the scholar’s hunger, a place past which even the appetite that has driven me through every other horror will not, must not, carry me.
I have written already of the four ingredients of the satchel, and of the indifference of the dark, and I have catalogued this hunt at every stage of its descent. Through all of it, beneath all of it, there has run a question I did not permit myself to pursue, the deepest question, the one that the codex-monocle and the bound pages of my mantle had been, I now believe, slowly assembling toward without my conscious leave. The question is this: what is the Beast’s true name?
You will recall, if you have followed this telling, that in the world the true name of a thing is the deepest fact of it, the name that the great fixing graved upon it at the naming of the world, and that to know a thing’s true name is to hold a measure of power over it, to be able to command it, to compel it, to wound it past its defenses, even to unmake it. I had thought, when first the question stirred in me, that here at last was the key to the whole undertaking, the thing that would make the hunt not merely a pursuit but a victory; for if the Beast could be named, the Beast could be commanded, and Thal-Zhurath, who bore the satchel and walked half-unmade at the head of us, might speak the name and bind the thing and end it. I had thought to give them this. I had thought, in the small surviving vanity of the scholar, that I, who had catalogued the Beast’s every nature, might be the one to pluck its name from beneath the dark and hand it to the hunter as a key is handed to a man before a locked door.
I was wrong, and the manner of my wrongness is the dread I set down now, trembling, upon the threshold I will not cross.
I bent the whole of my faculties to the deciphering on the seventh night. We were in the deep silence by then, the silence that ate sound, and within it the bound pages of my mantle could not whisper, for whispering is sound, but the codex-monocle could still read, for reading is sight, and I turned it upon the trail itself, upon the cold scoured track of the Beast, and upon the satchel that held the eye of its kindred, and I gathered, sign by sign, the fragments of the deep grammar from which a true name is composed. It came slowly. It came the way a name comes when one reads it letter by letter in a failing light, each fragment meaningless alone, the meaning gathering only as the fragments accrue. And as it gathered, as the shape of the name began to assemble itself in the deep chamber of my perfect and accursed memory, I felt a thing I had never felt in all my centuries of reading: I felt the name reading me back.
I must be exact, for exactness is the last service. A true name, in the lore I have kept, is a passive thing, a fact to be discovered, inert until spoken. This is true of the true names of things that belong to the world, of men and beasts and made objects, the things the great fixing graved and set in their places. But the Beast does not belong to the world. I had catalogued this already; I had stood in the Valley and understood that the Beast is kin to the unmade, native to the chaos that underlies all worlds, intruding through a thin place into the named and ordered realm. And it follows, though I did not see it until the name began to gather, that the Beast’s true name is not a name the world graved upon it. The world never named the Beast. The Beast was never fixed. Its name, if name is even the word, is a name out of the unmade condition, a name from before the first word, and such a name is not inert. Such a name is alive. To read it is to open a channel to the thing it names, and the channel runs both ways, and as I read the gathering fragments of the Beast’s name I felt the Beast, far off and near at once in the silence, begin to read the gathering fragments of mine.
I recoiled. I record it plainly. I, who have recoiled from nothing, who have leaned closer where the prudent averted their eyes, who carried his hunger past the Valley and the satchel and the indifference of the dark, recoiled, and snatched my reading back, and let the half-gathered name dissolve before its assembly could complete, and I sat trembling in the seventh-night silence with the dread of what I had nearly done sitting in me like a stone of ice.
For I understood, in the instant of recoiling, three things, and I set them down in the order of their terror.
The first is that the name could be completed. I was perhaps a dozen fragments from it. A night’s further reading, less, and I would have held it whole, the true name of the Beast, the key to the locked door. The hunger in me, even trembling, even recoiling, urged me on toward the completion, for the scholar’s hunger does not cease at the threshold, it only meets, for once, a thing stronger than itself.
The second is that the name, once held, must be either spoken or kept, and that both were ruin. To speak the name of a thing of the world is to gain power over it. But the Beast is not of the world, and I had felt the channel run both ways, and I understood that to speak the Beast’s true name aloud would not be to command the Beast but to summon it, fully, to call the whole of the indifferent dark through the thin place and into the world entire, for the name is alive, and to speak a living name is to call its bearer, and the bearer of that name is the unmaking itself. Thal-Zhurath, were I to give him the name and were he to speak it believing it a weapon, would not bind the Beast. He would open the door the Beast had been pressing against since the first prayer my hunters’ ancestors ever prayed, and the silence that ate sound would spread out from the speaking of it, and the world’s deep hum would be swallowed not in this one border-country but everywhere, and the great unmaking would begin, and there would be no satchel, no hunter, no world to be hunted in.
And the third thing, the worst, the one I tremble most to set down: to keep the name unspoken is no safety either. For I had read it, half of it, near all of it, and the reading had opened the channel, and the Beast had begun to read me back, and a channel once opened does not fully close. I carry now, in the perfect memory that is my curse, the near-complete true name of the unmaking dark, and the Beast knows that I carry it, and a thing that knows you hold the key to its summoning is a thing that will come for the holder, not in malice, for it has none, but in the way that the unmade is drawn toward the channel that has opened to it, the way water is drawn toward the crack in the vessel. I have made of myself a crack in the vessel of the world. By the mere reading, by the hunger I could not curb until the very threshold, I have made myself a place where the dark may more easily come through, and I cannot unmake the knowing, for my memory does not forget, it has never forgotten, it cannot be made to forget, and so I will carry the half-name and the open channel to whatever end this last night brings, a scholar who reached for the deepest fact of all and found that the deepest fact reaches back.
I have not told the others. Here, at the last, the pattern of my silences finds its final instance, and I will name the reason plainly, for it is no longer the reason of mercy or of cowardice but a reason simpler and more absolute. I have not told them because I dare not speak the name, even in part, even to warn them, for the speaking of even a part of a living name may be enough to widen the channel, and I will not risk it. The knowledge that would warn them is the very knowledge that, uttered, would doom them. This is the final trap of forbidden knowing, the one the prudent souls avoid by never reaching for the knowledge at all: that there are facts which cannot be shared without enacting the very harm the sharing would warn against, facts that must be carried in solitary silence precisely because they are too dangerous to set free, and the carrier of such a fact is alone with it as no creature was ever meant to be alone.
So I sit in the seventh-night silence, trembling, the half-name in my memory, the channel open, the Beast aware of me now in whatever fashion it is aware of anything, and I keep my silence, and I do not complete the reading, and I do not speak what I have read, and I wait for the ending that this last night must bring. I had thought to hand the hunter a key. I find instead that I have made of myself a door, half-open, and that the only thing I can do, the only service left to the scholar who has at last met the limit of his hunger, is to stand in the doorway and refuse, with the whole of my crumbling will, to open it the rest of the way.
Whether I shall succeed in the refusing, I do not know. The hunger is very strong, even now, even trembling. It whispers that the name is so nearly whole, that to complete it would be the crowning entry of all my keeping, that I might speak it carefully, partially, in some safe measure that does not summon. The hunger lies. There is no safe measure of a living name. I know this. I knew it the instant I recoiled. And yet the hunger whispers, and I am a thing made for the gathering of knowledge, and I do not know, as this last night gathers toward its close, whether the thing I am made for or the thing I have learned will prove, at the end, the stronger.
I close the entry here. I will read no further into the dark. I will hold the half-name in my silence and pray, to whatever a thing like myself may pray to, that the door I have made of myself stays shut until the ending comes, and that the ending, whatever it is, comes before the hunger wins.
Segment 25:
I Was Not Afraid of It
As told by Lirelle Ashthorn
They will say I went mad on the sixth night. Let them. I have been called mad my whole life by souls too small to feel what I feel, and I have learned to wear the word like a cloak against their cold. I did not go mad. I went toward. There is a difference, though none of them will ever understand it, and I will set it down here so that one heart, somewhere, someday, a heart wild enough to know, might read it and understand that what I did on the sixth night was not the breaking of a mind but the keeping of a promise I had made to myself on the slate hill long ago, when the cold first rose through my feet and I knew that I belonged to the dark and the dark to me.
It was after the boy. After the brother was taken in the silence and Bracca held the other up in the soundless dark, after Ysmir tore the grey mask from his face and screamed a scream that no one heard. The camp was full of grief and terror, and I sat at the edge of it, apart as I always sat, and I felt the thing the others felt and one thing more that they did not. They felt the horror of the Beast’s nearness. I felt its nearness too, the cold of it lying across the silent land, the long low presence of the thing that had taken the boy. But where their horror was, in me, there was the old wanting, risen now to a height it had never reached, for the Beast was close, closer than it had ever been, close enough that I could feel it the way you feel a fire across a dark room, the pull of the heat, the leaning of the body toward it before the mind has leave.
And I leaned. God help me, and let no small soul judge me, I leaned toward the thing that had unmade a boy twenty paces from where we slept, and the leaning was not horror. It was longing. It was the longing of my whole starved life come to its fullness, and I could no more have resisted it than the tide can resist the moon, and I did not try to resist it, for I was done with resisting, I had resisted in the Valley and resisted my own want for the satchel and resisted the urge to take it in the night, and I was so tired of resisting, so bone-tired of holding the storm in, and on the sixth night I stopped holding it.
I rose. The others did not see me rise; they were sunk in their grief, all but Bracca, and even Bracca had his hands full of the living brother and his face full of the dead one. I rose, and I walked out of the camp, into the silence, toward the cold.
I want to tell you what it was, that walking, for it was the truest hour of my life and I will not have it remembered as madness. The silence ate the sound of my steps, the silence that had so terrified me when first we entered it, the silence I had hurled my defiance at and watched it swallowed. But I was not defying it now. I had stopped defying. I walked into the silence and let it take the sound of me and I did not mind, for I was not trying to break it anymore, I was joining it, walking into the stillness the way a drop walks into the sea, and there was a peace in it that was not the Valley’s murdering peace, not the flat grey calm that would have unmade my wildness. This was a different stillness. This was the stillness of a wild thing that has found, at last, the only thing wilder than itself, and goes to it not to be tamed but to be matched, and there is no peace in all the world like the peace of the storm that has found its mountain.
I was not afraid of it.
That is the heart of this telling and I set it down plainly. I walked toward the thing that had taken the boy, the thing the scholar said did not care for us, the thing Ysmir said wore the faces of the dead, the thing that was the indifferent unmaking dark made flesh or made not-flesh, and I was not afraid. The others were afraid because the others wanted to live, wanted to go home, wanted the warm grey world and the safe count of the rations and the going-on that Bracca prized above all things. I did not want those. I had never wanted those. I had wanted, my whole life, the wind that would not blow and the storm that never came and the wild thing that would match my own wild heart, and here it was, close, closer with every soundless step, and a creature walking toward the fulfillment of its deepest want does not feel fear. It feels exaltation. It feels the abandon of the diver at the lip of the high cliff, the abandon that is not the absence of fear but the transmutation of fear into joy, the two braided so tight, as they have always been braided in me, that the braiding becomes a third thing, a thing that has no name in the tongues of the cautious, a reckless exalted gladness that I felt rising in me with every step toward the cold, until I thought I might laugh, until I did laugh, a laugh the silence ate, a soundless laugh flung into the dark toward the thing that was the dark, here I am, here I am, I have come, I have always been coming, I am not afraid of you, I am the only one who is not afraid.
I felt it turn toward me.
I had felt it turn its regard upon Ysmir, he had told us, and recoiled. I felt it turn toward me and I did not recoil. I opened to it. I stood in the deep silence at the edge of the Beast’s own presence, the cold pouring over me like the wind I had waited for all my life, and I felt the vast indifferent attention of the thing settle upon me, the not-caring the scholar had described, and here is the thing the scholar got wrong, or could not feel, because he is a thing of catalogues and not a thing of storms: the indifference did not wound me. To Vorhaeth the indifference was the worst horror, the not-being-known, the not-mattering, the being folded back into the dark by a thing that never knew you were there. To me the indifference was a freedom. For all my life I had been known, and watched, and judged, and told to sit down, told to be still, told to stay where I was put by souls who cared, who cared so much they would cage me, who loved me, even, Bracca had said he did not want to lose me, and the caring had been the cage. The Beast did not care. The Beast would not cage me. The Beast would take me as the storm takes the cliff it wears away, without judgment, without the cage of caring, without one word of sit down, be still, stay, and to a thing that has been caged by love its whole life, the indifference of the unmaking dark is not a horror. It is the only freedom it has ever been offered.
I stood in its regard and I gave myself to it. I want that understood. Whatever happened after, and I will not pretend to you that I know fully what happened after, on the sixth night I gave myself willingly, gladly, exaltedly, to the thing that was the dark, and if it had taken me then, in that hour, I would have gone laughing, I would have gone the way I had always wanted to go, toward and not away, and I would have called it not death but homecoming.
It did not take me.
That is the thing I have turned over and over since, the cruelty and the mercy of it braided as all things in that country were braided. It turned its regard upon me, the wild one, the willing one, the only one who came to it gladly, and it did not take me. I have wondered why. I have a guess, and the guess is bitter, and I will give it. I think it did not take me because I came willingly. I think the Beast, the unmaking dark, the indifferent thing that does not care, has no use for a thing that gives itself. I think it wants the taking, not the giving, not because it is cruel but because that is its nature, to unmake what clings to being, to fold back into the dark the warm things that wish to stay warm, and a thing that does not wish to stay, that opens itself, that comes laughing, that wants the unmaking, is a thing the Beast cannot quite, in its indifferent way, consume. I offered myself and the dark found nothing in the offering to take, for the taking is in the resistance, and I had no resistance, I had only longing, and longing is not the bread the dark eats.
It turned from me. I felt it turn away, incurious, having found in me nothing to its purpose, and it left me standing in the silence, alive, unwanted, the only one of us the dark did not want, and I will tell you that I wept then, standing in the cold, and the tears were not the storm and not the grief but something worse than either, the tears of a creature that has offered the whole of itself to the only thing it ever truly desired and been found wanting, been refused, been left alive and warm and unconsumed because its desire was too pure, too willing, too much like love.
Bracca found me. He had marked my rising after all, late, and come out into the silence after me against every rule he had ever held, risking the taking to bring me back, and he found me weeping in the cold where the Beast had turned away, and he took my arm, and he did not say I told you, he did not say sit down, he only held my arm and turned me back toward the camp, and I let him, for the dark had refused me and there was nowhere else to go.
I went back. But I will tell you the last of it, the thing I learned on the sixth night that I would not trade for all the safe grey years of all the cautious souls who ever told me to be still. I learned that I was not afraid of the dark, that I had never been afraid, that the fear the others felt was the price of their wanting to live and I had never wanted to live the way they wanted it, I had wanted to burn, and the difference between us was the whole difference in the world. And I learned that the dark did not want me, that the thing I had loved my whole life could not love me back, not because I was unworthy but because I was too willing, and that there is no loneliness in all the universe like the loneliness of being refused by the abyss itself for loving it too well.
I was not afraid of it.
I am still not afraid of it. And when the ending came, the next night, the seventh, I was the only one among us who watched it come without terror, the only one who had already offered herself and been refused, the only one with nothing left to fear, for the worst thing the dark could do to me it had already done: it had turned away.
Segment 26:
Eyes Black as the Forgotten Sky
As told by Thal-Zhurath, who was Unmade
And so came the seventh night, the last of the nights that were not nights, and the trail that I alone could see ran down at last into a hollow at the heart of the silence, a deep place, a still place, the stillest and deepest place in all the unmade country, and there, in the swallowing dark, I came face to face with the Night Beast, and I beheld it, and I have been trying, in all the years since, to find the words for what I beheld, and I have not found them, and I will not find them in this telling either, but I will set down the failing of the words, for the failing is the nearest thing to the truth that the tongues of the living allow.
I bid the others wait at the lip of the hollow. I could not speak the bidding, for the silence ate all speech, but I raised my hand, and they understood, and they stayed, all but Lirelle, who came a little way after me before Bracca held her back, for she would have come the whole way, the wild one, the willing one, she would have walked down into the hollow at my side and stood before the Beast unafraid, and I think she envied me, in that last hour, that I should be the one to go down. But it was mine to go down. The satchel was on my back, and the calling was in me, and the trail was mine to follow to its end, and I went down alone into the hollow where the Beast lay, and the silence closed over me like deep water closing over a stone, and I came into the presence of the thing.
It lay in the dark, and the dark was part of it, and I could not at first tell where the dark ended and the Beast began, for it was cloaked in the very darkness, as the old songs had said, born from the last breath of the dying moon, and the old songs were wrong, for I had learned from the scholar and from my own changed sight that it was not born at all, was never born, was kin to the unborn beast whose hide I wore, a thing the naming of the world had passed by. It lay in the dark and it was the dark, and I stood before it with my blind eyes that saw now by the unmade sight the satchel had given me, and slowly, slowly, as a shape gathers itself out of fog, the Beast gathered itself out of the darkness and became, for me, beholdable.
I will not tell you its shape. I have said I would set down the failing of the words and here is the first and greatest failing: it had no shape that the shaped world could hold. To say it was vast is to lie, for vastness is a measure of the made world and the Beast was not measured. To say it was a thing of claws or fangs or terrible limbs is to lie, for those are the parts of beasts that were born, and this thing had no parts, was not assembled, was not built up out of pieces as living things are built. It was whole in the way that the dark is whole, in the way that silence is whole, an undivided thing, and my sight slid across it the way my sight had slid across the architecture of the Valley, finding no edge, no seam, no place where the Beast stopped and the not-Beast began. I beheld it, and I could not hold what I beheld, and the not-holding was itself a kind of beholding, the only kind such a thing permits.
But the eyes I beheld. The eyes I held, and the eyes hold me still, across all the years, across death, across the place-between. For the Beast, that had no shape, that had no edge, that slid from my sight at every other point, had eyes, and the eyes were the one part of it that the made world could perceive, the one place where the unmade thing touched the realm of the seen, and they were black, black as the forgotten sky, black as the sky my people had never seen behind its grey and mourning veil, black as the space between the stars where no warmth has ever travelled, and they turned upon me, and I was transfixed.
I use the word with care, for it is the true word. I was transfixed. I was fixed in place, pinned, held, as a thing is pinned by a great cold weight, and I could not have moved nor wished to move, for the eyes held me, and in the holding there came over me an awe so terrible and so total that it emptied me of everything else, of fear, of grief, of the long doom I had carried since the weeping hour, of the joy of the trail and the dread of the silence, all of it gone, swept away, leaving only the awe, the pure transfixed awe of a small made thing standing before the unmade vastness and beholding, in its black and patient eyes, the truth of what it was.
For I saw, in the eyes black as the forgotten sky, the thing the scholar had catalogued and I had felt without understanding all the long road. I saw the indifference. I saw it not as a horror, as the scholar had seen it, but as a vastness, a depth, a black and bottomless patience, the patience of the dark that was before the world and will be after it, the patience of the thing that does not hunt because it hungers but flows because it flows, that does not hate because it cannot hate, that does not love because it cannot love, that simply is, and was, and will be, eternal, undivided, unmade, indifferent as the gulfs are indifferent, and in beholding that indifference in the black eyes I felt, God help me, not horror but reverence, the reverence a thing feels before the truly eternal, before the truly vast, before the thing so much greater than itself that all its small concerns, its hunger and its fear and its love and its doom, are revealed as the small flickering things they are, candles before the dark, and the dark not even aware of the candles, and the candles awed all the same.
I had wished for this. I knew it now, beholding the black eyes. I had wished, in the deep heart, since I was a child upon the slate turning my blind face to the weeping sky and listening for the voice beneath the silence, to stand at last before the vastness and behold it, to be small before the truly great, to know, for one transfixed moment, the awe of the made thing before the unmade. The spirits had told me I had wished for the dark, and I had thought they meant my hunting, my pursuit, the hunter’s dream of the unfindable quarry. They had meant this. They had meant the awe. They had meant that beneath all my hunting there had always been a deeper thing, a longing to behold the eternal indifferent dark and be transfixed by it, to stand before the thing that does not care and be unmade by the not-caring, and the longing had been answered, and I stood in the hollow before the eyes black as the forgotten sky, and the awe was on me, and it was terrible, and it was the fulfillment of my whole life’s deepest wish, and the terror and the fulfillment were one, as everything in that country was one, the sacred and the obscene, the joy and the doom, the mercy and the cruelty, all of them braided into the single black patient gaze that held me.
And I understood, transfixed, that the beholding was the danger. The scholar had warned, in his way; Ysmir had warned; Lirelle had nearly been taken by her own willing approach. To behold the Beast was to be opened to it, to let the black eyes pour their indifferent vastness into the small candle of the self, and the self, beholding, longs to be vast too, longs to leave off being small and flickering and afraid, longs to pour itself out into the great black patience and be done with the burden of being a made and mortal thing. I felt the longing rise. I felt the awe become a yearning, the yearning to step into the black eyes, to give over the candle of myself to the dark, to be unmade not by violence but by surrender, to flow out into the eternal indifference and cease, at last, to flicker. It was the sweetest temptation I have ever known. It was the temptation Lirelle had felt and given herself to, and the Beast had refused her for the giving; but it would not refuse me, for I bore the satchel, I was already half-unmade, I was kin to it now, and a thing that is kin and surrenders is a thing the dark will take gladly, will fold into itself, will make wholly its own.
I stood transfixed at the very edge of that surrender, the awe become a yearning become a step I had not yet taken but felt my whole self leaning toward, the way Lirelle had leaned, the way the diver leans at the lip of the cliff. The black eyes held me. The vast indifferent patience waited, not eager, for it could not be eager, but open, the door of the dark standing open in the black eyes, and I, transfixed, awed, longing, raised my foot to step through.
And in the raising, my hand, of its own accord, went to the satchel.
I will tell what came of that in the telling that follows, for it is not mine to tell here. This telling is only of the beholding, of the eyes black as the forgotten sky, of the terrible transfixed awe of the small made thing standing at last before the unmade vastness it had longed its whole life to behold. I beheld it. I was transfixed. I stood at the lip of my own surrender, awed past fear, longing past doom, and the black eyes waited, patient as the dark is patient, for me to take the step into them, the step I had been walking toward since I was a child upon the slate, the step into the eternal indifference, the step that was my death and my fulfillment and the answer to the deepest wish of my unmade heart.
I beheld the Beast. And the Beast, in its black and bottomless way, beheld me, and waited.
Segment 27:
The Battle None Saw
As told by Bracca Greypelt
I held Lirelle at the lip of the hollow and I watched Thal-Zhurath go down into the dark, and then I could not see him anymore, for the dark took him, and I stood there with my hand on Lirelle’s arm and I waited, and the waiting was the worst part. I have waited at the edge of many fights. The waiting is always the worst part. The fight is fast and the waiting is slow and a man would trade a hundred slow waitings for one fast fight if the trading were allowed, but it is not allowed, and so you wait.
I could not go down. I want that understood, because a leader who lets another go alone into the dark must answer for it, and I have answered for it to myself a thousand nights since. I could not go down. The trail was his. The satchel was his. The calling was his. Only Thal-Zhurath could see in that hollow, with the unmade sight the satchel gave him, and a man who cannot see does not go down into the dark to stand beside a man who can, for he is no help there, he is only one more thing for the dark to take. So I held Lirelle, who would have gone, who strained against my hand the whole time, and I waited at the lip, blind, and I listened to a silence that gave me nothing.
That is the thing about that fight. There was nothing to hear. We were in the deep silence, the silence that ate sound, and so even if there had been the sounds of a fight, the clash and the cry and the breaking, we would have heard none of it. But I do not think there were such sounds. I have fought all my life and I know the sounds a fight makes, and I do not think the battle in the hollow made any of them, even before the silence ate them. It was not that kind of fight. It was a fight between a man half-unmade and a thing wholly unmade, and such a fight is not fought with the clash and the cry. It is fought in some other way, a way I have no words for because I was not down there and could not see, and I am glad I could not see, for the little I felt at the lip was enough, and a man does not always want the whole of a thing.
What I felt was this. I felt the cold change.
The cold had lain over the whole silent country, the long low cold of the Beast, and it had been a still cold, a resting cold, the cold of a thing lying down. And then, all at once, at the lip of the hollow, I felt the cold move. I felt it gather and surge the way a still pool surges when something great turns over in its depths, and I knew the fight had started, though I heard nothing and saw nothing, I knew it the way you know a thing in the belly, and I gripped Lirelle’s arm harder and she went still at last, for she felt it too.
It was fast. I will say that, and it is the truest thing I can say about a thing I did not see. It was fast. The cold surged and churned, and I stood blind at the lip feeling it churn, and it could not have been more than a few breaths, ten, a dozen, the span of a fight that is truly a fight and not a long grinding thing, the span in which everything is decided. I have fought such fights. They are over before the mind has caught up to the body. You do the thing and then you stand there with your heart going and you realize the thing is already done. It was that kind of fight, down in the dark, and I felt the shape of it in the churning cold without seeing one moment of it, and then.
Then I felt the arrows.
This I felt clearest of all, and I do not fully understand how I felt it, but I felt it. Three times, in the churning cold, I felt a thing go through, a thing sharp and swift and sure, a thing that cut the cold the way a good arrow cuts the air, and each time it went through I felt the great churning thing flinch. Three arrows. Thal-Zhurath drew them from the satchel, I learned after, the arrows that were part of the thing, made for the hunting, and he loosed them into the dark, into the heart of the Beast, into the place where the black eyes were, and I felt them strike, felt them go true, three times, and the third time the churning cold did not flinch. The third time it broke.
I have killed many things. I know the moment a thing breaks. There is a moment, in every fight, when the thing you are fighting stops being a thing that is fighting and becomes a thing that is dying, and the moment is not a sound and not a sight, it is a change in the weight of it, a giving-way, and I have felt it ten thousand times and I felt it then, in the hollow, in the cold, the moment the Beast broke. The third arrow went into the heart of the dark and the great cold thing gave way, and the giving-way rolled up out of the hollow and over me at the lip, a wave of it, and I knew the Beast was dead, or whatever a thing like that is when it is no longer what it was, and the whole long hunt of seven nights came down to that, to a wave of giving-way rolling cold over a blind man at the lip of a hollow he could not see into.
It fell without a cry. The old songs say so and the old songs are right, for once. There was no cry. There could not have been, in the silence, but I do not think there would have been a cry even without the silence. The Beast did not cry out because the Beast did not care, the scholar had it right, a thing that does not care does not cry out when it dies, it only stops, the way the cold stops, the way the dark gives way, without protest, without fear, without one flicker of the thing a living beast feels when the arrow finds it. It was indifferent to its own ending as it had been indifferent to everything. It fell the way a wave falls. It was, and then it was less, and then it was not, and there was no cry, and there was no sound, and there was nothing to mark the death of the thing we had crossed a Valley and lost a boy to hunt, nothing but the cold giving way and rolling up over me at the lip.
Then it was over.
I want to say a thing about how fast it was, because I think it matters and the songs get it wrong. The songs make the great fights long. They make them go on, blow after blow, the hero and the monster trading ruin through the night. Real fights are not like that. Real fights are fast. The longer a fight goes the worse it is, for both, and the great fights, the ones that decide a thing, are the fastest of all, over in a dozen breaths, decided before either thing has time to be afraid. Seven nights we hunted. Seven nights of walking and watching and starving and grieving and breaking against each other, seven nights of the cold and the silence and the thing that walked behind. And the fight itself, the thing all seven nights were for, was over in a dozen breaths, in a churning of cold I could not see, in three arrows I felt but did not watch, in a giving-way that rolled over me and was done. That is the shape of it. All the long slow cost, and then the fast brutal resolving, and the resolving so fast that when it was over I stood at the lip with my heart going and could not quite believe the thing was already done.
Lirelle made a sound. The silence ate it, but I felt her make it, felt the breath go out of her, and I do not know if it was grief or relief or that other thing she felt that none of us felt, the wanting, the wanting that had just watched the thing it wanted die in the dark. I did not ask. There was no asking, in the silence, and there would have been no asking even with words, for some things a man does not ask, and what Lirelle felt at the death of the Beast was one of them.
We waited at the lip for Thal-Zhurath to come back up.
I will tell what came of that in its place, for it is not mine to tell here, and what came of it was the strangest thing of the whole strange hunt, and I am still not certain I understand it. This telling is only of the fight, the battle none saw, and I have told it as true as I can tell a thing I felt and did not see. It was fast. It was soundless. Three arrows went true into the heart of the dark and the great cold thing broke and fell without a cry, and seven nights of cost came down to a dozen breaths of churning cold, and then it was over, and I stood blind at the lip of the hollow with my heart going and the cold giving way around me, and the Beast that could not be tracked, that we had tracked, that had taken a boy and walked behind us and worn his face and turned away from Lirelle and held Thal-Zhurath in its black eyes, the Beast was dead.
I did not feel what a man should feel at the end of a hunt. I have felt it before, the thing you feel when the great quarry is down, the hard clean satisfaction of the work done. I did not feel it. I stood at the lip and felt the cold give way and I felt only the waiting again, the new waiting, the waiting for Thal-Zhurath to come back up out of the dark.
He was a long time coming.
That should have told me. A man who has just made the kill does not stay long in the dark beside it. But Thal-Zhurath stayed, down there in the hollow with the broken thing and the satchel and the last breath of the dark, and he was a long time, and I stood at the lip and waited, and I did not yet know what I would learn when at last he came back up, or what he would be when he came, or whether the thing that came back up out of the hollow would be Thal-Zhurath at all.
The fight was won. That was the easy part. It is always the easy part, the winning. It is what comes after the winning that breaks a hunt, and the after was coming, and I waited at the lip, blind, for it to come up out of the dark.
Segment 28:
The Last Breath of the Moon
As told by Ysmir Hollow-Between
I had thought, in my long torment, that the death of the Beast would bring an ending to it. I had believed, through every not-night of that black road, that when the thing in the dark was slain the whispers would cease, the bell would still, the watching at my nape would lift, and I would be returned to myself, to whatever poor remnant of myself the dread had left intact. I had held to this belief as a drowning man holds to a spar, for it was the only future I could imagine that was not the dark, and I record now, in the hollow aftermath, that it was a false belief, the falsest of all my beliefs, and that the moment of victory, when it came, brought not the ending I had prayed for but a thing far worse, a thing I had no name for until I stood in it: the dreadful hollowness of having won and finding the winning empty.
I stood at the lip of the hollow with Bracca and Lirelle. I could not see into it, none of us could, but I did not need to see. I had the bell, and through the bell I had the whole of it, the surge of the cold, the churning, the three arrows going true, and then the breaking, the great giving-way that Bracca felt as a wave and I felt as a thing far more intimate, for through the bell I felt the Beast die from the inside, felt the indifferent vastness flinch and break and fall, and I waited, in that instant of its falling, for the whispers to stop.
They did not stop.
The Beast fell without a cry. I have set down that the bell gave me the whole of it, and the whole of it included this, that there was no cry, no protest, no terror, nothing of what a dying thing pours out at its ending. It fell the way a held breath is let go, the way a candle gutters, without struggle, without lament, indifferent to its own unmaking as it had been indifferent to ours. And I waited for the silence that should follow the death, the true silence, the cessation, the lifting of the dread.
And instead I felt Thal-Zhurath take the breath.
This is the thing I must set down, the horror of the prize, and I find my hand slow to write it, for it is the keystone of all the horror, the thing toward which the whole tale has been building, and now that I have come to it I would almost rather leave it unwritten. But I have sworn to be the witness, and a witness who flinches at the last is no witness at all, and so I will write it, dreadful and hollow as it is.
As the Beast fell, in the instant of its falling, there came from it a last exhalation, a final breath, the breath the old songs call the last breath of the moon, the dying-out of the thing that was the dark. And it did not disperse. It did not pour back into the void from which the Beast had intruded. It was drawn. Through the bell I felt it drawn, gathered, pulled, as a thing is pulled into a vessel made to receive it, and the vessel was the satchel, the satchel of unborn hide that Thal-Zhurath bore, the satchel that held the dust of fallen stars and the plucked eye and the trackless wind and the scent of the grave, and now would hold this also, the last breath of the dying dark, the prize, the trophy, the thing the whole hunt had been for.
And in the drawing of it, I understood the horror of the prize, and the understanding emptied me.
For consider what was taken. The Beast was the indifferent dark, the unmaking, the thing kin to the void that underlies all worlds. To slay it was a deed, perhaps, though I am no longer certain that a thing which does not truly live can be truly slain. But to slay it was one thing, and to take its last breath into a vessel and carry it away was another thing entirely, and the second thing was the horror. Thal-Zhurath did not destroy the dark. He captured it. He took the dying breath of the unmaking and sealed it in the satchel and made of it a possession, a thing to be borne, a thing to be kept, and I felt, through the bell, in the instant of the taking, that the breath was not dead at all. The Beast was broken; its great churning presence was gone from the hollow; but its last breath, sealed now in the satchel, was a living thing, or a thing as living as the unmade ever is, and it whispered, the moment it was sealed, in the tongue I knew, the tongue of the spirits and the dark, and it whispered to the satchel, and the satchel whispered back, and I understood that nothing had ended. The Beast was not gone. The Beast had only been made smaller, made portable, made into a prize, and the prize lived, and it would whisper forever, and we would carry it, or someone would carry it, down all the years to come.
This is the dreadful anticlimax of the victory, and I would have you feel its full hollowness, for it is the truest thing I learned in all that black country. We had hunted seven nights. We had lost a boy. We had broken against one another in the camp. We had crossed a Valley and made a vessel of horror and walked into a silence that ate sound, all toward this, the slaying of the Beast, the great deed, the worthy end. And the deed, when it came, when it was done, was not an ending. It was a transfer. The dark was not defeated; it was relocated. It went from the hollow into the satchel, from the great loose presence that walked behind us into a small sealed thing slung on a man’s back, and the man would carry it home, and the dark would whisper to him as it had whispered to me, and the whole vast freight of the hunt, the cost, the grief, the terror, came to this, that we had taken the dark and put it in a bag.
I felt the bell, and the bell did not still. That is the proof, that is the thing I beg you understand. I had believed the bell would still at the Beast’s death, that the whispers would cease, that I would be free. The Beast died and the bell did not still, for the source of the whispers was not slain, only sealed, and a sealed thing whispers as loud as a free one, louder perhaps, for now it was close, now it was among us, now it was a prize we would carry and not a presence we might flee. I stood at the lip of the hollow in the moment of victory and I felt the whispers go on, unchanged, undiminished, and I understood that I would never be free, that there had never been a freedom to win, that the hunt had not been a road out of my torment but a road deeper into it, for now the torment would come home with us, sealed in a satchel, borne on a shoulder, whispering forever.
And there was no triumph in any of us. I felt that too, standing at the lip. Bracca felt no triumph; I felt the absence of it in him, the hard clean satisfaction of the hunt’s end that did not come. Lirelle felt no triumph; she felt only the loss of the thing she had wanted, dead now, or worse than dead, sealed in the satchel she had craved, so that the two things she had longed for, the dark and the satchel, were now one thing, and it lived, and she could not have it, and the wanting had nowhere left to go. And Thal-Zhurath, who had taken the breath, who had won the deed, I felt least triumph of all in him, for I think he understood, down in the hollow with the prize sealed and whispering, the thing that I understood at the lip, that he had not ended the dark but bound himself to it forever, that the prize was a chain, that to carry the last breath of the moon was to carry the unmaking home in his own pack, and that the victory was the beginning of a longer captivity than any defeat could have been.
We had won. The Beast was slain. And I stood in the won moment and felt the hollowness of it open under me like a pit, the dreadful anticlimactic emptiness of the great deed done and nothing changed, the whispers going on, the bell trembling still, the dark not defeated but merely pocketed, and I knew that this was the cruelest thing the unmaking dark had taught me in all its cruel teaching: that there are victories that are worse than any loss, that to slay the monster is sometimes only to take it home, and that the moment of triumph, prayed for through all the long dark road, can arrive at last and be found empty, be found hollow, be found to have changed nothing at all except to bring the horror closer, into the camp, onto the shoulder, sealed in a bag of unborn hide, whispering, whispering, whispering, forever.
The Beast fell without a cry. Thal-Zhurath took its breath. And I stood at the lip of the hollow in the moment we had bled for, and felt nothing win in me, nothing lift, nothing end, only the old whispers going on, and the new dreadful knowing that they always would.
Segment 29:
The Place Where Day Ends and Night Begins
As recorded by Vorhaeth, who is Catalogued
I am a keeper of records, and a record, properly made, has an ending. This is the comfort of the catalogue, the quiet dignity of it, that every entry is closed, every account is balanced, every thing that is set down is set down whole, with its beginning and its middle and its conclusion, so that the chaos of the world is rendered, at least upon the page, into something a mind may hold. I make now the entry I have most dreaded making in all my long keeping, and I make it knowing that it cannot be closed, that it has no ending, that it is the one account I will carry forever unbalanced, and the not-closing of it is a wound in the very faculty by which I have endured my existence, for I am a thing that closes accounts, and here is an account that will not close.
Thal-Zhurath did not come back up out of the hollow.
We waited at the lip, the four of us who remained, and Bracca felt the Beast break and fall, and Ysmir felt the last breath drawn into the satchel, and I, with the codex-monocle, watched the dark below for the changed man to ascend. He did not ascend. The waiting stretched, and stretched, and Bracca at last did the thing a leader does when the waiting has gone past all bearing: he went down. He could not see, but he went down into the dark hollow after Thal-Zhurath, and Lirelle went with him, for she would not be held back a second time, and I came behind with the lantern of the false flame, that I might lend them what sight my reading could provide. We descended into the place where the Beast had fallen.
There was no Beast. I record this first, for it is itself a thing that resists the record. The great cold presence was gone, broken and dispersed, the hollow scoured of it the way the deer’s last step had been scoured in the hills above the fen, a wound in causality where the unmade thing had been and was no longer. There was no carcass, for there had been no body; there was only the absence, the cold giving-way that Bracca had felt, settling now into a stillness that was almost, but not entirely, the ordinary stillness of an empty place.
And there was no Thal-Zhurath.
I turned the false flame about the whole of the hollow. I read the floor of it, the walls of it, every surface with the codex-monocle, searching for the trail, for the changed man could not simply have ceased, a thing that walks down into a hollow leaves a record of its walking, leaves a trail my eye can read, and I bent the whole of my faculty to the finding of it. And I found it. I found his trail, the trail of Thal-Zhurath, written faint upon the floor of the hollow where he had descended, and I followed it with my reading across the scoured ground to the place where the Beast had fallen, to the very center of the absence, and there, at the center, the trail did not stop.
I must be precise. Precision is the last service, I have said it through this whole account and I hold to it even now, at the unclosable end. The trail did not stop. A trail that stops is a thing I can record; the deer’s trail stopped in the hills and I recorded the stopping, the wound, the lifting-out. This was different. Thal-Zhurath’s trail did not stop. It went on. It went on past the place where the floor of the hollow ended, past the place where the made world ended, and it turned, at the center of the absence, in a direction I cannot name, a direction that is not north nor south nor up nor down nor any of the six directions the made world allows, a seventh direction, an eighth, a direction that opens only where the naming of the world has worn thin, and the trail of Thal-Zhurath went away along that direction, away out of the world, into the unknowable space the elder glosses speak of, the chaos that underlies all worlds, and I could read the trail going, and I could not read where it went, for it went where my reading could not follow, where no reading can follow, into the place that has no surface and bears no record and cannot be catalogued by any faculty that the made world has produced.
He had gone into the dark. Not been taken; gone. The distinction is the heart of this entry and I labor to make it plain. The Beast did not take Thal-Zhurath; the Beast was already broken when he went; the trail shows a thing that walked, of its own motion, into the seventh direction, that stepped through the open door at the center of the absence and went away along the path that has no end I could read. He had borne the satchel. He had taken the last breath of the dark into it. And then, the deed done, the prize won, he had not turned and climbed back up to us. He had turned the other way, the unnameable way, and gone, satchel and all, into the place where day ends and night begins, the threshold of the unmade, and the door had closed behind him, or had not closed, I could not tell, for the reading slid away at the door and gave me nothing, gave me only the fact of his going and the absolute opacity of where he had gone.
I tried to record it. I will set down that I tried, for the trying is the last dignity, and the failing of the trying is the entry. I drew forth a leaf of vellum and I attempted, with the ink-bound glove, to copy the trail, to fix upon the page the direction Thal-Zhurath had taken, that there might be at least a record of the way, if not the destination. The glove produced upon the vellum what it had produced in the Valley, a configuration that would not hold, a line that pointed, while my eye rested on it, in the seventh direction, and that rearranged itself the instant my eye moved, pointing then in the eighth, and the ninth, an infinity of impossible directions succeeding one another, none of them stable, none of them false, none of them, taken alone or together, the truth, for the truth was a direction the page could not bear, as the page could not bear the architecture of the Valley, and I closed the vellum upon the writhing infinity and knew that I had failed, that the account could not be closed, that the trail of Thal-Zhurath ended in unknowable space and that no record I could make would ever carry it to its conclusion.
Where did he go? I do not know. I record plainly that I do not know, I who pride myself on the closing of accounts. I have a surmise, and I will set it down, marked as surmise, for it is the nearest I can come to an ending, and even it is not an ending but only a deeper opening of the dread.
I surmise that he was, by the end, too far unmade to return. I catalogued, you will recall, the four ingredients of the satchel, and concluded that they were not tools but stages of a transformation, that to bear the satchel was to become, ingredient by ingredient and not-night by not-night, a creature of the place-between. By the seventh night Thal-Zhurath was very far along that transformation; Bracca smelled it on him, the smell of a thing crossing over and not coming back; he had become, in large measure, kin to the very dark he hunted. And I surmise that when the deed was done, when the breath was taken, the made world could no longer hold him, that he had become a thing that belonged to the seventh direction more than to the six, and that the door at the center of the absence opened to him as a door opens to one who has the key, and that he went through it not as a captive dragged but as a thing returning to the country of its new nature, the way a fish, long held in a failing pool, slips at last into the sea it was always meant for.
And I surmise, further, and this is the surmise that will not let me rest, that he is not dead. Death is an ending, and the made world allows it, and I could close the account if I could record a death. But the place where day ends and night begins is not a place where death occurs, for death is a thing of the made world and that place is unmade, and a thing that goes there does not die, it persists, in some condition my faculties cannot frame, and Thal-Zhurath persists, I am persuaded, persists somewhere along the seventh direction, bearing the satchel, bearing the last breath of the dark sealed within it, walking a country that has no surface and no record, neither living nor dead, a hunter passed forever into the dark he hunted, and the not-knowing of his condition, the impossibility of recording whether he suffers or is at peace or is even, in any sense the made world would recognize, still himself, is the wound that will not close.
This is the unfinished dread, and I have come to understand, making this entry, that it is a worse thing than any finished horror. A finished horror can be borne; one sets it down, closes the account, carries the weight of it as a known weight. An unfinished horror cannot be set down, for there is nothing to set; it remains forever open, a question with no answer, a trail that runs off the edge of every page into a direction the page cannot hold. I will carry the open account of Thal-Zhurath to whatever end my own long existence finds, and it will never close, and I, who close accounts, who have closed ten thousand accounts, who built my endurance upon the closing of accounts, must endure the one account that will not be closed, the mystery that cannot be solved, the trail that ends in unknowable space.
We climbed back up out of the hollow, the three of us who were left, into the thinning grey, and the silence began, faintly, to give back the world’s deep hum, for the Beast that carried the silence was gone, gone with Thal-Zhurath into the seventh direction, and the country around us was becoming, slowly, an ordinary country again. But I did not feel the relief the others may have felt at the return of sound. I felt only the open account, the unclosed entry, the dread that has no ending, and I knew that the tale I had been cataloguing did not have the shape a tale should have, did not resolve, did not conclude, but only stopped, at the lip of a hollow, with a trail running off into a direction no record can follow, and a question hanging in the unmade dark that I will ask forever and never answer: where did he go, and what is he now, and is the door he passed through closed, or does it stand open still, in the place where day ends and night begins, waiting.
Segment 30:
What Chases You in the Dark
As told by Lirelle Ashthorn
So it ended, and it did not end, and I am the one left to tell you that there is no ending, only a place where the telling stops because the teller can carry it no further. We climbed up out of the hollow, three of us, where five had set out and six had left the camp, and the silence gave back the world’s deep hum a little at a time, and the country became an ordinary country, and we walked out of it the way you walk out of a grave you have dug for someone else, slower than you went in, carrying nothing and everything.
Thal-Zhurath was gone. Into the dark, into the seventh direction the scholar could not name, satchel and all, the prize and the bearer vanished together along a path no record could follow. And I will tell you the thing I felt when I understood he had gone, the shameful thing, the true thing, for I have told you only true things and I will not stop at the last. I envied him. The dark had refused me on the sixth night, turned away from me because I came too willing, and it had taken Thal-Zhurath, who came bearing it, who had become kin to it, who walked through the door I had stood before and been denied. He went where I had longed to go. He passed into the shadow I had offered myself to and been found wanting for. And I climbed up out of the hollow alive, and unwanted, and carrying the one thing the dark had left me, which was the longing, the longing with nowhere now to go.
For the satchel is gone. I cannot crave it any longer; it went with him into the unnameable dark, the thing I wanted and was kept from, gone past all wanting now. And the Beast is gone, the thing I loved and offered myself to, sealed in the satchel, gone with the satchel, gone with the man. The two great hungers of my life, the dark and the vessel that held it, both passed beyond my reach in a single night, and I should be free of them, a sensible soul would say, free at last, the cravings carried off into a country I can never follow. But I am not free. That is the thing I have learned, climbing up out of that hollow, the thing I set down now as the closing of this tale and the moral of it, mine, not the gentle morals the old tellers give but the harder one the dark taught me.
The longing does not need its object. I had thought it did. I had thought I craved the satchel, the dark, the wind that would not blow, particular things, and that if the things were taken from me the craving would have nothing to feed on and would die. The things were taken. The craving did not die. It turned, instead, and looked for new shadow, the way a flame turns and looks for new fuel, and I understood, walking out of that grey country, that I had been wrong my whole life about the nature of my own wanting. I do not want the dark. I am the wanting. It is not a hunger I carry; it is the thing I am, the storm that needs no particular cliff to break against, only some cliff, always some cliff, forever some cliff, and when one is taken from me I will find another, and the finding will never end, for the storm does not end while there is breath in the thing that is the storm.
And here is the harder truth still, the one that has haunted me since the hollow, the one I would set in the heart of every wild soul that reads this so they might know it before the dark teaches it to them as it taught me. I had thought myself the hunter. We all had. We went out, five and then four and then three, the hunters of the grey land, in pursuit of the thing that could not be tracked, and we called ourselves the pursuers and the Beast the pursued, and we were wrong, every one of us, from the first night to the last. I see it now. The Beast did not run from us. It lay in the hills and let us come. It walked behind us at the edge of the light. It took the boy who went out to it. It turned its black eyes on Thal-Zhurath and drew him in. It was never the hunted. It was the hunter, all along, patient as the dark is patient, and we were the prey that came to it, walking, prayer by prayer and step by step, into the jaws of the thing we believed we chased.
The shadows hold both the hunter and the hunted, and they are the same. That is the moral, and it is not a comfort, and I will not dress it as one. What you chase in the dark is already chasing you. The longing you carry toward the shadow is the shadow’s longing reaching back through you, and the pursuit you think is yours is the dark drawing you home, and there is no telling, in the end, which of you began it, the wanting soul or the wanted dark, for they meet in the middle and become one thing, and the one thing has no name, and it is what I am, and it is what the Beast was, and it is what Thal-Zhurath became when he passed through the door.
I should be afraid of this. A sensible soul would be afraid, would resolve to want nothing ever again, to stay where she is put, to live the safe grey years and let the longing die of starvation. I am not afraid, and I will not resolve it. I have stood starved on the slate hill and offered myself to the abyss and been refused, and I have walked out of the hollow alive with the longing intact, and I have learned that the longing is not my affliction but my self, and a creature does not resolve to stop being itself. I will carry the longing forward. I will find new shadow. I will go on being the storm, breaking against whatever cliff the world sets before me next, wanting, always wanting, knowing now that the wanting is the dark reaching back through me and not caring, not caring, for the alternative is the flat grey peace that would unmake me, and I told you long ago, in the Valley, that I would never give the quiet a thing.
I have not changed. That is my defiance, and I fling it now at the end of the tale the way I flung my words at the silence that ate them. The dark took everyone. It took the boy, and it took Thal-Zhurath, and it broke Ysmir who hears it still, and it taught the scholar an account that will not close, and it wore Bracca’s hardness down to a grief he carries unspeaking. It touched every one of us and changed every one of us, and it turned away from me, refused me, left me unchanged, the only one it did not want, and I have decided, walking out of the grey country into whatever comes next, that I will make the dark’s refusal my freedom. It did not want me. So it does not own me. So I am the one soul that walked into the shadow and out again still wholly herself, still wild, still wanting, still the storm, and I will carry the tale forward into whatever shadow waits, not as a warning, though warning is the use the cautious will make of it, but as a song, a song for the wild, that the dark is real and it hunts us and we are drawn to it and it to us, and that to know this and go on wanting anyway, eyes open, unafraid, is the only freedom a thing like me has ever been offered or ever will.
The hunters are scattered now. Bracca goes back to the grey land, what is left of it, to lead the few who remain and keep them alive, the going-on that is the deepest thing in him. Ysmir goes I know not where, carrying his bell that will not still, hearing the whispers that did not end when the Beast was sealed and gone. The scholar goes to his catalogues with the one entry he cannot close. And I go forward, alone, the bearer not of the satchel but of the longing, into the shadow, toward the next dark, the next cliff, the next thing wilder than myself that I will chase and that will chase me, until at last some shadow takes me, as Thal-Zhurath was taken, through the door where day ends and night begins, and I will go, when it comes, the way I have always wanted to go.
Toward.
Not away. Never away. Toward the dark, eyes open, unafraid, wanting it still, knowing it hunts me, knowing I am perhaps already its, and going anyway, gladly, for that is what I am, and what I am does not end while the breath is in it, and beware, all you who read this and feel the same wild stirring, beware and take heart both at once, for what you chase in the dark may already be chasing you, and there is no escaping it, and I, for one, would not escape it if I could.
The tale stops here. It does not end. Somewhere along the seventh direction a hunter walks with the dark sealed on his back, and somewhere in the grey world a storm walks looking for its next cliff, and the shadows hold us both, the hunter and the hunted, and we are the same, and the hunt goes on.
THAL-ZHURATH THE UNMADE
Physical description: A tall, gaunt humanoid whose skin holds the wet grey sheen of slate left in rain. His eyes are filmed over in a milky white, for the light was lost to his people long ago, yet he turns his head toward unseen things with terrible certainty. His fingers are long and many-knuckled, and his hair drifts about his skull like black smoke that has forgotten how to rise. He wraps himself in hide that drinks the lamplight rather than reflecting it.
Overarching personality: Patient as erosion, fatalistic, and bound wholly to the pursuit. He believes the hunter and the hunted are a single thing wearing two masks, and he carries this knowledge without grief. He speaks rarely, and when he does, it is to mark a truth rather than to converse.
Accent and dialogue mannerisms: Archaic and formal, with inverted syntax and the older pronouns. He says “thou seekest” and “it came to me in the hour of weeping stars.” His cadence is slow, weighted, fond of triple repetition, and he answers questions with proverbs rather than facts.
His five items:
- The Hide of the Unborn [#4471]
- Slot: Chest
- Skills gained while openly worn: +2 Stealth, +1 Survival
- Passive magics: drinks ambient light so the wearer casts no clear silhouette in dim conditions; muffles the sound of cloth and movement; the wearer leaves no scent trail for one hour after donning it.
- Active magics: as an action, fold into shadow to gain heavy concealment until you move or attack; as an action, exhale the cold of the hide to extinguish all open flames within ten feet.
- Tags: Shadow, Stealth, Concealment, Leather, Magical, Silence, Scentless, Nightborn
- The Eye That Sees Without Seeing [#1208]
- Slot: Eye
- Skills gained while openly worn: +2 Perception
- Passive magics: grants darkvision in shades of grey; reveals the faint thermal ghost of any creature that passed within the last minute; the wearer cannot be blinded by sudden light.
- Active magics: as an action, perceive the residue of motion as glowing trails for ten minutes; as an action, lock sight upon a single creature and know the direction of it for one hour even through walls.
- Tags: Darkvision, Tracking, Perception, Eye, Magical, Trail, Pursuit
- Whisper-Wraps of the Soundless Step [#9034]
- Slot: Foot
- Skills gained while openly worn: +2 Stealth
- Passive magics: footfalls produce no sound on any surface; leaves no print in dust, sand, or snow; ignores the noise penalty of brittle terrain.
- Active magics: as an action, walk upon shadow as though it were solid ground for one minute; as an action, redouble speed in darkness until the next turn.
- Tags: Stealth, Silence, Movement, Foot, Magical, Trackless, Shadow
- The Quiver of the Final Arrow [#6627]
- Slot: Back
- Skills gained while openly worn: +1 Survival, +1 Perception
- Passive magics: holds arrows that never rattle or clatter; arrows drawn from it are always perfectly balanced, granting steadier aim in low light; the quiver replenishes one mundane arrow each dawn.
- Active magics: as an action, draw an arrow of bound darkness that strikes silently and dazes a struck foe; as an action, loose an arrow that trails a glowing thread back to its target for tracking.
- Tags: Ammunition, Ranged, Precision, Back, Magical, Hunting, Silence, Ambush
- The Vial of the Moon’s Last Breath [#3390]
- Slot: Neck
- Skills gained while openly worn: +1 Survival
- Passive magics: the vial glows soft purple in true darkness, easing the wearer’s nerves; protects the wearer from natural cold; whispers a warning hum when a predator fixes upon the wearer.
- Active magics: as an action, release a breath of pale mist that masks the wearer’s scent and form for one minute; as an action, draw a single point of stored breath to steady the hand and gain advantage on the next ranged attack.
- Tags: Neck, Magical, Concealment, Cold, Warning, Lunar, Relic
YSMIR HOLLOW-BETWEEN
Physical description: A figure of translucent grey, the skin drawn so thin over the bone that the candle of a far room seems to shine through the cheeks. The eyes are wide, dark, and unblinking, and the lips move always, a half-second behind whatever is spoken, as though something else finishes the words. The body is barely warm, more a memory of a person than a person.
Overarching personality: Melancholic and obsessive, perpetually braced for a horror that has not yet arrived. Ysmir perceives more than is comfortable to know and cannot stop perceiving. There is devotion here, but it is the devotion of one who follows a sound they cannot name.
Accent and dialogue mannerisms: Ornate, breathless, and ridden with repetition for the building of dread, fond of the dash, the sudden break, the insistence that “I was not mad, I was never mad.” Phrases circle back upon themselves like a tongue worrying a loose tooth.
Ysmir’s five items:
- The Listening Bell That Has No Tongue [#7715]
- Slot: Neck
- Skills gained while openly worn: +2 Perception
- Passive magics: the wearer hears whispers of nearby intent before action is taken; loud sudden sounds no longer deafen; the bell trembles silently when a lie is spoken nearby.
- Active magics: as an action, ring the tongueless bell to project a wave of dread, frightening a single foe; as an action, attune the ear to a single distant sound and follow it as a guide.
- Tags: Neck, Magical, Perception, Fear, Sound, Divination, Warning
- Pallor-Mask of the Place Between [#2284]
- Slot: Mouth
- Skills gained while openly worn: +1 Stealth, +1 Survival
- Passive magics: the wearer no longer needs to breathe audibly; resists fear effects; appears to the dead and the dying as one of their own kind.
- Active magics: as an action, speak with the recently slain for one question; as an action, blur the face into featureless grey so none can recall the wearer’s appearance.
- Tags: Mouth, Magical, Undeath, Stealth, Fear, Memory, Spectral
- The Twin Rings of the Unquiet Hand [#5562]
- Slot: Ring (Left and Right, counts as the paired set)
- Skills gained while openly worn: +2 Survival
- Passive magics: the wearer’s hands never tremble in cold or fear; faint phantom fingers steady held objects; warns of unseen presence by a chill upon the knuckles.
- Active magics: as an action, summon a spectral grasping hand to seize or drag a small object at a distance; as an action, leave a lingering grip-print of dread upon a surface that frightens the next to touch it.
- Tags: Ring, Magical, Spectral, Fear, Telekinetic, Cold, Warning
- The Lantern of No Honest Flame [#8806]
- Slot: Hand (Left)
- Skills gained while openly worn: +1 Perception
- Passive magics: sheds a cold grey light visible only to the wearer; reveals invisible and incorporeal things in its glow; never gutters in wind.
- Active magics: as an action, flood a room with the false flame to outline every hidden door and seam; as an action, snuff the lantern to plunge a small area into magical darkness.
- Tags: Hand, Magical, Light, Detection, Spectral, Darkness, Concealment
- The Shroud-Cloak of the Long Vigil [#3147]
- Slot: Shoulder
- Skills gained while openly worn: +1 Stealth, +1 Survival
- Passive magics: the wearer feels no fatigue from sleepless watching; the cloak hides body heat from cold-sensing predators; trails behind soundlessly even at speed.
- Active magics: as an action, wrap fully in the shroud to feign death convincingly to sight and scent; as an action, draw the cloak’s edge across the eyes to gain a single vision of what passed in this place at the last dusk.
- Tags: Shoulder, Magical, Vigil, Concealment, Undeath, Divination, Stealth
BRACCA GREYPELT
Physical description: A great wolf-blooded avatar, broad through the chest, the pelt a stormcloud grey gone white at the muzzle. One ear is notched, both eyes are amber and steady. The teeth are clean. The body moves low and certain, and there is nothing wasted in it.
Overarching personality: Stoic, grounded, economical with all things including trust. Bracca measures the world by track and scent and the weight of a thing’s footfall. Loyalty, once given, is not discussed. It is simply done.
Accent and dialogue mannerisms: Clipped and plain, short sentences, present tense, no decoration. Says “Tracks are old. We go now.” Does not explain feelings; lets the silence after a sentence do that work.
Bracca’s five items:
- The Scent-Collar of the Old Trail [#4019]
- Slot: Neck
- Skills gained while openly worn: +2 Survival
- Passive magics: the wearer can isolate and follow a single scent among many; old trails remain readable for a full day longer; the collar tightens slightly to warn of approaching weather.
- Active magics: as an action, mark a scent into memory to track it across any distance for one day; as an action, mask the wearer’s own scent entirely for one hour.
- Tags: Neck, Magical, Tracking, Survival, Scent, Beast, Pursuit
- Greaves of the Long Run [#6680]
- Slot: Leg (Left and Right, paired)
- Skills gained while openly worn: +1 Survival
- Passive magics: the wearer tires far slower over long travel; gains surer footing on loose ground; landing from a leap makes no sound.
- Active magics: as an action, surge to double speed in a straight line until the next turn; as an action, plant the feet to become immovable against being pushed or knocked prone for one minute.
- Tags: Leg, Magical, Movement, Endurance, Beast, Stability
- The Fang-Bound Bracer [#2937]
- Slot: Arm (Right)
- Skills gained while openly worn: +1 Perception
- Passive magics: natural attacks strike a little harder; the wearer senses the heartbeat of the nearest living thing; wounds clot faster.
- Active magics: as an action, deliver a bite or claw that holds a foe gripped until they break free; as an action, let blood to heighten the senses, gaining advantage on the next Perception check.
- Tags: Arm, Magical, Natural Weapon, Beast, Tracking, Grapple
- The Plain Grey Pelt-Cloak [#5503]
- Slot: Back
- Skills gained while openly worn: +2 Stealth
- Passive magics: the wearer blends into wild terrain; rain and cold do not reach the skin; movement through brush is silent.
- Active magics: as an action, go still and become nearly invisible against natural ground until movement; as an action, shake the cloak to scatter a cloud of dust that obscures pursuit.
- Tags: Back, Magical, Camouflage, Stealth, Cold, Beast, Concealment
- The Hunter’s Whistle of Bone [#8172]
- Slot: Mouth
- Skills gained while openly worn: +1 Survival
- Passive magics: the wearer’s calls carry far without echo to give away position; nearby beasts read the wearer as kin and do not startle; the whistle warms to warn of poison nearby.
- Active magics: as an action, sound a note that calls a single charmed beast to the wearer’s side; as an action, pierce the air with a cry that briefly stuns and disorients creatures that hunt by sound.
- Tags: Mouth, Magical, Beast, Sound, Pack, Warning, Hunting
VORHAETH THE CATALOGUED
Physical description: A desiccated scholar of the undead, skin gone to brittle parchment that crackles faintly when he turns. The eye-sockets hold no eyes but a steady cold candle-glow, and the fingers are perpetually ink-stained though the ink long ago dried. He smells of dust and tallow and old vellum, and he carries himself bent, as though always reading.
Overarching personality: Pedantic, cautious, and quietly terrified of the truths he has catalogued. Vorhaeth records everything and trusts almost none of it, for he has learned that the deepest facts unmake the mind that holds them. He hedges. He footnotes. He fears the silence at the bottom of the page.
Accent and dialogue mannerisms: Verbose, parenthetical, given to antiquarian spellings and constant qualification. Says “It was, I am reluctant to record, a thing of wholly impossible geometry.” Interrupts himself to cite a source no one else can see.
Vorhaeth’s five items:
- The Codex-Monocle of the Forbidden Gloss [#7728]
- Slot: Eye
- Skills gained while openly worn: +2 Perception
- Passive magics: the wearer reads any script, however ancient or coded; sees the faint runes of enchantment upon magical things; recalls perfectly anything read while wearing it.
- Active magics: as an action, gaze upon an object to glean one hidden property of it; as an action, inscribe a glowing ward-glyph in the air that frightens the unlearned.
- Tags: Eye, Magical, Lore, Identify, Language, Divination, Antiquarian
- The Ink-Bound Glove of the Recording Hand [#1995]
- Slot: Hand (Right)
- Skills gained while openly worn: +1 Perception, +1 Survival
- Passive magics: anything the hand touches is briefly catalogued in the wearer’s memory; the glove never lets a held quill, vial, or tool slip; faintly warns when touching something cursed.
- Active magics: as an action, copy a page or surface-impression onto blank vellum exactly; as an action, smear a glyph of confusion that fogs the mind of one who reads it.
- Tags: Hand, Magical, Lore, Memory, Curse, Copying, Warning
- The Tallow-Crown of the Endless Vigil [#3361]
- Slot: Headwear
- Skills gained while openly worn: +1 Perception
- Passive magics: the cold crown-flame sheds reading light only the wearer needs; the wearer requires no sleep to study; resists effects that would erase or alter memory.
- Active magics: as an action, brighten the flame to reveal hidden text or secret compartments nearby; as an action, dim it to a guttering ember that conceals the wearer’s face and intent.
- Tags: Headwear, Magical, Light, Undeath, Memory, Detection, Concealment
- The Vellum-Wrap Mantle of Bound Pages [#6044]
- Slot: Shoulder
- Skills gained while openly worn: +2 Survival
- Passive magics: the mantle’s pages whisper relevant lore when a known creature draws near; protects the wearer from fire as the pages refuse to burn; steadies the nerves against dread.
- Active magics: as an action, tear free a page that becomes a one-use ward against a named creature; as an action, riffle the pages to release a swarm of distracting glyph-moths that obscure vision.
- Tags: Shoulder, Magical, Lore, Fear, Ward, Fire, Concealment
- The Reliquary-Ring of the Sealed Name [#8890]
- Slot: Ring (Left)
- Skills gained while openly worn: +1 Perception
- Passive magics: the ring stores one true name the wearer has learned and keeps it from being read by others; cools sharply when a stored name’s bearer is near; grants advantage on library research of stored subjects.
- Active magics: as an action, speak a sealed name to gain advantage on the next attack or save against that being; as an action, lock the ring to render the wearer’s own name unreadable to the Mind’s Eye for one hour.
- Tags: Ring, Magical, True Name, Lore, Concealment, Divination, Relic
LIRELLE ASHTHORN
Physical description: A wiry young woman, weathered beyond her years, with dark hair forever escaping its binding and eyes the colour of peat water. Her hands are scarred from bowstring and bramble. She stands as though braced against a wind no one else feels, chin lifted, jaw set.
Overarching personality: Passionate, willful, and haunted by a longing she will not name. She loves fiercely and resents fiercely, and she follows the hunt less for the kill than for the wildness of it, the way the dark calls to something dark in herself. She is the youngest of the five and the least willing to look away.
Accent and dialogue mannerisms: Moorland intensity, weather pressed into every sentence. Says “The dark wants me as much as I want it, and I’ll not pretend otherwise.” Speaks in declarations and accusations, given to comparing feelings to storms, wind, and frozen ground.
Lirelle’s five items:
- The Heath-Worn Boots of the Wandering Heart [#4456]
- Slot: Foot
- Skills gained while openly worn: +2 Survival
- Passive magics: the wearer never loses footing on moor, scree, or bog; cold ground does not numb the feet; the boots tug gently toward the nearest living trail.
- Active magics: as an action, run across treacherous ground at full speed without check; as an action, root the feet and draw warmth from the earth to shake off cold or exhaustion.
- Tags: Foot, Magical, Movement, Survival, Tracking, Cold, Wilderness
- The Bramble-Bound Bow-Bracer [#2071]
- Slot: Arm (Left)
- Skills gained while openly worn: +1 Perception, +1 Survival
- Passive magics: arrows loosed by the wearer fly truer in wind; the bracer thorns prick a warning when a hidden foe takes aim; minor wounds to the arm seal quickly.
- Active magics: as an action, loose a thorn-wrapped arrow that snares and slows a struck target; as an action, raise a brief tangle of living bramble from the ground to block a path.
- Tags: Arm, Magical, Ranged, Precision, Snare, Warning, Wilderness
- The Storm-Grey Shawl of the Open Moor [#6692]
- Slot: Shoulder
- Skills gained while openly worn: +2 Stealth
- Passive magics: the shawl shifts colour to match heath, stone, or fog; the wearer is unbothered by rain and wind; muffles sobbing, breath, and the catch of grief.
- Active magics: as an action, draw the fog itself close to gain heavy concealment outdoors; as an action, throw the shawl wide to summon a sudden gust that scatters dust and arrows.
- Tags: Shoulder, Magical, Camouflage, Stealth, Weather, Concealment, Wilderness
- The Locket of the Unforgotten [#3915]
- Slot: Neck
- Skills gained while openly worn: +1 Survival
- Passive magics: the locket warms toward a single person the wearer has bound to it; steadies the wearer’s resolve against fear and despair; glows faintly in true darkness.
- Active magics: as an action, sense the direction and rough distance of the bound person within a plane; as an action, draw on remembered longing to gain advantage on a single save against being charmed or frightened.
- Tags: Neck, Magical, Bonding, Tracking, Fear, Memory, Relic
- The Ashthorn Hunting-Knife [#8338]
- Slot: Hand (Right)
- Skills gained while openly worn: +1 Perception
- Passive magics: the blade never dulls and cuts hide and bramble alike with ease; hums softly when prey-blood is fresh nearby; resists rust and frost.
- Active magics: as an action, strike a blow that bleeds a foe, leaving a glowing trail of blood-scent to track them; as an action, drive the knife into earth to listen through the ground for footfalls within range.
- Tags: Hand, Magical, Blade, Tracking, Hunting, Survival, Pursuit
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