The Waking

The first person came down from the mountain on the third day.

They had stood upon the ridge beside her, looking out, and asked her nothing more, for she had no answer to the first question and they had not yet learned a second. Then the cold came down off Kharn's shoulders, and they shivered, and that was the first thing they ever learned about themselves: that they could suffer.

They went down. She did not stop them.

They walked the length of Kharn's arm, which was a ridge of granite a day long, and came down into a valley of ice. They walked out onto the iron plains, where Orrun's ridges ran straight as a drawn line from one end of sight to the other. They walked to the shore, and saw Sethe's sea, and it was grey and restless and had no end.

Everywhere they went there was nothing that looked back.

The world was beautiful, and vast, and wholly theirs, and empty. And at the edge of the sea, as the small sun went down, the first person sat upon the sand and wept, and did not know what weeping was.

Another.

It was not spoken. Like every need before it, it did not have to be. But it was the first need that had ever come from a heart, and not from the bones of the cosmos, and it pulled.

She felt it on the ridge.

She had felt every need since her making: the pull of the world, the long cold patience of the Hollow. She had never felt one like this. It was so small. It came from one body, sitting alone by the sea. And it was stronger than anything that had moved in the world since the Fall.

So she came down from the mountain, and stood upon the shore, and spread her six arms, and did again what she had done before. Stone first, then measure, then spark, then breath. Out of the wet sand, out of the iron underneath it, out of the light on the water, the second person rose.

The first person looked at the second, and stopped weeping.

That was enough. She did not need to make a third.

Sethe's breath was in them both, and Sethe's breath is change, and growth, and after. So it was that people did not need to be made any longer. They made each other. Children were born at the edge of the sea, and grew, and had children of their own, and the oldest of them grew grey and slow, and lay down, and did not rise. People learned to grieve by the shore, where they had first learned to weep.

And they spread.

Some went north, into the long valleys under Kharn's face, and lived among the ice. They were slow to anger and slow to forget, and they kept the bones of their dead in the walls of their houses so that nothing loved would ever leave. They called themselves the Held.

Some went out onto the iron plains and built their homes inside the fallen rings of Orrun, which lay half sunk in the earth, a mile across. They laid their fields out in squares, and their quarrels were always about where one field ended and the next began. They called themselves the Measured.

Some never settled. They went along the shore and onto the sea, and followed the weather wherever it led. They called themselves the Turning, and they buried no one, but gave their dead to the tide.

And some stayed in the open places, under the small sun, and made nothing to last, and gave away everything they had, and sang. They had no name for themselves. They were the warmest of all people, and the shortest-lived.

None of them knew the others' ways. All of them had all four gods inside.

It was in a ring of Orrun's on the plain beneath Kharn's face, on the longest night of the first winter, that the first fire was lit.

There was a vein in the rock there, running deep, that was warm to the touch even in the snow. A child found it. The child's mother struck the vein with a stone, wanting nothing but warmth, and a spark leapt out of it, white and gold, and caught in the dry grass.

It was a spark of Vael. It had been in the bones of the world since the Fall. It had been waiting, as she had always waited, to be needed.

The people of that ring gathered close around it, and for the first time since the gods had died, the night was pushed back by something that was not the sun.

Upon the ridge, far above, she saw it, very small and very far: one point of light in all the dark of the world.

She did not go down to them.

They did not know her. They had been born of the second person and the third and the thousandth, and none of them had seen her shape upon the shore. They saw a tall figure on the ridge sometimes, against the dawn, and did not know what it was, and made up stories. She let them.

She was not made to rule. She could not see what they were for, and she would not pretend to. She watched.

And she saw, before anyone, what their fires and their fields and their grief by the shore would bring. Every one of them held all four of the Elders, and so every one of them could need anything.

And they did. All of them, all the time.

What is needed enough becomes real.