The Silence

Before there were cities, before there were roads, before anyone thought to ask what a thing was for, there was the Silence.

It was not darkness, the old texts insist, because darkness is a thing and the Silence held no things. It was not empty, because empty is a shape and the Silence had no shapes. It was not cold, or still, or quiet, because each of those is a quality, and qualities must belong to something. The Silence was simply unwritten: a page so vast that no edge of it has ever been found, waiting for a hand that had not yet been imagined.

The scholars of Aurum spent nine centuries trying to describe it and agreed on only one other thing. The Silence was patient.

They did not mean it was alive. It had no will and wanted nothing. They meant that it was a direction, the way downhill is a direction. Whatever exists leans, very slightly and forever, back toward not existing. A wall forgets it is a wall. A road forgets where it was going. A rule, left alone long enough, forgets why it was made, and then forgets that it was made at all. Ages later the Wrights would give this pull a name, the Undertow, and spend every age of the world holding it back. But in the beginning there was nothing for it to pull on, so it simply waited.

How long it waited cannot be said. There was nothing to count with. The Chronicler likes to think that time itself had not yet been written, and that the Silence did not wait at all, but simply was, the way a blank page is.

Then, from nowhere, into the Silence, came a question.

It was not spoken, because there was no one to speak it. It did not echo, because there was nothing for it to echo from. It was simply there, the way a ripple might be there on a pond with no stone thrown into it.

What the question said has been argued over for as long as there has been anyone to argue. The common reading, carved over half the doorways in Aurum, is What if? The Chronicler has seen the oldest surviving fragment of the Book of Foundations, a sliver of black stone kept in a sealed vault that no longer exists, and believes the common reading is wrong. The fragment says, as near as it can be translated:

What is this for?

Everything that has been made since is an answer to that question. Some answers are better than others.

The question did not fade. The Silence, which had never had anything in it before, arranged itself around the question the way iron filings arrange themselves around a lodestone, and at the center of that arrangement a spark appeared. It was very small, and it was the color that would later be called gold, and it was the first thing that had ever been.

Around it, at a great distance, twelve shapes woke.

The Chronicler is careful with that word. They were not born. Nothing bore them. They were not made, because nothing yet existed that could make. They woke, as if they had been asleep inside the Silence all along and the question had simply called them by names they had not known they had. They were tall, and made of a pale light that did not cast shadows, and for a long while they did not move. They only listened.

Each of them heard the question differently.

One heard what is this for? and understood that every made thing must have a purpose, or it is only clutter waiting for the Undertow. Her name, when names came later, was Ilyth. One heard how should it be done? and spent the rest of his existence on the answer. One heard how will we know it is right? One heard what should it be called? One heard who will it serve? And one, whose name was Halvor, heard something none of the others did. He heard how will we keep it?

Twelve minds, twelve hearings of a single question. The Chronicler wishes to note, here at the very beginning, that this was not a flaw in creation. It was the first and best thing about it. No one of them heard the whole question. All of them together very nearly did.

They spoke for the first time then, to one another, and it was the first sound. They called themselves the Wrights, which in the oldest Script means those who answer.

Then they looked out at the Silence, which went on forever in every direction, and understood two things at once. They could fill it with anything they could imagine.

And it would try, patiently and forever, to take back everything they put there.