The Sundering

It began with a single star.

It was among the first, one of Orrun's oldest, set in a ring of gold at the heart of the lattice. Kharn loved it above all others, and none knows why. Perhaps because it was the first thing he ever held. He kept it in the vault of his chest for an age, unchanging and perfect, and its light rose through his frozen beard onto his closed eyes.

Sethe could leave nothing as it was. She reached into the ice and turned it.

She meant no harm. She never meant harm. The star began to age, as all things she touched began to age. It burned brighter, then redder, and then it burned out.

It was the first star to die. Kharn opened his eyes.

What followed was not at first a war. It was worse: two true needs, each pressing with all its strength, and neither able to yield, for yielding was not in them.

Kharn held. Where he had held one star, he now held a hundred, then a thousand. His frost crept across the lattice and stilled it. Rings ceased to turn. Light halted between stars and hung there. Whole reaches of creation froze exactly as they were, that nothing in them might be lost again.

Sethe could not bear it. A thing that could not change was a thing already dead, and he was killing the cosmos to save it. She came against him and bound him in her coils and turned him. The ice of his shoulders aged and split and fell away. He rose from his knee for the first time since his making, and his chained fists came down upon her, and the sand of her hair burst outward in storms the size of worlds.

Orrun came between them. He did what he had always done: he drew a line. He brought his rod down between the two, and the line of gold split creation, this side yours, that side yours, exact and fair.

Neither stopped. A line cannot settle a need. Orrun had never understood this, and he did not understand it now. So he drew another line, and another, and their struggle tore through every one.

Vael lit all of it. She lit Sethe and she lit Kharn and she lit the breaking rings, for she could not stop shining, and she could not choose for whom she shone.

There was no one to decide. Creation had never needed a decider. There had never before been two answers that could not both be true.

The golden age broke. Rings cracked and fell from the lattice. Stars were torn from their places and flung into the dark. The roads of light guttered out, one by one.

And at the root of everything, the Lack felt what it had never felt.

Fear.

It had drawn light out of nothing, and edges out of light, and time and lasting out of edges. Now it saw all of it breaking, and understood that what had come from nothing could return to nothing.

That fear was a need. Let me not go back. It was the oldest need there had ever been, the shape of the Lack itself turned inside out.

What is needed enough becomes real.

It was answered.

The Hollow has no likeness to record. It is a shape cut out of the world: tall and thin and stooped, long-armed, its small head bowed. It has no surface, no face, no light. To look upon it is not to see something dark. It is to see where things stop.

It is the dread of nothing, given form, and like every answer it mirrors the need that made it. It does not destroy. It unneeds. What it touches is forgotten, and what is forgotten fades, and what fades is gone as though it had never been.

It touched one of Orrun's rings, and the ring did not break. It was simply not there, and none could remember where it had hung.

Vael saw it first.

She had been the first answer to the first nothing, and she knew its face. She understood that all they had made was about to be unmade, not by war, but by forgetting.

So she did the only thing she knew. She shone.

She turned the whole of herself upon it. All her existence she had given without choosing, and now, for the first and only time, she chose. She poured out everything she was, the star in her chest flaring white, her porcelain splitting and falling away in burning shards, her crown of rays breaking outward, until the whole torn cosmos went white.

The light reached the Hollow, and stopped at its edge.

She shone harder. It was the only answer she had.