Before the first stone learned the weight of itself,
before the cold collision crowned the dark
and flung its burning wreckage into space,
I held the blueprint of this breathing ark;

a world that would not simply be, but yearn,
that would not simply turn, but ache in turning,
whose rivers would not merely run but mourn
the stones they left behind, forever burning

with the particular grief of moving water;
which is to say, with beauty. Which is to say,
I knew what I was making when I made it,
and made it anyway.

I have watched you take the ones you could not fathom
and press them into service of your fear,
watched suffering become a kind of anthem,
watched grief dressed up in vestments and called dear,

watched you open up the ground beneath your beloveds
and call the opening mercy, call it need,
watched you lay your necessary burdens
and walk away and call the walking freed.

Something stirs in everything you bury.
This is not a comfort I extend.
It is the oldest, most indifferent magic
of a world that has no interest in your end,

only in its own continuing;
the root that cracks the altar stone in two,
the vine that swallows monuments to kingdoms,
the sea that has no memory of you.

There are those who move across my surface
with their instruments and their immaculate grief,
who have learned to find in tragedy a purpose,
who press the flower and call the pressing relief,

who count their centuries like careful jewellers
appraising stones that are not theirs to keep,
who write down what they witness in their ledgers
and call the writing vigil, never sleep.

They are not wrong about the weight of sorrow.
A scale that reads correctly still reads true.
They are wrong about the shape of what comes after,
wrong about the hands the weight is carried through,

wrong about the vessel and the carried,
wrong about the story and its due,
wrong in the way that only the most careful,
the most devoted, can afford to be wrong,

which is completely,
and with great conviction,
and at tremendous length,
and for so long.

I do not hate them for it.
Hatred is the province of the young,
of gods still learning where their edges finish,
still surprised by what their making has become.

I have watched too many centuries unspool
to spend the watching angry at the thread.
I have only marked the depth of every furrow
their conviction carved beside their dead.

There is a love this world has always carried
like a coal inside a fist of stone;
that leaves no record and requires no witness,
that does not seek and does not wait to be shown,

that moves across impossible distances
the way starlight moves, indifferent to the cost,
arriving long after the source has guttered,
still warm, still true, not caring it was lost,

that holds a dying hand in a strange room
on a world whose name it barely knew,
that takes a grief into itself like rainfall
and carries it the way the deep earth carries dew;

downward, silent, patient as geology,
asking nothing of the surface it moves through.

I have watched this love since before love had language.
It is rarer than the elements that burn.
It does not know its own name when I speak it.
That is the very reason it can find

the things that cower from the light of reason,
the things the careful centuries have missed,
the name pressed into stone many times over,
the wound that every archive has dismissed.

Something waits beneath my oldest lantern.
Something that has learned the shape of chains
not from the having worn them but from deeper;
from the marrow, from the blood, from what remains

when everything the self once carried loosens
and only the essential is left whole.
It knows this room the way the sea knows salt;
as something it was never separate from at all.

I do not intervene.
I breathed this world and stepped away and watched
the beauty and the terror grow together
like two trees whose roots are so long interlocked

that cutting one means losing both.
I watched.
I watch still.
I have always only watched.

But I confess,
in whatever passes for confession
in a being made of everything at once,
that I have held my breath across these ages

longer for this story than for others.
That I have leaned, infinitesimally,
toward this particular unfinished question
with something that, in you, would have a name.

The stone remembers every soul it swallowed.

So do I.

And I am waiting,
with the whole of what I am,
to see if this time,
love is the exception
that rewrites the rule.

Penned by my hand on the 2nd of Daedalan, in the year 1007 AF.