There was a place high on the shoulder of a mountain where a boy, an old man, and a pregnant woman knelt and observed as another man, a scarred grotesquerie, convulsed and voided his bowel.
Perhaps it was real—a real place—but the fractions, who were legion, who rutted and rampaged through the black, did not care, could not.
Too many cuts. Too many divisions of skin.
Run was a rule.
Hide was a rule.
Know was a rule.
Desire was a following.
Existence was a heap.
One hundred stones, too round to lock one into the other. Rounded like thumbs. Those on top warm for sunlight, like lobes or lozenges of living meat between the fingers. Those below chill, like the lips of the dead. Eyes scanning the coniferous gloom, isolating the ink of avian shadows. One hundred throws, arm snapping, sleeve popping, hand flicking … A buzzing line, comprehended more in after-image than seen, spearing through the seams between branches.
Ninety-nine birds struck dead. Numerous sparrows, doves, and more crows than anything else. Two falcons, a stork, and three vultures.
“Killing,” a fraction explains to the wondering boy. “Killing connects me to what I am.”
And what are you?
“The Survivor,” another fraction replies, and yet another registers the network of scar tissue across his face, the tug and tension of unnatural compromises.
“The Heaper of the Dead.”
There was more horror than concern in their faces when his eyes fluttered open. The boy especially.
The Survivor drew a sleeve across his hideousness, looked to him, his son. The Legion-within howled and clamoured, stamped and spit. Only now did he understand …
Ignorance. Only ignorance had sealed the interval between them. Only blindness, the wilful idiocy that was worldborn love. A fraction relives the flight of the Brethren before the thunderous onslaught of the Singers. D?nyain leaping before billowing geometries of light, fleeing into the mazed gut of the World, hunted by stone-cracking words, utterances, the violation of everything they held to be true. D?nyain do not panic. D?nyain do not reel, broken and bewildered. And he yet he had found himself in the nursery without thought, scooping up this very babe without thought, the one that smelled of him, of Anas?rimbor, the most promising of the Twelve Germs. He clutched this wailing burden to his breast, this impediment, without thought, as if it were no less a fraction of his own soul, a part that had wandered …
Zero. The difference that is not a difference. Zero made One.
He had survived. He, the one burdened, the one tasked, the one who refused to illuminate the interval between him and his son. The fractions of the D?nyain had been sorted, and he, the least able, the most encumbered, had been the one Selected … the Survivor.
He who had refused to know … who had embraced the darkness that comes before.
The boy clutches his tunic with both hands, hale and halved. He cannot help himself. He is defective.
And so it was with the Absolute. Surrender. Forfeiture. Loss … At last he understood what made these things holy. Loss was advantage. Blindness was insight, revelation. At last he could see it—the sideways step that gave lie to Logos.
Zero. Zero made One.
The Eye watches. Approves.
He gestures to the boy, who obediently comes to him.
He does not speak for a time, electing instead to gaze across the crumpled condensations of earth, dark beneath the silvering arch of the sky. They have finally come to the end of the mountainous throw and steep, the terminus of tyrannical ground. The trackless forests below were just that, trackless, demanding judgment, decision, for being so permissive. Only one scarp remains, one last perilous descent.
The wind is warm with the dank rot that promises life, with the taste of surging green.
It will be better there.
“What is it?”
“Things …” he murmurs to the panorama, “are simple.”
“The madness worsens?”
He looks back to the boy. “Yes.”
He draws the hundredth stone from the waist of his tunic.
“This is yours now.”
The boy, the most blessed fraction, looks to him in alarm. He would deny the interval between them, if he could.
He cannot.
The Survivors stands, begins sprinting. He marvels at the magic that joins will to flexing limbs.
A cry, spoken in a tongue that even animals know.
The Survivor does not so much move as the ground runs out. But the leap … Yes. That is his.
That is his …
As is the yawning plummet, the drop …
Into the most empty arms.
So quickly …
The events that transform us slip …
So quickly.
The face, cut into all expressions, all faces.
Eyes gazing wet from mutilation.
Fixed upon something that runs as he runs, a place he can only pursue, never reach …
Unless he leaps.
The Eye understood, even if the woman did not.