For a moment, they stared at each other, Niren’s words bitter with foreboding. But then Eda smiled. “Thank you, Niren. I will treasure it.”
Niren smiled, too, swift and bright. She pressed Eda’s hand and, rising, left the room.
Eda sat staring at the illustration of Tuer’s petitioner for a long, long while.
She tried to tell herself that the marks on Niren’s brow were just shadows. They had to be. Because Tuer had sent her back—his fingerprints ought to have faded.
She touched the image of the god on the page and wondered what his petitioner had offered him and how high a price Tuer had demanded in return.
Eda shut the book and went to bed.
But she couldn’t sleep, the weight of Niren’s gift heavy on her mind. At last she got out of bed and brought the book over to the window, where moonlight flooded in, making the pages shine. Eda opened it at random, and began to read. The words leapt out at her. Devoured her. She couldn’t look away.
Long ago, when the world was young but not quite new, a man dared stand against a god, and the god struck him down. The man’s name was Tahn, and he wished to take a seed from the great Tree that had stood from the beginning and travel west with his brothers and sisters to plant a new Tree, and so help mankind to flourish and grow.
But the god, Tuer, did not want him to go, and so he slew him.
Death entered the world, darkening its edges, staining its joy.
And the god was haunted by what he had done. He had poisoned the world he was supposed to make beautiful and broken the people he was supposed to guide.
To atone for his sin, Tuer decided to seek the soul of Tahn, to bring him back to life and by so doing help to heal the world.
He prepared for a long journey, arming himself with Starlight and a sword made of Tree bark, forged in fire. He bound himself with Words of protection, and then he came out of his mountain and opened a door in the world.
He stepped through into darkness and strode a long way, shadows slithering over his feet. He had entered the void, the space beyond Endahr. But there was nothing to hold Tahn there, nothing for his soul to fix on. And so Tuer knew he was not there.
Long Tuer walked in the void, gathering it and binding it into a sphere that compassed the earth, so that it would catch any other souls that happened to perish before he could put an end to dying. And he named that sphere the Circle of Death. When he was finished, he made a door and stepped from the Circle of Death to what lay beyond.
And it was there that he forgot.
He forgot his name and his purpose. He forgot mankind and the Tree. He forgot about death and life and all other things.
Stars wheeled round him, swirling shapes and colors he did not understand. There were rivers of light and shining pools of a substance he had never seen. He wandered an eternity before he thought to look in one of the pools, and found what filled it up: it was memory. Memory of what had happened, memory of what was yet to be. Every pool teemed with it, and the memories reached up and pulled him under.
He saw all the ages of the world pass before his eyes. He saw its making and unmaking, saw his own death, saw all the lives of all mankind spinning out before him.
And he saw the soul of Tahn, shining like a star, dwelling in the realm of the One who made the world and existed outside of it.
And then he remembered his name and his purpose, and he stood and freed himself from the pool of memories.
With his sword and the light that blazed inside of him, he drew the memories from the pool and bound them all together. And he made a second sphere, and built a door out of it, and that he called the Circle of Time.
But he still had not reached Tahn or the realm of the One who was before all things. He had come to a nothing, a nowhere place that had less substance than the void.
He couldn’t see or hear. He had no form. He didn’t properly exist at all. He needed something to forge a pathway between the Circle of Time and the One’s dwelling place.
But what is greater than time? What can contain it?
He didn’t think of love, which would have led him straight to the realm of the One and then home again, for he had not experienced love in the same way as mankind.
But he had known sorrow.
And so he wove around himself a sphere of sorrow, large enough to encompass the Circle of Time, large enough to fill up all the space left in the universe.
But as he wove, the sorrow weighed on him, binding itself into heavy shackles around his ankles and his wrists. He built a door, but he could not bear to go through it. How could he go to fetch the soul of Tahn, drag him back through all the Circles to live again, when he was content in the realm of the One?
And so Tuer bowed his head and let the chains grow up around him like brambles.
