Act II — First Ground

Page 10 — The Forbidden

I know what prismatic means.

I have known it since before the four of them were in my life, and it has cost me things I will not write down. It is not a word you take up and carry. It is a word that takes you up and carries you.

Prismatic Dragons carry the power of several gods in one body, and the size to match. One god's power is a thing a body can keep. Two gods' power is a thing a body keeps for a time, and the time is short. Several — three, four, and a count I will not give — several gods' power in one body is a thing no body is allowed to keep. In the old world, that was a law the world kept longer than its gods.

The word prismatic was not in a book in the old world. It was a name in a book, and the names in the book did not cost anything. Here the word is not in a book. Here the word is the color in the seam — the color the thing that broke this coast did not take back.

I looked for the shape first. A prismatic is a body, and a body leaves a shape: the claw, the burn, the mark, the print. A shape is a story a thing tells about itself after it is gone. I looked on the broken line with my eyes, and the eyes found no shape. I looked with the hands. No shape. I looked with the craft; the craft does not look at the rock, it looks at what is under the rock, and the craft found no shape either.

The proof is the color. A shape is a thing that was left. A color is a thing that is kept. The thing that broke this coast did not leave it a mark. It gave it a color, and the old world's weapons never did that. The old world's weapons took. The taking was what the old world understood. The wound is not a thing left on the rock. The wound is the color the rock keeps.

I said it to the four of them.

We were at the line where the water comes in, in the dark. The fire was between us and the water. I said it in the plain voice, because the four of them build on what I say:

This coast was broken by a prismatic. Prismatics are forbidden here. And the forbidding is not a law the world made. The world is the forbidding.

I said the four sentences, and the four sentences stood in the dark, and the dark did not answer them. I do not say the last two again. I say them once, and the world hears them once, and the hearing is enough. The fire burned. The five of us were around it. The dark came in from the water and went over the fire and did not take it.

Wreckreate said the only thing that was left to say.

He had not come back from the water when I spoke. The three paces had become a standing, and the standing did not keep him from what I said. He spoke when the last sentence had stood in the dark and the dark had not answered.

Then we are not the first to be dropped here.

He said it flat. He had finished the argument somewhere in the three paces between the water and the rest of us, while we were still standing in the last sentence. He was waiting for the rest of us to catch up.

The four of them did not answer him. Rumzuck's hand stayed on the boss, and the staying was his answer. Smackage said nothing; he had not said anything since the second morning, and the silence was his own kind of reading. Zahlia's face came down from the sky for the first time since the impact, and she looked at Wreckreate, and looked at me, and looked at the fire, and the looking was the question she did not ask.

I caught up. A line of people catches up one at a time when the front has walked into a room they did not know was there. Not all at once.

It meant more than the sentence said. Not the first to be dropped here: others had come through the white, and the white had let them through, and they were not here. I thought about it in the dark. I do not know what the world does to the ones it takes. I know what the world does to the fire, to the sound, to the words. I have been keeping a list, and I have not added a name to it yet, and I will not add one tonight.

The five of us stood on the four sentences. The first was the proof. The second was the law. The rest I have said once, and I have said them once. The fire carried us through the second night to the third morning, and the third morning was wood.