Act I — The Crossing

Page 2 — The Threshold continues

The Threshold has no floor. No ground under it, no sky over it. A thing that has no floor does not stop when the ground stops, so we did not stop.

Below us — the word is a guess, and I keep my guesses in a separate place — the light thinned toward a color that is not a color. The color was going somewhere. I could not say where. I could say it was patient.

It was not motion as we know it. I know what a stone falling is: the stone gaining speed, the world getting smaller, the ground rushing up to meet the end of it. A fall has a bottom, and a bottom is a thing you can plan for. I have planned for bottoms my whole life. This was not that. There was no gaining of speed. There was no rushing up. There was only the white, and the smallness of the six of us in it, and the fact that we were not arriving.

It was closer to the way a debt settles. I have seen it happen in the old world: a man who could not pay, and a creditor who simply kept sitting at his table, patient as a well, until the debtor's own hands did the reaching. That is what the white did to us. No direction I could name. No speed I could measure. Only an arrival that kept not arriving. I do not know what the white was patient for. I will not guess at it, because the guessing is where the record lies.

There was a sound, or the memory of a sound. I will not decide which. If there was a sound, it was the sound a room makes when a door is opened in it and no one comes in — a low taking, a settling, the air of the room choosing to be thinner than it was. I have heard that sound in the old world, in the sanctums, in a room where a presence has been and is not there anymore. The new world has not cleaned up yet, either.

I kept my hands open at my sides, and I tried the craft a second time, in the old words. I asked the water to come. I asked the earth. I asked the air to move. I tried a third time, because a man will ask a thing three times before he admits the thing is not there. The white did not answer the third time either. They were not sleeping. They were not there, and I wrote it down as I saw it.

My craft was still in me. I will say that plainly, because it was the true thing in the white. The craft did not wake, but the craft was still mine, and its staying asleep frightened me more than the white did — a craft that does not wake is a craft the world has stopped answering. I did not look down to check for a floor. A man who checks for a floor in a place that has no floor has not yet admitted the place has no floor, and I had admitted it.

Where the six of us were, I will say as I remember it. Rumzuck was to my left, as he had been in the circle, and his hand was in mine. Zahlia was below him, or what passed for below in a place with no below, and she had not spoken since the old world went out under us. Wreckreate was reading the white with his eyes open, and I will not decide what he was reading, because I do not know what he was reading, and he did not say either. Smackage — I did not see Smackage. Not seeing him is what I have never been able to explain.

Rumzuck's hand found mine in the middle of the falling.

I am not saying this for the warmth of it. I am saying it because the ogre who has held the line in every fight I have ever known reached for my hand in the white, and reached it, and held. The ogre does not reach for a hand out of fear. He reaches for a hand to hold, and he does not spend it. His hand found mine with all of the body, not with the fingers. The grip was not a comfort — a grip written as a comfort is a grip not yet learned. The grip was a fact: the hand found the hand, and it was the only thing on our side in the white.

I held the ogre's hand. I will not say that I was glad, because glad is not the word. I held it with the whole of the craft in it. The ogre did not speak. He did not owe the white a word. He held, and the hold was the line.

The sound came again. The low taking, the settling, the door opened in a room where no one comes in. It was closer this time. My craft turned over once under my ribs, the way a sleeper turns in a dream. I looked for the ogre's hand in the white. The hand was still there. The six of us went on in it — not arriving, not stopped.

That is all I have for now. The white did not do the rest. Not yet.