Act I — The Crossing

Page 6 — The Crossing

The Veil tore. I have written that word a hundred times, and it is still the wrong word, but I will keep it, because it is the truest of the wrong ones. A tearing has a sound in every world that has ears. There was no sound. I checked for it, and the sound is not there, and I keep the place where it should have been.

I will tell you what I heard instead. I heard the ogre breathe. He was steady, steady the way a man is steady after he has finished an argument. He had finished it long before the tearing reached the white. I heard Wreckreate's lips move. He was counting. He counts before he reads, and the counting was for water he had not yet seen. I heard Smackage not move at all. I will not call him calm. He simply did not move, and a man who does not move in a tearing has already decided something. I heard Zahlia's breath go thin. Her breath goes thin when the air is about to be asked a question, and the tearing was about to ask one.

And I heard myself. My breath was not steady. It was the breath of a man holding a shape.

It was not a door. A door is a place where a world has decided to be crossed, and a door has a side: the outside that knocks, and the inside that does not. This had no side. This was a wound: the place where a world has been broken and has not decided what to do about it yet. A wound does not let you in. A wound lets you through.

I have looked at a hundred wounds, and a wound in a man is where the world has been broken in the man. This was not in a man, and a wound in a world is a different thing from a wound in a man. It had no edge I could put my hand on. I put my hand out once, in the white, and the hand found no edge. It had no depth I could measure, and a wound that has a depth is a wound the world has finished with, and this was not that. What it had was a place, and the place was the size of the five of us. A wound that is the size of the thing it is about to take has already decided. The old world never decided.

The old world was on one side of it. By the time we were at the place of the tearing, the old world was a shape behind us, and the shape was already the shape of a memory. The shape was the plain. The shape was the circle at the south rim. The shape was the dark that had come up out of the south, the last motion of the old world. And in the middle of the shape we were five, small, the way we had been six before the ground came. I have kept that smallness longer than I will say.

On the other side there was no world I knew. There was a world that had not been told. I read it as I read everything. It had no name, and it did not owe me one — a name is a thing a world takes from the man who gives it. It had no light, and a world with no light is a world the dark has not yet spent. And it had an air. That was what I kept of it, because a world with an air is a world that has already begun.

We went through it with the shape of the breaking, which is to say with no shape. I do not mean to be strange. I mean that when the world broke, we went with the breaking, and the breaking had no shape, so neither did the going. For the length of the happening, my body was in the white, and my body was in the happening, and my body was in the world that had not been told. I have been in three places at once a handful of times. A body that is in three places at once is a body the world has not finished with.

The ogre did not look at the wound. He looked at the five of us. His hands were on the grip, and he went through with the whole of his body, the way he walks. The ogre does not go through a thing. The ogre walks it.

I held the shape of the story. I held it as he had held us: low, even, without a color I could name. The shape was the five of us, and the empty place where the sixth had been. If I let go, the world would scatter us, and the white had tried exactly that. I held the empty place with the rest of them, and I did not let go.

I have crossed doors before, and a crossing that has a shape ends. Ours did not end. It finished, like a ward finishes, like the old world finished behind us. The finishing came without a sound. I just knew it. The white went thin behind us, and I did not see the old world move again. The black came up ahead of us, and I saw the new world move for the first time. And the five of us were in the middle of it — in the middle of the happening, in the middle of the wound, in the middle of the world that had not been told — and the middle is what the wound kept, because a crossing that does not keep its five is a crossing the world takes back.