Act I — The Crossing

Page 8 — Impact, the Shattered Coast

Black rock. Black sand. Kept air — the air that stays where it is put, the air of a world that has not decided to move yet.

The landing was not a landing. We came down like a stone dropped in a deep well. The old world had wells, and the wells had depths, and the depths had the patience to take a stone. The sound arrives before the stone does. We hit before the falling finished. In the old world a fall ends with a sound, and the sound is the body's part of it. Here, the ground took us without looking up.

We struck the broken shore of The Shattered Coast. The shore took us. The shore takes everything that comes to it. I will tell you the shore is the truest thing in this world, because it does not pretend to be anything that was not broken. The rock was the color of a word that has been said too many times.

I breathed the kept air on the first morning of the new world, standing on the black sand, my hands still open from the white, and it tasted of nothing. Not salt. Not the mineral nothing of a cave. The nothing of a thing that has never been anything — clean, empty, and patient.

The five of us on the black sand at first light.

I say the five, and I do not count, because the counting is the work of the third morning. I will say only that I looked. Five went through the happening, and five came out of it. I looked at the four of them, and the four of them were there. What sat down in my hand instead was the place in the shape where the sixth had been. The place was empty, and the happening had let it through with the rest of us. I have held shapes in my life that were lighter than they should have been — I held the shape of a city through a night I will not name, and the city came up short by a street — and the short sat in my hand the way a stone sits in a hand: warm, real, and not yet a word. I did not say it. I will say it when the counting is done.

The shore was the first ground of the new world, and the new world had already begun without us. It was not waiting. I have crossed into things that were waiting; the old world had doors that were waiting, and the waiting had a shape and a reason. This was not that. A world that has begun without you is a world you will have to join, and the joining is the work of the mornings after the fire.

There was a gull, or something with the shape of a gull, on the black rock at the water's line. It did not look at us — five beings from a world it had not heard of, in a sky that had not been its sky a moment before — and the bird did not turn its head. I was glad of it. A bird that looks at you is a bird that has counted you, and I did not want to be counted on the first morning.

Rumzuck was on one knee, his hand already on the shield's boss. He had been down before the ground stopped moving under him. His hand was on the boss the way a man's hand is on a door that he is not yet sure is closed. He did not look at the sky. He looked at the water's line, and that was all of him that morning: a man who looks at the water's line on the first morning of a new world has decided that the world will be taken from the shore inward.

Smackage was on the ground. Not kneeling this time — lying, with his cheek flat on the black sand and his palm flat on it. The ground here is not the ground he reads. The sand here is the inside of a shell, and the inside of a shell does not speak his language. He was listening to it with the whole of the ear, the way you listen to a language you have not heard before. He had not opened his eyes. The eyes will open when the ground is ready.

Zahlia had her face turned up at the sky. She was not looking at it. She had her face turned up at it, a flower at a sun it has not met — not toward, but not away. She asked nothing of the world that morning.

Wreckreate was already three paces from the water's edge, standing at the line the water makes on the black rock, his hands at his sides. The water here was the color of the sky, and the sky was the color of the rock, and the three of them were the only things that agreed with each other.

And me. I stood in the middle, with my hands still open. My craft had gone quiet in me. It had been quiet since the white — not silent; kept. A bell after the striking is kept, not gone, and my craft was kept. I held the shape of the story against the place in it where the sixth had been, and the place was empty. I did not give the place a name, because a name said on the first morning would be a name the world could hear, and the world has ears I have not yet met.

The air kept. I breathed it, and the new world and the five of us breathed it together. A world that breathes with you is a world that has not decided yet what you are to it.