Wherein are treated the deities brought into the world after the First Light, and the one that would not come.
The First Light being come into the world, as the foregoing book has shown, the other great Powers followed after; and the bringing of each is named a Crossing, for that the God is understood to cross from the undifferentiated deep of the Wellspring into the ordered world of known things. Every tradition agrees that the Crossings were wrought in the manner of the Dawnsong, by great and coordinated gatherings of voices and power, always anchored at the Shardspire, and always overseen by the early Luminarchs. In this the priesthood of Mythrael takes a quiet pride that I will not pretend to hide: for it was my order that kept the rite, and no God after the First Light entered the world but by a working that the Luminarchs prepared and governed.
Whether the Crossings were truly the several distinct events the traditions now describe, each with its own year and omens, or whether they were one long and messy labour that later hands divided into a tidy sequence, I cannot say with confidence, and I have come to doubt that anyone can. It is agreed that the Gods were made manifest in the dawn of the Age of Magic. It is agreed on almost nothing else, not the dates, not the omens, not even the order. What is consistent is only the pattern: voices raised at the Shardspire, the Luminarchs presiding, and at the end of each working a new divine presence in the world.
Let the reader hold one thing in mind through all this book, for it governs the age in which I write it. Since the Shardspire was shattered, no God has been sung or brought forth, and the consensus of every school I have read is that none can ever be sung again, the instrument of the Crossings being destroyed. The four Powers we keep are held to be all there will ever be. And of the workings of those Powers, only the least survive: the shaping of the Wellspring by mortal hands is gone, but a God may still grant some small answer to its faithful, and this divine working is now the only magic in the world. It is a candle where there was once a forge. But it is not nothing, and it is the reason a priestess may still, in this dark age, keep an office worth keeping.
Second among the sung Gods is Cyraeth, whom those who keep her name the Lady of the White Flower, the Turning, the Bloom and the Barrow, and She of Two Doors. Her Crossing is placed in the late Age of Magic, in a season when plague and famine lay heavy upon Rhaedwyn; and it is said, by those who keep her, that she was called precisely to answer that suffering, that where the First Light had given the world knowing, the world now needed one who could give it bearing, a Power to stand with mortals in the hour of dying. I set this account down as it is given, and I will not quarrel with the tenderness of it, for it is a true thing that her Crossing came in a time of great grief.
Of the plague itself the sources tell much and agree on little. It ran through the Great City of Lavellor, greatest seat of the kindreds then in the world and holding, the accounts say, some millions of souls within its walls and the country under them; and it wasted the body and took the dead by thousands. I give the figure as I find it and lean no weight upon it, for those who set it down loved the city and had no occasion to count it.
One Salvus Navarus, writing some three hundred years after, has it that nothing living was exempt from its wrath, that the kindreds and the beasts and the very plants withered alike, so that the wheat blackened in the ear and the vine died upon the wall. Contrariwise, a fragment of an account otherwise wholly lost, preserved to us only where a later hand thought fit to quote it, describes a swifter and a narrower thing: a sickness that took a body in days, that raised boils upon its victims, and that so fouled the river by which Holy Lavellor stood that the water ran dark, which the writer likens to oil. Upon one matter only do all surviving accounts agree, and I set it down as the whole of what I would defend: that the plague fell heavily upon the Holy City, and was not contained there, but grieved Rhaedwyn entire.
Her nature, where the First Light is sharp and blinding, is patient and relentless. This is the heart of her teaching: that life and death are not two rival forces but a single cycle, a turning of the Wheel, and that the same door is a door of birth on one face and a door of ending on the other. Her sign is a circle split into black and gold, the flower upon the one half and the grave-mark upon the other. The golden flower Cyrathis, which blooms even in the short dark days of winter, is held sacred to her; and it is from that flower, and so from the Lady, that this present age takes its very name, a fact of which those who keep her are not slow to remind those who keep other cults.
The teaching of the Lady turns upon two things that must be held together, for taken apart each is easily mistaken. The first is acceptance: that change, and loss, and death itself are to be received and not merely resisted, being the necessary turning of the Wheel. The second is legacy: that a life should feed something beyond itself, a child, a craft, a memory, so that in ending it is not wasted. From these it follows that she forgives much to those who let go rightly. It is told that a village which burns its own fields in retreat, that the enemy may not eat, is forgiven of her; but a village that hoards its grain while its neighbours starve is not, for that is a clutching against the turning.
The more esoteric who keep her hold that undeath without purpose is an offense against her, and the Dwarven doctrines are harshest here: the wights, they say, are not her servants but her disappointments, souls that broke their vows and fell out of the proper turning of the Wheel, neither living nor rightly dead. Contrariwise, they promise that those who keep their promises to the very end are met by the Lady at the ending and woven into the next Cycle of the world.
The compiler: I have set the Lady's doctrine down fairly, and I ask the reader to mark that I have praised where praise is owed. Her hatred of stagnation is a true and noble thing, and in that one matter she and the First Light stand shoulder to shoulder, for what she calls stagnation my god calls the sin of the shut eye. But I am a priestess of Mythrael, and I will not feign that the whole of her teaching sits easy with me. Acceptance. It is a beautiful word, and a dangerous one. The First Light does not teach acceptance; he teaches inquiry, risk, the refusal to let any grief stand unexamined. Where the Lady says receive the turning, my God says ask why it turns, and whether it might turn otherwise. I do not say she is wrong. I say only that the folk of this present age have grown very fond of a doctrine that asks them to bear rather than to seek, and that a people weary of the hard light will always love the gentler Power who tells them their weariness is wisdom. I have written that sentence three times and struck it twice. I let it stand now, and the Lady may forgive me at her door if I have judged her ill.
Third I set Aethros, named the Stormbinder, Lord of the Four, Shaper of Vapour and Stone, and the Roaring. His domains are the elements themselves, storm and sea, flame and earthshaking, and all raw physical power and the brute craft that masters it. His sign is a broken circle of four marks, for flame and wave and mountain and wind, set about an empty centre. The Luminarchate texts describe his Crossing as a time of violent omens: earthquakes, storms, and strange fires marked the days before his coming, as though the world itself convulsed at the labour of it.
Of these omens the later texts are lavish and the earlier are sparing, which is itself a thing worth marking. The oldest notice I have handled, a Luminarchate calendar-leaf that gives the Crossings in bare order with a line or two allotted to each, grants the Stormbinder's a single earthquake and says nothing further. The accounts written in the centuries after grow steadily richer: a fire that burned upon the sea without fuel; a peak of the Taurus that smoked for a year and was quiet before and after; hail out of a clear sky in three cities upon the one day; and, in the fullest telling, a night wherein every bell in Lavellor rang untouched. The stormtowers keep this last and love it, and I have heard it preached at a festival. I do not say the thing did not happen. I say only that a Power of storm and earthshaking will never want for storms and earthshakings, the hands that come after being always readier to furnish a God with portents than to remember what was actually seen.
Yet I would not have the reader throw out the whole catalogue with the embroidery, for there is a reading of it that I hold likelier than either the devout or the scornful. It is this: that the disorder was real, and was no sign at all. If the Luminarchs had indeed torn open paths into the Wellspring, as the next matter of this chapter must show they had, then earthquakes and strange fires and unseasonable storms are not the heralds of the Stormbinder's coming but the plain consequence of the labour that made his coming needful. The world convulsed; the convulsion was the reason for the calling; and later hands, finding the two set close together in the record and being devout, took the effect for the announcement. Nor should the reader wonder that the Luminarchs themselves did not set this down plainly, for a priesthood that has cracked the ground beneath a province would far rather record a portent than a fault.
And here I must set down the matter plainly, for it is the key to his place among the Powers. Aethros was called by the Luminarchs to a purpose, and the purpose was this: they had torn open paths into the Wellspring and loosed powers too raw for any mortal frame to endure, and they needed a God who could anchor that raw power into the elements, into fire and water, wind and stone, so that what they worked might take a shape a mortal body could survive. Aethros was that anchor. Where the First Light governs the invisible patterns of the deep water, Aethros governs the visible elements that answered when those patterns were worked. He is, in the truest sense, the strong arm of the sorcerous labour: the Power who made the working bearable, who caught the loosed lightning of the Wellspring and grounded it in a thing that would not unmake the one who called it.
The way of the Stormbinder is not the way of subtlety, and those who keep him do not pretend it is. He is called in thunder and drums, in bells and crashing waves and bonfires; those who serve him are oftener smiths and shipwrights and stormtower wardens than scholars. His nature holds destruction and creation together without contradiction: he loves to break things, and he loves equally anything that uses elemental power well. A forge, a kiln, a shipyard, an aqueduct, a storm-tower, anything that channels wind or water or fire or stone draws his attention and his favour. It is said, and I believe it, that a smith who understands heat and timing honours Aethros even if he never once speaks the name.
There is an honesty in this that I confess I admire, priestess of the sharp light though I am. Aethros asks no creed and keeps no secret doctrine; he is worshipped in the doing, and his blessing falls upon competence wherever it is found. Yet let the reader mark the shape of it: his is a Power that served the work of hands and the work of sorcery both. He is the anchor, the ground, the strong element that answered when it was called. He did not govern the calling. That was another's office.
Fourth and last of the sung Powers is Eryndar, named the World-Heart, the Deep Root, the Listener, and Father of Foundations. His sign is a single vertical line crossed by three short horizontals, for the layers of stone and root beneath the surface of the world. His domains are the world itself, stone and soil, deep roots, memory, oaths, endurance, and the slow change that outlasts all quick and shining things. He is the quietest of the four, and, those who keep him would say, the most pervasive; for where the others are called and answer, Eryndar is simply present, in every foundation and every buried thing.
But concerning his coming there is a dispute I cannot pass over, for it touches the very order of this book. The Luminarchate maintained officially that Eryndar was the last of the great Crossings, that he was brought fully into awareness by the Song, in the final days of the Age of Magic, to stabilise a world shaken by too much sorcery. Against this the keepers of Eryndar hold, and Berevald who is their most learned present voice has written at length, that he was never sung at all: that the great chants did not make Eryndar but woke him, that there was already a consciousness sleeping in the deep stone of the world, older than the Shardspire, older than the First Light, and that the Song only roused what was always there. The dispute is not settled, and I do not think it will be settled by any hand now living.
The compiler: I will be honest with the reader, because the First Light despises the coward who hides her unease behind other people's words. This dispute troubles me more than any other in the whole work. For if Berevald is right, if the World-Heart was not sung but woken, and was there before ever mortals raised their voices, then Eryndar is older than my God, older than knowing itself, and the whole order of this book, which sets the First Light first, is built upon a falsehood. I do not believe he is right. I hold with the Luminarchate: that Eryndar was the final Crossing, made aware by the light, and that a thing which sleeps without awareness is not yet a Power but only a possibility the same way that a raw block of marble is not a statue. The stone was there. The Listener was not, until the Song gave it ears. But I set down plainly that I hold this partly because I must, and that a wiser lamp than I might see further into the dark of it. Let the reader keep the question open. I have not been able to shut it.
The teaching of the World-Heart is simple to state and brutal to keep: hold your oaths, maintain what you build, and remember what came before you. He is invoked whenever a mortal builds, or swears, or remembers; and the foundations of cities and bridges and Dwarven keeps, and even of humble farmhouses, are sometimes sprinkled with earth and blood in his name. It is believed that he records oaths in the deep strata of the world itself, as a ledger records a debt, and that where too many oaths are broken in one place, the ground may at last rebel, and answer the broken word with subsidence, sinkhole, or quake.
Chief among the sins his keepers name is deliberate forgetting: not the honest ignorance of one who has never learned, but the choice to forget, the decision to pretend a promise was never made, or a crime never done. And here, as with the Lady's hatred of stagnation, I find a true kinship between his doctrine and my own, and I own it gladly. The First Light names ignorance a sin; the World-Heart names forgetting a sin; and these are near neighbours, being both a turning of the face from what one might have kept before the mind. I will only observe, a priestess of Mythrael to the last, that my god condemns the forgetting of truth, which is the higher thing, where the World-Heart guards chiefly the forgetting of deeds and debts, which is the lower. The kinship is real. The rank is not equal.
I come now to a matter on which no two temples in Eryndor will ever agree, and on which I must nonetheless take a position, for a work that showed the Powers in no order at all would be no mirror but a heap. The order I have kept in this book is the order of the Luminarchate, and it is this: the First Light first, as the coming of knowing without which nothing is shown; then the Lady, the Stormbinder, and the World-Heart, as Powers that entered a world already lit. And within those three I have set Aethros and Eryndar by their offices in the sorcerous labour, the one called to anchor raw power, the other called last to stabilise the shaken world, with the Lady set before them, in courtesy, as the elder of the three Crossings and the one whose flower names the age.
Let the reader understand that this ordering is disputed, and that the dispute is not idle. Those who keep Cyraeth, in this present age, would set their Lady first, and they have a strong argument, for the age itself bears her name, and it is her doctrine of bearing, not my God's doctrine of seeking, that the folk have taken to their hearts. The keepers of Eryndar, as the foregoing chapter showed, would set the World-Heart first, on the ground of his supposed antiquity. Each temple's order is an argument, and whoever reads the table of a mirror such as this reads, whether he knows it or not, the confession of the hand that made it.
The compiler: So let me confess it, and not be caught out in a false modesty. I have set my God first. I have set him first because I believe he is first, because Knowing must precede the known, and light the thing it shows, but I will not insult the reader by pretending that a priestess of Mythrael arrived at the primacy of Mythrael by some cold and disinterested reckoning. Those who keep Cyraeth order their works otherwise, and are no more liars than I. What I ask is only this: that the reader who holds another order should hold it knowing it to be an order, an argument, a thing chosen, and not mistake his own temple's table for the plain shape of the world. That much honesty the First Light requires of all of us, whichever Power we set upon the first line.
There remains one Power, if Power be the word, and my order disputes even that, which no temple sets in any order among the four, because it stands outside their number altogether. This is the Endless Night, and of it the whole remainder of this book must treat, for a mirror that showed the four sung Gods and passed over the fifth thing in silence would be that lie by omission, which is the worst lie of all.
The oldest cults of Rhaedwyn do not count the Endless Night among the sung Gods. They name it, rather, the one that did not cross, the presence that refused the call when mortals first raised their chants at the Shardspire. Where each of the four answered the voices and entered the ordered world, this one answered and would not enter; or heard, and turned away; or was called, and returned nothing but a silence that was somehow worse than no answer. Those who keep the First Light have a phrase for it, and I find no better: they name it an absence that learned to speak. The Darksworn, who serve it, name it otherwise, calling it the only truth that was not born from the Wellspring, but stands outside it. Which of these is nearer the mark, the following chapters will weigh, and none of them will settle.
Endless Night is a Rhaedweny title, and the most common, but far from the only one; for a thing so feared and so little understood gathers names as a wreck gathers weed. Across Eryndor it is called also the Unlit, and the Sleepless Void, and the Other Voice, and the Black Current, and the Devourer of Songs, and the Rest-That-Is-Not-Rest. The Dwarven fragments name it the Oathless One, which, from a people who record their very foundations in oaths, is as bitter a title as their tongue can frame.
As for what it is, thousands of scholars of Eryndor have worn out their lives in dispute, and their opinions may be gathered under three heads. The first: that it is a God like the others, one that heard the first great Song at the Shardspire and simply never answered, a Power that could have crossed and chose not to. The second: that it is no separate thing at all, but the shadow of the Wellspring itself, the part of the deep water that recoils from form, that will not be persuaded into pattern, and that is therefore not an intruder but an aspect, the underside of the very source from which the Gods were sung. The third: that it is an intruder from beyond the whole known order of things, older than the sung Gods, not bound by their rules, and native to no part of Eryndor's cosmology at all. Each opinion has its learned defenders, and each its texts, and I hold none of them proven.
Among the three opinions, the teaching favoured in my own order, held firmly by the Luminarchate in the late Age of Magic, is the second, though refined past what the plain word shadow conveys. I set it down here not as a thing proven, for I have proven nothing and the first chapters of this book have confessed how little any of us can prove, but as the reading my order holds and I find likeliest. The teaching is this. The Wellspring holds infinite potential, undifferentiated, formless, capable of becoming anything precisely because it is as yet nothing in particular. The sung Gods are the great persuasions of that potential into pattern, into differentiation: the First Light persuades it toward knowing, the Stormbinder toward the enduring elements, and so with each. But that which can be persuaded into form can also fall back from it; and the Endless Night is the name of that falling back, the Wellspring turned inward, tempted out of pattern and toward the undifferentiated stillness whence it came.
Understand what this would mean, if it is true. The Endless Night would be no rival God at all, and no intruder from beyond, but the standing possibility of unmaking that shadows every made thing, the pull toward the stillness where nothing hurts, because nothing exists as itself to be hurt. It would not have needed to cross into the world, because it was never outside it. It would be the world's own capacity to cease. And this is why my order holds it the deadliest of all matters, and why the First Light, who is the persuasion of the deep water into knowing, is understood to stand in the sharpest opposition to it of all the Powers: for the Endless Night would be precisely the un-persuasion, the temptation of all things back toward the dark from which the Song first called them. I believe this reading. I cannot prove it. I would not have the reader mistake my belief for the proof it lacks.
Whatever the Endless Night may be, the traditions agree closely on what it offers, and it is here that its danger becomes plain even to the unlearned. Where the four Gods each ask something hard, the First Light asks inquiry even through pain, the Lady asks that one bear and let go, the Stormbinder asks mastery, the World-Heart asks that one keep faith and remember, the Endless Night asks nothing at all. It offers release: the end of burden, the erasure of every limit, power without the cost of discipline. It offers a world where nothing binds forever, because nothing endures forever; where no oath need be kept, since the Wheel need not turn; where no truth need be sought, since there is at last nothing to know.
Set thus, the wonder is not that any mortal ever hearkened to it, but that any mortal ever refused. For every God's gift is also a weight, and there is no soul so strong that it has not, in some low hour, longed to set its weight down. The Endless Night is the voice that says the weight may be set down forever, and that the setting-down is not death but rest. That the rest is a rest-that-is-not-rest, that the release is the release of a thing that ceases to be itself, this the voice does not say, and the weary do not always ask.
The compiler: I end this book afraid, and I will not hide it, for the First Light does not honour a false calm any more than a false knowledge. I have written of the thing my whole order exists to stand against, and in the writing I have felt the pull of it, as I think any honest soul must. There are nights, and I am old, and my lamp is low, when the offer of the Sleepless Void does not sound like horror but like mercy. That is its craft. It does not come to us as evil; it comes as rest, to the tired, in the dark, in our own voice. The first book of this mirror ended with Virulan, who was the second strongest of all mortals and could not refuse it. I set his fall at the end of the light. I set this at the end of the Powers. Let the reader who has followed me this far understand that the two endings are one ending, and that the whole of the labour of the four Gods, and of my poor order, and of this cracked mirror I have spent my years to make, is the long refusal of a single, gentle, patient voice that asks only that we stop.
Return to the Table of the Rubrics
Here endeth the Second Book.