Chapter 6. Lira’s Book

The First Shadow

She wove herself into hundreds of worlds, before one of them answered with anything at all that differed from the even, indifferent silence of all the others.

It was not recognition — she would, much later, recall that moment in exactly those terms, so as not to confuse it with that other, true recognition that would come centuries after. It was a change in the quality of the silence. So subtle that she herself hesitated a long time before daring to believe she was not inventing it out of the sheer weariness of too long a waiting.

By then she had lost count of the worlds into which she had set a part of herself. Not because she did not count — counting in the Shimmer is easy, time does not tangle when one has no need to live through it, only to watch — but because the count had ceased to matter long before it passed the first hundred. Each new world received the same from her: a path that began with something small — a stone, capable of answering the touch of that single one who knew how to touch something and remain different after — and led further, step by step, to where, if he came, there would be something to learn.

She did not expect an answer at once. She knew — from the experience of all who had borne this name before her — that waiting would be long, possibly longer than her own Shimmer would last. But knowing does not cancel weariness, and the weariness, accumulating decade after decade without a single response, had begun, little by little, to make the silence itself resemble — and she knew how to recognize this, watching her own dying world — that particular silence that precedes not an answer, but a fading.

And then — in one of the thousands, in a world so poor, so scorched, that she herself, setting her first stone there, had for a moment doubted whether anyone capable of finding it could ever be born there at all — the silence changed.

Not with a sound. Not with an image. With a direction.

She had felt this so many times before — at the very edge of the childhood dark, in the room her mother would light a little brighter than usual — that she recognized the very feeling before she could have explained what was happening: as though the emptiness, which until then had been simply emptiness, had at once acquired a barely perceptible slope, a slight lean toward something that had not been there before.

She did not see a child. She did not hear a name he might not even have had at that moment — for the Stream does not always follow the straight line of time the way life does, and what she felt could have been not the birth, but only the echo of a birth, reaching her before the event itself. She felt a presence. Not a name, not a face — only that somewhere there, behind the many-layered, unbroken silence of that particular world, something had taken shape, capable one day of noticing her path and not passing it by.

She returned to that direction again — in a month, in a year, again and again, with the same caution with which one touches a barely healed wound, afraid that an uncareful move would wipe away the little that had managed to appear.

Sometimes the direction was silent, and she was afraid — not as she had been afraid of the dark as a child, but differently, deeper: with that special fear that is born not of a threat, but of the chance of losing what one has only just allowed oneself to hope for. Sometimes, on the contrary, it grew a little clearer, a little warmer — confirming nothing for certain, but also not letting her altogether give up the thought that she had not simply imagined it all for herself.

She could not call this recognition of the boy — because the boy, as she would one day meet him face to face, face to consciousness, did not yet exist. She called it, for lack of a better word, a shadow. Not a darkness cast by someone, but that faint foreknowledge that appears on the wall before the one who casts it has entered the room — a foreknowledge so early that the one who looks sees it first, before the sound of steps.

From that day on, she stopped spreading herself evenly among the thousands of silent worlds.

She went on setting a particle of care into each of them — she could not do otherwise, every world deserved a chance, and she did not know for certain that the shadow she had noticed would really turn out to be the one, and not another false hope of an exhausted Shimmer. But the greater part of herself, the deepest and the most patient work, she began to direct there — into that one world, where the desert burned its children before it let them grow, and where, if the barely perceptible lean of the silence was to be trusted, there would one day be born someone who would not be afraid to touch a found stone with bare hands.

She did not hurry that direction. She knew — too well she knew, from the years of being a student of a voice without a body — that to hurry a shadow meant to frighten it away before it took shape. She simply went on working — patiently, century after century — weaving into that one world not a single beacon, but a whole path, step by step, each next one a little further and a little more complex than the last, in case the shadow did one day truly come into eyes capable of finding it.

More centuries passed, before the shadow at last was born into a body — and Lira did not know of this at that very moment, because the birth of a child in a world cut off from the Stream does not make the kind of ripple that can be felt as clearly as the ripples of a world where every breath is answered in everyone at once.

She would learn of it later — not at the moment of his first breath, but at the moment when, still small, he first touched the stone in the dark of ruins, and her own light, long used to disappointments, would for the first time in almost a thousand years not go out, but tremble.

But long before that moment, long before the name she would keep more dearly than her own, she already knew one thing, simply, without proof, the way a mother knows about one who is not yet born, but is already loved:

It is you.

I will wait as long as it takes.

Only come.