Chapter 8. Lira’s Book

A Thousand Years of Silence

No one had warned her how long the waiting itself would turn out to be — not the work, not the making of paths, but the waiting itself, the empty space between one action and the next, in which nothing remains except one’s own thoughts and a silence ready to become anything, if one listens into it long enough and alone enough.

Work filled the centuries. Waiting filled everything else.

The first century she spent almost calmly — with that calm steadiness that comes to a person who still has an unimaginable amount of time ahead. She wove paths into world after world, returned to En-Ra’s memory, took it apart for lessons, built the lessons into stone. The shadow she had once noticed in the silence of a scorched world would sometimes grow clearer, sometimes vanish entirely, and she was learning not to be frightened by these disappearances — the way she had once, as a child, learned not to be frightened by the dark at the edge of the room.

The second century was harder. Not because the work had grown heavier — because she had begun to count. Not the years — that she could do without effort, time in the Shimmer does not tangle. She had begun to count what she had never counted before: how much was left to her before the limit of her own Hour, and how much of that limit had already passed without a single confirmation that the shadow for which she was working would ever become anything more than a shadow.

By the third century she understood: to count was a poison she was pouring for herself, sip by sip, because each count made the missing time shorter, and what she had done — insufficient.

She stopped counting. As far as that was possible for a consciousness that had nothing to do, except its own thoughts.

There were nights — if night was even the right word for what measured time in the Shimmer — when doubt would come not quietly, but all at once, with all its weight, and she would allow herself, for a brief moment, to ask the question she had carefully avoided all the rest of the time.

What if he is not there at all?

Not “if he is late” — with lateness she had by then almost come to terms, knowing the path required time, and time did not hurry for anyone’s hopes. If he is not there at all. If the world she had chosen — that very one, scorched, poor, which had seemed to her the only place capable of giving birth to a real hunger — simply did not produce the one she was looking for, because hunger killed before it had time to teach anything. If the shadow she had once noticed had been only a coincidence, a game of an exhausted consciousness that had deceived itself out of the need to find at least something to hold on to.

She would remember then the Mirror of the Future shown to her on the day of her Initiation — the three pictures, of which she had chosen the third not whole, but only as a direction. What if the direction led nowhere? What if she would one day simply thin out, the way the Shimmers of less stubborn, less obsessed Architects before her had thinned — meeting no one, spending a thousand years on a voice that would never answer?

In such moments she did not call him. Every time the temptation drew close — to cry out directly, with all the strength she had left, spitting on every lesson she had drawn from En-Ra’s memory, spitting on the fact that a direct call could not reach a world without hearing — she would force herself to remember: one desperate cry, thrown not according to the rules she herself had worked out at the cost of centuries of trial and error, would not bring him any closer. It would only spend the little she had left, in vain, leaving the path unfinished just when he might almost have reached its end.

She would tighten — if the light she was could tighten anything at all — and wait on.

Closer to the end of her own Hour, when by every measure known to her from the history of the Architects before her, no more than a few years remained, the shadow she had so long been watching over began to give the first, barely distinguishable signs of life.

She felt touches on the stone in the dark crack of ruins — weak, childish, full of fear and yet not drawing back. She felt the eighth statue in the Garden of Stones growing warm under someone’s palm. She felt an echo from under the collapse of the Tomb of the First Ones.

And still — this was not enough.

Each touch was proof that someone was there, that the path was finding its traveler. But none of them was yet what she had been working a thousand years for: not an echo, but an answer. The child touching her stones could have been simply a child, who had happened to wander where he should not have — frightened, curious, but not necessarily that very voice capable, one day, of speaking to her directly.

She counted again, though she had promised herself not to. By her own measures, by the limit she felt in her own thinning cloth, no more than a few years were left — and she had only this: weak, childish touches, not enough to be sure, not enough to let go of fear altogether.

This was the closest she had ever come to despair in all the thousand years of her Shimmer — not in the first dark centuries of uncertainty, but precisely now, at the very edge, when almost no time was left, and the proofs were still too fragile to bear the full weight of hope.

Perhaps it is not enough, — she thought, in those few years that, as it seemed to her, were still left to her. Perhaps I have managed to grow in him only fear, and not a voice. Perhaps I will thin out before he learns to speak, and all that will be left of me is a path without anyone to walk it to the end.

She did not let herself stay in this thought for long. Every time she caught herself in it, she would return to the work — not because the despair had passed, but because the work was the only thing she could still offer in place of a certainty she did not have.

And then — not in a rush, not all at once, but in such a way that she recognized the change at once, with all that she still was — the shadow came to where it had not come before. To the place with which she herself had frightened herself more than with anything else in the world — to the Temple of No Voice, where the silence was so complete it broke weak hearts faster than it let them hear anything at all.

The shadow entered. And did not come out the same.

That night, for the first time in nine hundred and ninety-nine years, her own light, long since at peace with fading, did not dim, the way it had dimmed every night before this. It trembled — the way a candle flame trembles, when a draft brings from behind a closed door the barely perceptible, but unmistakable, scent of someone else’s living fire.

She did not yet know how much time was really left to her. She did not know whether it would be enough to wait for a real answer, and not only the proof that a traveler existed.

But for the first time in long centuries, the despair had retreated far enough to make room for what she did not at once dare to name.

A little more, — she thought.

Please. A little more.