The Wall With The Number On It

Kindling · page 47 withdrawn

Greetings again, my dear readers. Page forty seven.

Kaunis. Farming world, one moon, a calendar that is wrong on purpose. The Vedrei, "the ones who re-measure," do not hand a child an almanac. They hand her a forked rod and a marker stone cut deliberately off true and send her out to read the actual sky, every generation, from nothing, because a child who is only ever given the answer never learns a sky is a thing you have to go and look at. The method survives forever. The answer never does.

It costs them. Some cycles nothing worth mentioning. Some cycles a frost comes nine days early and people who trusted that year's reading go hungry, and some of those people die of it, and the Vedrei do not hide a single name of it. They cut it into a long low wall in the capital square, resurfaced every generation, chalk plaster now instead of stone, because stone that lasts makes you stop reading it.

The Vedrei can stand in that square and see what their honesty costs them. All of it, name by name, out loud, on a wall built for the purpose of never letting anyone look away from it. It is a terrible number and it is a real one and it belongs to them.

I have ninety pages. I am burning them one at a time, in the correct order, on purpose, and there is no wall anywhere with that number on it. There will not be one. The Vedrei's cost is public because it happens to a whole world, in daylight, to people who get to bury each other and grieve out loud and carve a name where the next generation will trip over it on the way to market. Mine happens in one room, to one page at a time, and when it is done there will be nobody left who was there to write the name on anything.

That is the whole of it. A world that gets a wall, and a man who does not.

The page catches slow, like it wants another minute. I give it the minute. I do not give it more than that.

Kaunis is ash now.