What the Light Called

His page for this day is blank again, and the account that survives is not his. The order tells the caverns of the Drift Rock from the Fragments, and I will give it to you as I was given it.

And they went into the stone, and the stone was dark, and nothing in it had weight.
And the way divided, and in one way were the tracks of one, and in the other the tracks of many.
And they took the way of the many, for they thought there was safety in numbers.
And the telling does not say whose choice it was, or whether anyone chose at all.
And Deku was not with them, for he had stayed behind in the ship, and the robot that served the android was not with them.
And the tellings do not agree about the robot. Both are kept.
And they had one small light among them, and there was no other light in that place.
And in the first hollow of the stone a body hung in the middle of the air.
And it was one of the Acreon's own, and so they knew the crew had come to the stone, and that not all of them had lived.
And an Akata had done it.
And from the dead they took a needle pistol and a better skin of armour, for the dead had no more need of either.
And they went on toward a greater hollow, and the quiet one went first, and the light came behind.
And the light moved on the walls, and something in the dark turned toward it.
And it was a dead thing that walked, and inside it a larva lived, blue and beating.
And it threw itself at the light, and the light was with Bren Talic, who was already sick.
And the larva put out its tendril and held him, and drank a little of his strength.
And behind the fallen rock there was a sound, and the rock broke open, and it was Deku.
And Deku had woken on the bridge of the Acreon and dragged himself the length of the cable alone,
and he burned his way in with the great gun he carried, and came among them in their need.
And the telling says he would come to regret it.
And they shot the dead thing until it had no head, and it floated on in the dark.
And they went out by the southern way, into a hollow greater still,
and two more of the dead were there, facing the wall, wanting nothing.
And the telling holds that they might have been passed in the dark, unwoken.
And Deku went first, and he carried the light.
And the dead turned to the light, as the dead in that stone do.
And the fight was short by the clock and long by every other measure,
and friend and foe were thrown from the floor of the hollow to its roof, thirty feet above.
And Deku was struck down, and did not die.
And Kopalo sent his mind against the dead, and there was no mind there to meet it.
And the fighting ended, and the living were still there.
And Bren was sick and weakened, and his hand was hurt from the shooting, and Deku was sick and weakened,
and Qwitch was sick, and Grek had taken a glancing blow.
And Kopalo was not touched.
And she who kept the record wrote that he may have been regretting his choice of companions.
And the one who taught him said: Then write that he was still among them.
And the telling ends there, in the dark, with the light still in their hands.

— Fragments of the Keepers, the Kopalo cycle, as it is usually told

The Fragments are generous to Deku here, and I think rightly: the records give him the bravest crossing of the day and the worst of its cost. They say less about the light, though every novitiate who has spent a night in the forest learns that the lamp is the loudest thing you carry. What I return to is the larva. A parasite that lives in a dead host has found the one body that cannot reject it.