What the Darts Left

The records for this day are short: a ruined city, the name Zan gave it, a fight set down in pieces, and a body. When the records are this thin, the order tells the day as the Fragments do, and so will I.

And the trees gave way, and the mountain stood up out of the green,
and a city was built up the side of it, climbing as a vine climbs.
And the city was of stone, and all of it was broken.
And there were shapes in it like pyramids, and there were pillars,
and they stood upon a plain made level by hands long gone,
and half of them stood on stilts.
And Halqueem Zan had come this way before them, and had given the place a name.
And the name he gave it was the stairs to eternity.
And the one who taught him said a name is a map left by the one who came before.
And she who kept the record said this name was only a name, and should be kept as one.
And both are kept.
And among the ruins there were beasts like basilisks, and they came against the party.
And Kopalo called the cold down upon one of them,
and the line that tells of it breaks off, and this telling does not finish it.
And the blows of the others fell, and some fell short, and some struck true.
And someone among them sought to put fear into the beasts,
and the beasts did not know fear, and came on.
And the telling does not say how many they were, nor how the fighting ended.
And one of them had been eating when they came upon it,
and what it ate was a lashunta, of the people of that world.
And in the body were darts, seven of them, or eight,
for a trap had been sprung in that place, and the darts had a working in them,
and the working had stilled the body.
And the darts were counted, and the count was not certain.
And no telling knows who the lashunta was, or why they climbed the stairs.

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

The Fragments make more of the name than his notes do. He gives it one line, between the stone and the beasts, and says only that Zan referred to the place that way. The line I come back to is the last one. The trap had stilled the lashunta, and the beast had come to what the trap left.

The Field Canon took a single line from that body, and it is the one novitiates are made to repeat before their first ruin:

Where a body lies still in a ruin, look for what stilled it before you look for what feeds on it.
(Kopalo, from field notes; Castrovel.)

— the Field Canon, on Predation, later additions