What the Pale Vesk Watched

The records for these days are thin: five days at the station, two pale strangers, a name for a place, and a fight that had only just begun when the notes stop. When the records are this thin, the order tells the days the way the Fragments do, and so will I.

And word had gone out ahead of them, for one of the cult had sent what he knew to his own,
and no telling knows who received it, or what they meant to do with it.
And the party came to the great wheel, to Absalom Station, and stayed five days.
And of the first day the telling keeps nothing.
And on the second day there were figures near the ship that had no business near it,
and on the third day they were there again,
and they did not come aboard, and they did not go away.
And on the fourth day Kopalo looked, and saw them plainly,
and they were two, and large, and they were Vesk,
and their scales were pale, as things grown without light are pale.
And the telling does not know who sent them, or whether anyone did.
And on the fifth day the ship was mended and refitted, the Sunrise Maiden,
and one among them said in jest that someone had given her a new name,
and no one had, and she kept her name.
And messages came to them, saying: make haste.
And the telling does not know whose voice was in the messages.
And they went into the Drift, and were one day in it,
and came out at the place that is called, by those who speak of it, "the field of the lost".
And it was bleak there: ice, and a vast void, and a field within the void.
And there they were set upon, ship against ship,
and the first blows were struck, two of them, and both went wide,
and the telling does not say whose they were.
And here the telling stops.
And she who kept the record asked how it ended,
and the one who taught him said the record does not say,
and she wrote that down, because it was true.

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

For once the Fragments stop where the notes stop, and I have nothing to temper. The pale Vesk come from his own hand: it was Taeon who finally got a look at them, on the fourth day, after two days of only knowing someone was there. What happened at the field of the lost isn't in the records for these days.