Who Held at the Edge of Falling
Session: 2023-05-17
Under his own name, the journal records a fight with an elemental, and that it was down. It does not say what kind of elemental, where it stood, or whose blow brought it down. Nor does it say how the crew came there from the street where the Herald spoke.
Who saw the elemental brought down.
— the Long Names, Zigu, 34
All mass bends toward what is near.
— the Cycle, III.1
Then a new heading: the eohi fight. These were the monkey wolves whose fur lined the boots he had taken up. A blow landed, and later another. The journal does not say whose.
Who stood against the eohi, whose fur he wore.
— the Long Names, Zigu, 35
He fought the beasts whose fur was on his feet, and wrote nothing of it. Why would a man note the boots so carefully, and not this?
After the fight he made a list, and priced every line. Old hardplate, archaic make. A bow someone had carried. An axe worth more than both together. A handful of baubles. The journal does not say whose they had been, or who took them.
Who weighed what was left, and wrote its worth.
— the Long Names, Zigu, 36
What is counted is kept.
— the Cycle, I.12
Many small weights, held together, make a world.
— the Cycle, III.2
The rooms here had been offices once. They had been made into cells for meditation. Pilgrims sat in them until they felt moved to paint something from their own lives. He wrote down the balconies, ten feet up, and the ceiling, thirty.
Who came to the cells where the pilgrims sat, and painted what they had lived.
— the Long Names, Zigu, 37
What holds does not hurry.
— the Cycle, III.4
Then the master of those halls. It slowed him, and kept him slow through most of the fight. One stroke its hard plating turned would have gone home through its ward of energy. He wrote both halves of that down.
Who was made slow in the pilgrims' halls.
— the Long Names, Zigu, 38
Know the shell from the ward.
A blow the shell turns, the ward may let through.
Strike where it is thinner.
(Zigu, from his journal.)
— the Forms, Form 37, later additions
He asked what it was weak to. Beside the question he wrote one word: Solarian.
Every hidden mass is found by what bends around it.
— the Cycle, III.8
Was it weak to his own way, or was it of his way? Why would he leave a thing that large at one word?
The last lines reckon a distance, forty-five feet, twenty more with each moment, for a reason he wrote only as instant. Then that he came near to falling, and steadied himself by his own resolve. The journal does not say whose distance it was, or how the fight ended.
Who came to the edge of falling, and held himself there.
— the Long Names, Zigu, 39
The anchored stone is the still center of its storm.
— the Cycle, III.6
He wrote that he held. He did not write how near he came, or what held him. Why leave that out, of all things?