You have climbed a long way to be here.

A fictional character Telling. Meet Terraphmaw.

I know. I know exactly how far, and I know what you told yourself the whole way up. I have heard it before. Every one of the names behind you spoke some version of it at this threshold.

They believed, as you do now, that the climb meant something. That arriving meant something. Perhaps it did. I have never been able to tell the difference between the ones who came with purpose and the ones who came by accident. The names end the same way.

Look at the walls. Read them if you can. The older ones have begun to smooth over — stone does that, given enough time, and I have had enough time. Beneath the ones you cannot read are older ones. Beneath those, older still. There is a name down there, one of the first, that I watched become past tense before the Circle had a word for what I was.

It would surprise you to know how small that one was. They always seem larger in the telling.

Now: you came because you want to know something. You want to know what I see when I look at you.

I see the date.

That is all I will tell you. Not what the date is — only that I see it, the way you can see a word written on the back of a page held up to the light. I know it is there. I know where on the wall your name will go.

I will not tell you where. That is not what this is for.

What this is for: you needed to look at something that knows. Something that has watched enough endings to have stopped calling them endings. Something that will still be here when the stone arch above us has forgotten it was ever an arch.

You needed to know that you have been witnessed.

You have been witnessed.

Now go.

Visual

Skull-faced. Single horn rising from the crown — twisted, incomplete, the mark of something that arrived before it was finished. Ribcage bare below the dark shroud that has gathered around it the way sediment gathers at the bottom of a very old river. Behind it, stone carved floor to arch with names — hundreds of them, maybe thousands, the older ones already smoothing back into the rock.

It does not look like it is waiting. It looks like waiting is simply what it is.

Faction: The Broken Circle · View the Gallery