(Tharien does not rise. Tharien is already risen. The air around them is colder by two degrees and the light on their hands does not fall where it should.)

A fictional character Telling. Meet Tharien.

There was a wound.

I know this the way one knows that a country existed before one's birth. Not in the body. In the record. Somewhere, long ago, a thing happened to someone who was me. I was held back by it. I am held back by it still. The holding has not loosened. The wound has simply gone out of focus, the way a face does when you have been looking at it for too long.

I used to know the name. I used to know the face. I used to know the year. Those went first — within the first century. Then the reason the wound was a wound, the logic of why it mattered. That went in the second century. Then the feeling of the wound, the sharp and the dull of it. That lasted longer. I was proud of that feeling for a while. I thought it was all I had left of myself. It left too.

What remains is the shape. The shape of someone unable to move on. It is not a shape I chose. It is the shape I have been for longer than most countries have had their present names.

I will tell you what I tell the newly Veiled when they come to me frightened.

You do not have to resolve it. Many of you will not. The anchor is not asking to be cut — it is asking to be lived beside. You learn its weight. You learn where it catches. You learn to move as a creature who drags this thing. In time the dragging becomes the walking, and the walking becomes the way you are.

And then — I will not lie to you — the thing you dragged begins to wear. Erosion works on anchors as it works on stone. You will lose the edges of it. You will lose the reason. You will lose the face. You will come to a Lodge, or a place like a Lodge, and you will find that you cannot say what keeps you any more, only that something does.

When that happens, the newly Veiled will come to you, and they will be frightened, and you will not advise them. You will sit with them. That is what I am doing now.

Visual

Tall, lean figure of no determinate age, white hair falling past the shoulders, skin translucent at the hands and throat, robe of undyed unshaped grey cloth, eyes calm and almost empty. More presence than person.

Faction: The Veil · View the Gallery