This likeness was rendered from an account given anonymously. The subject was described for three hours. The witness has not spoken since.

A fictional character Telling. Meet The First One.

The Lodge possesses no Telling from The First One. He has never entered the Telling Chamber, never sat before the Archivist, never spoken into witness. What follows is a transcription of something else — a thing that occurred in a room where no ritual was underway, overheard by a junior archivist who has not spoken in the eight years since, transcribed from marks she made on the wall with her own blood before anyone found her.

The marks are reproduced here as they appeared. The Lodge has not interpreted them. Translation is a form of ownership, and some things must remain unowned.

Before the water, there was wanting.

Before the wanting, there was nothing — and the nothing was sufficient. I do not know why I began. I was not incomplete before. I was not lonely. The deep was all I needed and I had all of the deep. The wanting arrived like a splinter I had not swallowed.

I rose. I do not know why I rose. The water did not push me. I pushed myself, and the pushing was the first thing I had ever done that was not simply continuing.

The air hurt. Light was a blade. Your world was young then — younger than you can imagine — and I walked through it salt-crusted and silent, leaving footprints that filled with water no one had named yet. I found nothing that answered. I found nothing that recognised me. I turned back to the deep more than once, and each time something held me at the surface: not curiosity, not hunger — a thread, taut and waiting, that I had not yet pulled.

I found her by smell before sight. Iron and origin. The first blood that was not mine. She stood at the edge of the water where I had risen, and she did not run. She looked at me the way I had looked at the sky — with the recognition of something that had never seen its own kind before.

I did not speak. I had no language yet. But I opened my mouth and she saw what was inside me — the dark that had been there before the water, before the wanting — and she chose to enter it.

That was the only turning.

I did not teach her. I did not explain. I opened, and she entered, and when she emerged she was no longer what she had been. She was the first of what would become a ladder. I had no part in building the ladder. I had no part in naming the ranks or writing the laws or pretending that blood purity meant anything to something that had never needed blood to be pure. I did one thing — opened my mouth — and then I walked back into the deep.

I do not know why I rose. I do not know why I found her. I do not know why the thread chose to pull then and has not pulled since. I only know that I have not risen again, and that the wanting that arrived like a splinter has never left — a fragment of your world lodged beneath my oldest skin, reminding me that I was changed by the rising as much as she was changed by the entering.

The first thirst has never been quenched.

I do not think it is meant to be.

The archivist made eight marks. The first seven correspond to the passages above — one mark per section, drawn in sequence as if she was transcribing something she heard once and could not afford to forget. The eighth mark is different: a single line that does not end — not a slash, not a cut, but a line that simply continues off the edge of the wall.

She has been asked what she heard. She opens her mouth. Nothing comes out.

The Lodge has placed her in a room that faces east, where she can watch the sun rise each morning. She does not speak. She does not appear to be waiting for anything.

Faction: Children of the Night · View the Gallery