The Shards of Creation

II. The Sentinel Descends

For ten thousand years, the River remembered itself.

It lay like a vein of dusk across the belly of the world, breathing in shadows and breathing out light, a slow exchange that kept the sky from forgetting it had once been a thought. Along its banks, stones learned to endure and the wind learned to carry rumors. Stars wandered. Seasons hardened into habit. And Kealan stood where the first oath had placed him, eyes of violet and silver reflecting a current that scarcely reflected back.

The River had sung, once. In the infancy of creation it carried in its throat the names of gods and the laughter of dawn and the keen of first partings. Its song had been a ladder between eras—rung after luminous rung—by which memory could climb out of oblivion. He had listened, for he was made of listening: shadow struck to resonance, flame cooled to patience. He did not age. He did not dream. He watched and he remembered.

But songs exhaust themselves. Even eternity tires of speaking.

On the ten-thousandth winter since the oath, the River's cadence unspooled into a single, tenuous thread. The thread frayed where the old scar of glass bisected the current and, for the first time, there was more silence than sound.

Kealan felt it like a change in weather within his bones. The ember of Vaeshar, banked within his chest, fluttered and went still, as if some great hand had cupped it. He looked down into the water and saw only the page-white face of a sky without stories. The present no longer tugged at the past; the past no longer leaned toward the future. The River moved, but meaning did not move with it.

He spoke the names he always spoke when the world seemed thin, a rosary of remnants.

"Lethara," he murmured. The water did not soften.

"Thawlira." The wind did not answer.

"Orenthis." The ground held its breath.

"Myrion." Glass did not gleam.

"Viraen." Light did not gather.

"Kaelen." His voice came back to him without echo, as if shadow had swallowed it out of love.

Kealan knelt and laid his hand upon the current. Cold. Once the touch had been a covenant—River and Sentinel trading confidences with each pulse. Now it gave him only a sensation without a secret. Memory was still in it, yes, but the world had turned its face. The River remembered, as it must; the world had chosen to forget.

He was made to guard the balance, not to chase those who preferred ruin. He knew this. The oath had been specific in its silence: Guard the flow, but do not stop it. He had obeyed for an age, a single figure painted against the same horizon, letting time break itself into calendars around his stillness. But the stillness had become something else—an emptiness with teeth.

He closed his eyes. Within the quiet there was a tremor. Not the River's voice—it had lost its voice—but an agitation beneath it, like something walking along the riverbed with bare feet, feeling for purchase.

Kealan turned his head and listened with the part of himself that had never been human. The world's skin was cold and taut, but beneath it the muscle of desire worked ceaselessly. He heard it in the way clouds leaned toward their reflections, in the way stones nursed their sheen when the sun looked at them. He heard it in the way darkness kept looking for its own outline.

And then he heard something else, the smallest vowel, the beginning of a plea—carried not by water but by breath.

A mortal prayer.

It came to him as a forgetting remembered: a child whispering for a lost mother at the edge of sleep; a widow tightening the shawl of grief and asking the air to please be kind; a craftsman polishing a polished thing past usefulness because his face in it made him feel immortal. Petitions without altars. Confessions made to an audience of windows. The words rose and broke against the night, sank, rose again. They did not know the River, but they used the old grammar of need.