Fragment: A Letter from the Wall

Recovered from the Guardian Den of a northern Sanctuary. The hand is confirmed as Valerius’s. The Codex holds it with the recipient’s blessing.

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Cinder —

You asked me on the stair, in front of the whole Den, why I was content to “stand there and be hit,” and because you are young and made of weather I answered you with a look, which was wrong of me. You deserve the words. Here they are.

I stand in front because I was finished as a wall, the way you were finished as a fire. There is no rank in that, whatever the woven soldiers think when they cheer us. A wall that envies the fire burns down the house. A fire that envies the wall goes out. I have seen both deaths and they are the same death: a finished thing forgetting what it was finished for.

When the line meets a snarl, you will be behind me, and you will hate it. You will see the loops come on in their terrible repeating way and every thread in you will want to be in front, where the work is loud. Hear me: your work is not in front. When my shoulder gives — it gives, little flame; even twice-woven wood gives — what holds the line in that breath is what comes over it from behind. You are not hiding behind a wall. You are what the wall is for.

The soldiers the Grove lends us fray and are carried to the Font, and come back new and do not remember the field. We remember. That is the weight of being finished, and no one warns you of it, so I am warning you. Carry it the way you carry everything else. Loudly, if you must.

Stand where you were made to stand. I will do the same. Between us we are most of a Sanctuary.

— V.