Fragment: The Devourer, Witnessed

The account of a march-captain of the allied Sanctuaries, taken down by a Seamkeeper the morning after her column returned from the world’s heart. She asked that her name be withheld and her words kept exact. Both requests are honoured.

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You want to know what it’s like. Everyone wants to know what it’s like. I’ll tell you the true part, and you’ll write it down, and it still won’t be what it’s like.

We marched with nine columns. Nine Sanctuaries’ worth of woven soldiers and the guardians of each walking their lines, and the closer you come to the heart the less the land argues with itself — you notice that first. No fraying. No whisper. The ground firm, the sky decided. The young ones started joking that the maps were wrong, that the heart of the world was the safest ground left in it.

Then you crest the last rise and understand. The ground is firm because it is worked. Everything for miles is woven — hills that almost hold their shape, a river that almost runs, trees placed the way trees ought to be placed, all of it in grey. Grey thread, tight as wall-grain, mile on mile. It’s beautiful. I want that written down because it’s the part nobody says: it is the most beautiful made thing I have ever seen, and every thread of it used to be something that had a name.

It sits at the centre of its work and it does not look up. That’s the part that unmade the jokes. Every account tells you it’s vast, and it is — but vast we could have borne. It’s the diligence. Hand over hand over hand, the shuttle going, a rhythm older than any of our orders, and it never once looked at nine columns forming lines against it, because we were not, in any sense it was made to care about, the point.

We did what the alliances do. We broke the work. Hours of it — the wall holding, the rear lines pouring everything over our shoulders, the weave coming apart in sheets that sighed going down, and I’m told what we carried home was the richest salvage a column ever took, and I believe it, because it fell like a harvest. Everything it took, given back at once.

And at the end, when the great grey sheets were down and the thing itself knelt in the ruin of them — it gathered up the nearest threads, and cast on, and began again. Didn’t look at us. Didn’t mourn. Began again, in the wreck we’d made, with the patience of the first morning of the world.

My grandmother darned by the fire the winter she stopped knowing our names. Same hands. Same rhythm. That’s what it’s like. Now you know why nobody says.

We’ll march again within the season — the salvage feeds three Sanctuaries and the work must be kept broken; I know the arithmetic, I am the arithmetic. But you ask any captain who’s seen it what she wants, and if she’s honest she won’t say victory.

She’ll say: someone should find out what it was making, back when the light was still coming. Someone should finish it.

Let the poor thing put the shuttle down.