Dusk folded the sea like a page; lanterns blinked along other decks and gulls argued their old disputes. Cael sat with the chronometer in his lap and the child on the thwart opposite him; Jeran's lacquer tube rested at their feet like a small entrusted thing. A man with a travel-stained cloak climbed aboard when the tide slackened — not a loud merchant, but the lean composure of someone who had practiced asking before answering.
His name was Zahir. He spoke with the civility of one used to testing ideas softly. "You keep songs and pebbles," he said, "and teach people how to remember. I travel with questions. Tell me plainly: how do you know the pattern you read points to a Maker, rather than to patient laws and long processes of chance?"
The question arrived plain and honest, and the skiff's little world held its breath. Cael felt the pebble at his belt like an answering pulse. He had rehearsed humility as a habit; now he found himself needing steadier words.
"The signs call," Cael began. "They do not offer arithmetic proof. They invite, and the fitrah — the inward bent of the human heart — leans toward meaning. But that is only a starting place, not a finished demonstration."
Zahir smiled in the way of a man who liked beginnings. "Postures can err," he said. "A spider weaves because its body makes silk; long processes produce patterns without a maker. Gulls follow currents shaped by wind and spin; an astrolabe measures poles that exist because the planet behaves so. Order can arise when law, time, and chance combine. That is a plain hypothesis that needs testing."
He framed his view precisely, not in malice but as a scientist of argument. Cael recognized each clause: it asked for evidentiary labor, not comfort. He had felt the spider and the gull as sermon; Zahir turned them into hypotheses. It could have made Cael defensive. Instead he let the harbor's lessons settle and answered along lines the skeptic respected: evidence, consequence, and coherence.
"Suppose the natural account is true," Cael said slowly. "Even so, three things press on us." He let each point land like a peg in wood.
"First: anchoring the laws. You can describe how patterns operate, but how do you explain the existence of lawfulness itself — that there are reliable regularities rather than sheer chaos? Describing processes presumes a framework that makes description meaningful. If everything were merely flux, our speech about laws would be meaningless.
"Second: moral intelligibility. The physical world's order does not by itself explain moral obligation — why we should do justice or pity the weak. Across cultures, people recognise duties not simply as convenient habits but as claims on the heart. That recurring moral testimony suggests a standard beyond mere utility.
"Third: practical testimony. I have watched lives change when a person accepts a measure higher than appetite. Families bind themselves to truth, communities keep promises that markets would not. That transformation is the sort of human evidence philosophers ought to count: it is not a syllogism, but it is not nothing."
Zahir listened, fingers looping a rope. He was not easily impressed by rhetoric; he wanted raw logic. He picked up the oldest challenge: "Who authored the author? If you posit a Maker, who made that Maker? Explanatory regress is a real sting. A chain of causes only postpones the problem unless you have a first sort of existence that is different from what it causes."
Cael had expected the regress question; he had feared the burden of a full metaphysical lecture. But he had learned the value of simple analogies spoken without jargon. He answered with the language of craft and being.
"Think of a house and its builder. A house requires parts that are contingent — wood, nail, mortar. We can ask who built the house. A builder, however, is not a house; he is a different category: he is an agent with ways of acting that do not themselves require being built in the same way. The question 'who built the builder' makes sense only if you assume the builder is of the same kind as the house. But some realities do not belong to that class. They do not begin in the way a house begins. To ask who made such a reality is to confuse categories.
"In plain terms: the kind of existence you infer for the maker is not the same kind as a created thing. If all beings were contingent — their being dependent on something else — you could never reach a foundation. A foundation must be of another sort: it remains without depending on another. Saying this is not a clever evasion; it reflects a real distinction many philosophers notice between dependent things and a source that grounds dependence. Call it First, Origin, or Necessary — the name matters less than the recognition that not every question demands a same-kind answer."
Zahir's eyes narrowed in thought. The sailor nearby grunted approval at the clarity of the image. The child on the thwart, who had been listening, made a small face of wonder. The regress had been turned from a trap into a category question; it did not close argument, but it made the burden intelligible.
Still the skeptic pressed the moral point: "Even if a First exists, why suppose it is close to our morality? Societies form morals for survival. Why prefer a transcendent good to evolving social contracts?"
Cael's reply came from what he had seen in the valley and on the headland. "Social practices can produce norms, yes. But that does not erase the fact that across times and tribes certain demands recur: kindness to kin, fairness in exchange, a prohibition on needless slaughter. These recurring moral recognitions suggest a moral root in human nature. The fitrah inclines us; the practice shapes us. A transcendent source explains both why the fitrah inclines and why moral demands can bind beyond local convenience. Practically, when people live by a measure greater than immediate gain, community flourishes in ways markets alone often fail to sustain."
Zahir nodded, not conceding but acknowledging that Cael's evidence was not without weight. He offered a final counsel in the scholar's tone: "Your posture is sound: do not replace argument with piety. Search both the book and the world. Read the astronomers who chart the errors and learn why constancy points to something reliable. Read moralists who test the ground for duty. Collect testimony, and see which explanation bears the best coat of reasons."
"That is what I will do," Cael said. "I will gather reasons as well as witnesses. I will go to Miran to learn more of the stars; I will visit those who keep books; I will speak with elders who have guarded these traditions. I will not barter what the valley entrusted me for a convenient syllogism."
Zahir accepted the pledge with a small smile. "Then we may argue again on the road and be better served by one another's reading."
The circle on the beach broke into smaller tasks. Nets were mended, embers were banked, and the child asked a question that stopped the argumentative hum more gently than any proof could: "If we are to find the Maker, will the Maker be alone?"
Cael looked at the child and felt the fitrah answer in him: the world's single grammar suggested unity rather than committee. He answered plainly, with the humility he had learned to practice. "When the world's measure speaks with a single voice — stars, tide, the pattern of living things — the simplest and most coherent answer is unity. Many makers working in confusion would likely produce a world that contradicts itself. If constancy speaks in one tone, it is sensible to infer a single source. I do not trumpet certainty as if it were a done trumpet-call. I only say this: unity fits what we see better than multiplicity."
Zahir did not concede; he bowed to the question as an honest interlocutor. "Then gather reasons," he said again. "Find where unity answers better than natural account. Keep humility. Let no convenience buy your mouth."
When the other men slept and the inlet softened into night, Cael sat on the skiff's rail and felt the chronometer's tick like a slow tutor. Instruments and fitrah had carried him this far; now the work would be to gather texts and testimonies that could speak to Zahir's polite demands. He would read the keepers of the sky, seek the archive, listen to moral thinkers. He would keep the counting-song and the threefold mouth as practice while he learned the arguments that bind head and heart.
He did not imagine the search would end in a neat proof. He had seen the way evidence and life together changed people; he had also learned that the heart's readiness matters. His pledge now had two limbs: humility before reason, and steadfastness in the moral practice that had saved names in his valley. That evening, before sleep, he added the small lines he had learned at the headland to the counting-song and sang them softly into the dark — an oath and a compass both.
Zahir folded his cloak and, as if to seal their compact, offered a last piece of counsel: "Collect reasons with an open hand. If unity remains the best account, it will bear the weight of argument. If it does not, we will be the wiser not to follow a false certainty." The words were not a threat but a charter for the road.
Cael looked northward as the first pale thread of dawn began to come. He felt both the old duty of keeping and the new duty of learning. The search would be long; he would walk it with instruments in his pouch, with Jeran's tube safe in the child's care, and with an honest hunger that refused to take easy bargains.