I was born on the night the sky forgot to write.
This is how my mother described it, not with grief or apology but with the particular matter-of-fact warmth she brought to everything she considered simply true. The Celestia-reader who attended my birth — a narrow man named Dorath who smelled of ceremonial incense and had the expression of someone perpetually consulting an interior ledger — had looked up at the sky above Greyveil for the positioning of the stars and found, in the place where a birth-constellation should have been burning with the particular brightness the tradition reserved for new arrivals, nothing. A gap. A pause between one constellation's end and another's beginning. The sky mid-breath. The script mid-sentence. A blank space in the celestial text that had no precedent in Dorath's records and would, he noted in the formal register with the compressed disapproval of a man whose system had been inconvenienced, require a special notation.
My mother had listened to all of this from the bed where she had just spent fourteen hours doing something considerably more demanding than consulting registers, and when Dorath had finished his notation and delivered his verdict — unwritten, no celestial designation, fate undetermined — she had looked at him with the expression she reserved for people who were correct about facts and entirely wrong about their significance, and she had said: Good. He can write his own.
Dorath had left shortly after. My mother had looked down at me — new and unremarkable and entirely unaware that I had just failed my first formal assessment — and had apparently found nothing in my face to contradict her position.
I have been trying to live up to that position for as long as I can remember. I have not always succeeded. But I have never stopped trying, which I believe was what she actually meant by it.
Greyveil sits in the crease between two sets of hills like something that fell there and decided to stay.
This is not a poetic description. It is a geographic one. The town occupies a natural depression where the land folds between the eastern and western hill lines, and the river — which has no grand name, being the kind of river that people refer to simply as the river with the comfortable familiarity of long acquaintance — runs through the bottom of that fold with the patient indifference of water that has been doing the same thing for considerably longer than anyone has been watching it do it. The hills on either side are not dramatic. They do not have names in the Celestia mythology or feature in the great geographical epics that the tradition's scholars sometimes wrote about the more spectacular parts of Aethermoor. They are simply hills — grey-green in autumn, muddier in spring, briefly extraordinary in the short weeks of high summer when the grasses go gold and the light does something specific and unrepeatable with the angle of late afternoon. For those weeks the hills are beautiful in the way that modest things are sometimes beautiful — completely, without self-consciousness, without any apparent awareness that the beauty is occurring.
I have always loved the hills for this quality. The beauty that doesn't know it is beautiful. The thing that is entirely, completely itself without reference to anything outside itself.
Greyveil itself has something of the same quality. It is not a town that appears in histories or features in the accounts of significant events. Nothing has happened here that would justify a chapter heading in any book I have read in Dovel's archive. The most notable entry in the civic record for the past two centuries, as far as I have been able to determine, is a flood in the third year of the Restoration Council's governance that displaced approximately forty families from the lower streets and prompted the construction of the river wall that still stands on the east bank, solid and unremarkable, doing its job. This is Greyveil's relationship to history. Practical, local, quietly getting on with things.
I grew up in the upper streets, away from the flood risk, in a house that my mother had lived in since before I was born and that had the quality of places that have been inhabited with genuine attention for a long time — not grand, not decorated beyond what was useful, but entirely itself in every room, each corner expressing some accumulated decision about how to live that had been made so long ago it had ceased to be a decision and had become simply the shape of the place.
My mother's name was Erith. She worked at the loom cooperative on the north end of the market square, three days a week, producing the particular grade of heavy cloth that Greyveil exported to the larger towns down the river. She was not a woman who talked about herself or her history with any frequency, but from the things she did say, assembled over years into something approaching a picture, I understood that she had come to Greyveil from somewhere further east when she was young, had met my father here, had decided to stay when he was gone, and had proceeded to build a life with the focused practicality that characterised everything she did. She believed in the utility of things. She believed in getting on with it. She believed, with a conviction that was entirely untheoretical and entirely absolute, that a person's worth had nothing to do with what the stars had written about them and everything to do with what they did with the time they had.
She never said any of this in the form of a philosophy. She simply lived it, consistently and without drama, and I absorbed it the way children absorb the fundamental convictions of the people who raise them — not through argument or instruction but through the accumulated texture of a thousand ordinary days.
The question behind the question has been with me for as long as I can remember having questions at all.
I do not mean this metaphorically. I mean that from a very early age — earlier than I can precisely locate, somewhere in the years before the schoolhouse, in the time when the world is primarily texture and sensation and the beginning of language — I was aware of a doubling in my experience of things. The thing itself, and then the question of what the thing actually was when you set aside everything you had been told about it.
The stars, most obviously. The Writ of Celestia is Aethermoor's oldest and most pervasive mythology — the belief that the stars constitute a literal text, that fate is written in the sky before birth, that the celestial positions at the moment of a person's arrival in the world encode the essential nature of their destiny in a language that trained readers can interpret. The Celestia-readers maintain this tradition with the careful authority of a guild that has been right about enough things across enough centuries to have earned a conditional trust. They read births. They advise rulers. They are consulted on significant decisions by people who believe, with varying degrees of sincerity, that the stars have something relevant to say about the matter.
Greyveil has one Celestia-reader. His name is not Dorath — Dorath retired the year I turned six and moved to one of the larger towns where his services were more frequently required. The current reader is a woman named Vey who occupies the same narrow house on the hill road that all of Greyveil's readers have occupied in living memory, and who has the quality of someone who takes their work seriously without taking themselves seriously, which I have always considered a useful combination. I have nothing against Vey. I have nothing against the tradition she practices. What I have is the question behind it — not what do the stars say but what are the stars, actually, when you set aside the saying. Not what does fate mean but what is the thing that makes fate possible. The question that lives in the space between the text and the surface the text is written on.
I was aware, from the time I was old enough to ask questions in the schoolhouse and observe the quality of the responses they generated, that this was not the question most people were asking. Most people were asking the first-order question — what does it mean, what does it say, what is my fate, what is the nature of the thing. I was asking what the thing was made of. What was underneath it. What was above it. What was the surface on which the whole elaborate system of stars and fates and celestial script was actually drawn.
This made me, in the gentle assessment of the Greyveil schoolhouse's teachers, an interesting student. It made me, in the considerably less gentle assessment of certain of my peers, strange. It made me, in my own assessment, simply myself — a person for whom the question behind the question arrived automatically and without effort, the way other people apparently experienced hunger or tiredness, as a fundamental fact of being alive that did not require justification.
My father's name was Cael Hightower and he died when I was four years old from a fever that moved through the lower streets of Greyveil in the winter of that year and took three people with it, of which he was one. I do not remember him with any reliability. What I have are impressions — a quality of warmth, a specific sound of a voice that I cannot reconstruct into words but whose tone I can still access, a memory that may be a memory or may be a story I was told so many times it became one, of sitting on his shoulders at the river festival and seeing the lanterns on the water from that height and feeling, in the specific way of small children carried above the crowd, that I was the tallest person in Greyveil.
My mother spoke of him with the economy of someone who has processed a loss so thoroughly that it has become part of the structure of things rather than a thing in itself. Not without feeling — I was never under the impression that she had loved him insufficiently or grieved him incompletely. But with the practical acceptance of a woman for whom dwelling was a luxury she had not found useful. He had been. He was gone. She had kept going. This was the shape of it.
What she did tell me, with some frequency, was the thing he had said when Dorath delivered his verdict about my unwritten birth. Good. Let him find his own stars. She told me this not as a consolation or a mythology but as a fact of record — as though it were something I was entitled to know about myself, something that belonged to me in the way a name belongs to a person. Your father said this. It is yours.
I have turned it over many times across many years, the way you turn over a coin — finding in it sometimes a challenge, sometimes a gift, sometimes something I do not have a name for that sits between the two. Let him find his own stars. As though stars were a thing that could be found rather than assigned. As though the Writ of Celestia, for all its centuries of authority and tradition, was not the only possible relationship a person could have with the sky above them.
As though the blank space was not an absence but an invitation.
On the morning that I will later understand was the last morning of the Before — the last morning of the version of myself that existed entirely within the narrative without any awareness of the narrative — I was at the market.
This requires no particular setup. I was often at the market in the mornings, in the way that people with flexible working arrangements and a disposition toward observation tend to accumulate in the places where ordinary life is most visibly occurring. The market square of Greyveil in the morning is as good a place as any I know to practice the art of looking at things directly — at the specific, irreplaceable texture of a community going about the business of existing, which is, in my experience, one of the most interesting things there is to look at.
The bread woman whose name I have learned over years of peripheral acquaintance is Yssa had her cart on its corner, which it occupied with the permanence of a geographic feature. The dry goods seller Otta was arranging her morning display with the focused efficiency of someone who has been doing this for long enough that the efficiency has become a form of artistry. Two men I recognised from the cooperage were moving barrels with the coordinated ease of people who have performed the same physical task together enough times that they no longer need to communicate about it. A child I did not recognise was standing in the middle of the foot traffic with the complete stillness of a small person who has seen something interesting and has temporarily forgotten that they are in the way.
I stood at the edge of the square and looked at all of it with the quality of attention I reserved for mornings when nothing particular was required of me — not the looking-through, not the question behind the question, not the philosophical inquiry into the surface beneath the surface. Just the looking-at. The direct, uncomplicated, appreciative attention to the thing itself.
It was, I thought, an exceptionally good morning for it.
The light was doing something particular with the angle — the low autumn quality that found the edges of things and made them briefly luminous, the copper gutters of the civic hall, the wet cobblestones from the overnight rain, the brass fittings on Otta's display counter catching it and throwing it back in small specific flashes. The smell of the market in the morning — bread and river damp and the green sharpness of the vegetable stalls and beneath all of it the particular mineral smell of old stone that every part of Greyveil carries, the smell of a town built on rock that has been here longer than anyone.
I was thinking, in the comfortable unfocused way I thought about things when I was not actively trying to think about them, about a passage from the Tethovan Commentaries I had been reading the previous evening. Varis Tethovan, in one of his denser marginal annotations, had written something that I had read three times and was still working through — a distinction he drew between what he called the authored fate and what he called the authoring condition. The stars, he argued, were the authored fate — the text, the script, the written thing. But what interested him was the authoring condition — the circumstances that made it possible for there to be writing at all. The surface. The medium. The whatever-it-is that the text requires in order to exist.
He had not, in that annotation, pursued this further. He had moved on to a more specific objection about the Celestia-readers' interpretation of the third constellation cluster, which was also interesting but less so. I was standing at the edge of the market square turning the authoring condition over in my mind with the quiet pleasure of an idea that had not yet finished arriving, feeling the particular satisfaction of a thought that is still in motion, that has not yet resolved into something you can write down and file away.
And then my mother appeared beside me.
This was not unusual — she shopped at the market on her days away from the cooperative, and our schedules occasionally coincided without planning. But there was something in the quality of her arrival that morning, a purposiveness, that suggested she had seen me and come over rather than simply found herself beside me by the convergence of separate trajectories.
She stood next to me and looked at the market with the same quality of attention I had been giving it, which was one of the things I had always found comfortable about her company — she did not require the silence to be filled.
After a moment she said: "You're doing the thing."
"What thing."
"The thinking-about-something-that-isn't-here thing." She said this without criticism. As an observation of fact. "You have the expression."
"What expression."
"The one your father had. When he was somewhere else in his head." She was quiet for a moment. "He used to stand exactly like that. In exactly that spot, actually, when he came to the market. Right at the edge, watching." A pause that had the quality of something she was deciding to add. "He said he liked to see the whole of it before he went into it. That going into a thing without seeing it whole first was a waste."
I looked at her.
She was watching the market with the even, practical gaze she brought to everything — not sentimental, not dwelling. Simply present, in the way she was always present.
"What was he thinking about," I said. "When he stood here."
"I never asked him." A small pause. "I thought I'd have time to." She said this with the matter-of-fact acceptance that characterised everything she said about him — not bitter, not self-pitying. Simply true. "Ask the questions while you can, Nighdy. The people who have the answers don't stay."
She squeezed my arm once, briefly, with the specific pressure of a woman who expresses affection in small precise gestures rather than large demonstrations, and then she moved off into the market toward Otta's stall with the purposive step of someone who has things to do and has said what she came to say.
I watched her go.
Then I turned back to the market and stood at its edge and looked at the whole of it before going into it, the way my father had apparently stood in this same spot and done this same thing, and I thought about the authoring condition and the surface beneath the text and the blank space in the sky above Greyveil that had been waiting since the night of my birth, patient as an unfinished sentence, for whatever came next.
The morning light did its particular thing with the copper gutters and the wet cobblestones.
The bread woman Yssa called out her prices in the cadence she had been using since before I was old enough to notice cadences.
Everything was entirely, completely, utterly itself.
I went into the market.
And somewhere above and beyond and beneath all of it — above the light and the smell and the sound and the specific irreplaceable texture of a morning in Greyveil that would not be repeated — something that had no name and no face and no understanding of what it was doing turned its incomprehensible attention toward the blank space between two constellations.
And found, in that space, a person.
And began.