I. On the Nature of the Weave
The first codex is the most complete and the least contested. The Department notes that it speaks of the Weave not as a system to be understood but as a presence to be encountered. Several passages resist paraphrase.
- Department of Antiquities, University of Rivermount
I. I have seen the Weave. I did not seek it. I was sitting with my back against a stone on the hill above the river, and the world opened its eye and I was inside the eye, and what I saw cannot be said in the way that other things are said. It was the world recognising itself through every stone and leaf and drop of rain. I wept. The weeping was part of it. The Weave knew my tears before they fell, and the tears were the Weave also.
II. Before Tohu spoke, the rivers ran and the stones held fast, but they did not know that they did so. Her speaking was not merely the creation of magic. It was the opening of the world's eye. The eye, once opened, cannot close. It may lower its lid and sleep, but the eye is still there, beneath the sleeping.
III. As above, so below. As within, so without. Know that the spark within a mortal is a fragment of the Black Sun's fire. The Weave within the world is a thread of Tohu's first utterance. They are the same substance at different densities. This is why a child, before it learns to doubt, can move a leaf with its wanting. It has not yet learned to believe it is separate from the leaf.
IV. He who commands fire stands outside it and shouts. The fire obeys, resentfully, and gives less than it holds. He who speaks the fire's name stands within the naming, and the flame does not know where it ends and he begins. The difference between these two is the difference between a man who carries water in a bucket and a man who has learned to be the rain.
V. I have asked the wind why it moves. The wind said: I do not move. I am movement. You are the one who has mistaken stillness for your nature.
VI. I have asked the stone why it holds. The stone said: I do not hold. I am patience. You are the one who has mistaken urgency for strength.
VII. I have asked the Weave why it answers some and not others. The Weave said nothing. It opened, the way a hand opens when it trusts what approaches. And I understood. But the understanding was not in my mind. It was in my chest, and I cannot move it from my chest to this stone.
VIII. The Weave is the living mercury of the world. It dissolves what is rigid and coagulates what is diffuse. He who works with it must become both the fire and the vessel, and if he cannot hold both at once, he becomes neither.
IX. I was shown what happens when the one who woke the Weave grieves. A god's sorrow does to a world what a mother's sorrow does to a house. The Weave draws inward like an animal that has been struck, and the world goes deaf to itself, and the deafness is the silence I have spoken of elsewhere.
X. But hear this: the Weave does not vanish when it withdraws. It sleeps beneath the surface of things like water beneath desert sand, dreaming of the word that will call it again. And when it wakes, it wakes as one wakes who has dreamed of betrayal. It remembers. What returns is not what departed. What returns carries the weight of everything that was spent, and the weight changes the shape of the giving.
XI. The Weave is strongest where it has been broken, as a bone that heals grows thicker at the fracture. I do not know why this is so. I only know that it is so, and that the knowing of it has changed me.
XII. I say to you: the Weave is not your servant. It is your kin. If it does not answer you, sit in the silence and ask yourself what in you has made the silence necessary. The answer will not come in words. It will come in the manner of rain, which does not explain itself but which, when it arrives, makes explanation unnecessary.