III. On the Wound of the Peoples
The third codex is prophetic in nature. Scholars have debated whether this text predicts the First War or describes a universal tendency within mortal nature. The Department suspects both readings are correct simultaneously.
- Department of Antiquities, University of Rivermount
I. I have seen what will come, for it has always been coming, the way water has always been seeking the lowest ground even when the ground itself does not know it is low. Scattered light forgets that it was once one flame. Each fragment begins to believe it is the whole. This is the shape of the ground, and water flows downward on it.
II. The eldest will mistake their wound for an eye. We have suffered, they will say, therefore we see. But a scar does not see. It remembers. And memory without sight is a hand reaching in the dark for something it held once and will never hold again in the same way.
III. Those shaped from the bones of the world will mistake their permanence for precedence. The mountain stands when the forest falls, but the mountain has never grown, never borne fruit, never died and become soil for what comes after. There is a kind of strength that learns nothing because it has never needed to yield.
IV. And the youngest will mistake their fear of ending for the right to take what is not offered. They will build faster than they understand, and call this wisdom, and the building will be their argument, and the argument will be their justification, and the justification will be their tomb.
V. The peoples will wound each other in the name of healing themselves, and the healing will be the deepest wound.
VI. The blood will fall on ground that remembers. Every river that carries it will speak of it to the sea. The Weave will thin with each severing, for every life taken is a thread cut, and the Weave does not forget its threads.
VII. Know that I will tell you the root, for it is simpler than you expect and more terrible for its simplicity. It is the belief that what is given to another is taken from you. That the world was made too small for all who dwell in it. This is the Void's whisper dressed in the clothing of reason. The Void cannot create scarcity. It can only make abundance invisible to those who count with closed fists.
VIII. And when the wound has opened fully, the Weave will grow quiet. A mother does not silence her house because her children have angered her. She falls silent because her heart has broken, and a broken heart has no voice. A god's broken heart silences a world.
IX. He who has never known the absence of water does not know what water is. She who has always seen by the light will not understand what light does until the light is gone and she must learn what her hands can tell her that her eyes never could.
X. The wound is not the end. It is the incision through which the deeper sickness drains. I have seen this, and I have also seen that the sickness and the cure are made of the same substance, and the hand that cuts is the hand that heals, and I cannot explain this further because the explanation would be a lie.