IV. On the Gift of Emptiness
The fourth codex is remarkable for its tenderness. Several passages have moved scholars to tears, which is an unusual response to a theological text. The Department notes that this codex alone among the eleven appears to have been inscribed more slowly, the letterforms deeper and more deliberate, as though the author was unwilling to move past what he was writing.
- Department of Antiquities, University of Rivermount
I. There is a gift that can only be received with empty hands. And hands that are full cannot be emptied gently. I learned this. It was not a gentle learning.
II. When the Weave withdraws, the world will not end. It will grow bare, as a tree grows bare in the season before fruit. Those who built their lives upon its branches will find themselves on ground they have never touched, and the ground will be cold, and the cold will be the beginning.
III. Know that in the first days there will be despair. The healer will reach for the light and find her own hands. The seer will look toward tomorrow and see fog. They will say: we have been abandoned. They will say: we are being punished. I say to you: a seed is not punished by the winter. The winter is what breaks the hull so that the root can reach.
IV. I was shown what grows in the empty time. I saw a healer who could no longer call upon the light, and she discovered what her hands alone could do, and what her hands knew, she placed in the hands of those around her, and what had been the privilege of the gifted became the inheritance of all. I saw a child born in the empty time who could hear the colour of stone. She did not know this was unusual. The children born after the return could not.
V. The peoples, stripped of the separate magnificence of their arts, will stand in the same cold. They will need the same fire. And something will occur in that shared need that no prosperity could produce. They will see each other. Not the power. Not the heritage. The face beneath, which is the same face, which was always the same face.
VI. In the deep middle of the emptiness, when the grief has worn its edges smooth, something will be heard. Not merely the echo of what was lost, but something beneath the Weave. A presence in the bedrock of existence that the Weave itself rests upon but also, in its constant singing, obscures. The stars are always there by day. You cannot see them because the sun outshines them. The emptiness is the night in which the deeper stars become visible.
VII. Those who hear this presence will not be mages. They will be the ones who learned to listen when there was nothing to hear. What they find will change them in the manner of ground, not in the manner of power. They will become the foundation beneath the foundation, and they will not be able to tell you what they know, because what they know is not a thing that words can carry. They will show you by the way they stand.
VIII. The soul descends into emptiness as gold descends into the acid. What survives the dissolution is what was real before the gold was shaped. The emptiness does not destroy. It reveals.
IX. Do not pray for the emptiness to end. The hands that have been emptied can hold what the full hands never could, and they will not know what they are holding until the light returns and they look down and see.