VI. On the City at the Threshold
The sixth codex is heavily damaged. The destroyed sections show no tool marks. The stone appears to have been removed, as though it had never been inscribed.
- Department of Antiquities, University of Rivermount
I. I have seen what will be built upon the threshold. I do not know whether what I saw was tragedy or the most terrible form of hope. I have turned this vision in my mind for years, and it will not resolve into one or the other. Perhaps the distinction does not apply to what he will do.
II. Know that there will come one who sees further than those who made the Seals, and what he sees will not let him rest. What is a wall but a confession that what it holds back is stronger than what it protects? He will ask the question the Seal-makers chose not to ask: what if the answer to the Void is not to keep it out but to stand in its presence and remain whole?
III. He will build a city where the world wears thin. A city of those who cannot close their eyes to anything that is real. For a time it will be the brightest thing the mortal world has known. The Weave will run through its streets like water through a garden.
IV. And this brightness is what will draw the Void closer. The Void is drawn to creation the way a shadow extends from light. It does not come to extinguish. It comes to taste what it is not.
V. [Seven lines destroyed.]
VI. ...and he, seeing what presses against the boundary, will not retreat. He will choose a path that exists at the edge of what language can carry.
VII. He will open the door wider.
VIII. He will believe that creation and dissolution can be married. That the question and the answer can inhabit the same house. That light and void are the left hand and the right hand of something that has not yet learned to clasp them together.
IX. [Three lines destroyed.] ...the city will descend. Not in fire. Slowly, as a stone sinks through deep water. The buildings will remain intact. The inhabitants... [four lines destroyed] ...changed. Into what, I cannot see. The vision will not hold still when I look at this part of it.
X. He will go with his city. Holding the threshold open from within, as the Weavers of the lost world held the Crossing open from without. One was a flight from the Void. This will be a descent into it.
XI. The city still exists. Below the surface of things, in a place that is neither the world nor the Void but the space between. A space that had no name before he gave it one by going there.
XII. [Partially legible:] ...not dead... the door has not closed... what descends may also rise... the city waits... [illegible] ...when the seals thin, the city will answer, but whether as salvation or... [remainder destroyed]