Two Heartbeats

Year 0, a moment that exists outside time. The Hall of Veils.

Veyrion stood at the silent curtain.

He had been at the curtain since the prologue's final page. He had not moved. The Hall did not measure time the way a hall in any of the six worlds measured time. The Hall measured time the way a hand measured a coin in its palm: slowly, by weight, with no need to look down.

He had been listening.

He had been listening, this whole book, to two heartbeats.

The first was the heartbeat of a young man at a chamber window in Valdris. The young man had, this evening, just laid his palm on a wooden horse and a wooden box that held two pieces of a Broken Crown. He had laid down. He was falling asleep.

The second was the heartbeat of a young woman at a camp at the edge of the Ember-Tree Reaches, on the world of Lythariel. The young woman had just placed a piece of polished silver back into a triangle of three things on a flat stone, and had sat down with her back against the trunk of an ember-tree. She was falling asleep.

The two heartbeats, this evening, were at the same rate.

Veyrion noted this.

He had been listening to the young man for four months. The young man's heartbeat was the heartbeat of a Sworn-becoming, slowly, the man the Codex had asked him to be.

He had been listening to the young woman longer. He had been listening to her since the morning the world had stopped turning, when she had been twelve. He had not, in the years between, known why.

This evening he understood.

He had not, in the years he had been listening, allowed himself to hear what he had been hearing.

This evening, he heard it.

He stood at the silent curtain.

He looked, very briefly, at the cloth doll missing one button eye that he had carried in his other hand for nine hundred years. He had not, in his standing at the curtain, set the doll down.

He held it.

He did not, this evening, set it down.

He would set it down. He did not yet know when.

He had, this evening, adjusted his hold.

The adjustment was the shift of a man who had been holding a thing very tightly and who allowed his fingers to loosen by a fraction.

The doll did not, in the loosening, fall.

Veyrion did not weep.

He said, very quietly, to the silent curtain: Two heartbeats at the same rate.

The curtain did not answer.

He had been talking to the curtain for nine hundred years. The curtain had not, in those nine hundred years, answered. He did not, this evening, expect an answer.

He stood at the curtain.

The two heartbeats slowed by the fraction of two people falling deeper into sleep.

His tears caught the starlight that came through the high window at the Hall's eastern wall.

He did not wipe them.

He waited.

He had been waiting for nine hundred years. He would wait what was still to be waited.

The fraction of a fingers'-loosening on the doll he had been holding for nine hundred years had, this evening, put him off-balance.

He waited, off-balance, at the curtain.

The Hall witnessed.

The Hall was, this evening, very quiet.

The two heartbeats slowed further into the cadence of two people sleeping.

Veyrion stood at the curtain.

He waited.