The Wound

The Wound is the pale scar that has lain across the sky of the Reach since the morning after the Sundering Night, when the Cathedral of the Hymns fell in the lake-country of central Varrow and the land for twenty miles about it turned to the black glass of the Glassmere. It may be seen from the fjords of the Hask to the harbours of the Tidebound League. In three hundred and twelve years it has not moved, narrowed, nor closed. What it is, no one can honestly say; what it means, every people of the Reach says differently.

Appearance and Measure

By day it shows as a thin, milky line, like a scar long healed, and cloud hides it as cloud hides the sun. By night it glows faintly, a shade brighter than the dark around it. In winter it brightens; at midwinter, in a clear sky, travellers swear it outshines the stars it crosses and lays a grey cast upon snow. This winter brightening is the one change in the Wound upon which all accounts agree, and the one that none can explain.

The Pale Choir keeps yearly measures of its light at Ostrovane. The most careful series was that of Cantor Anselm Vey, who recorded the Wound's brightness each midwinter from 260 AS until 289 AS, when his measure-books were taken into the keeping of the Seventh Circle; he published nothing further and died some years later in obscurity. The Collegium of Ash in Saverra makes its own measures with brass instruments and disputes the Choir's figures, as it disputes most things the Choir says; its ledgers are not open to the archive. Between confiscation on the one side and secrecy on the other, the honest student is left with very little.

I write down what the instrument shows. If another man would know why, let him build a better instrument.

Names and Beliefs

In Varrow it is the Wound, or, plainly, the Scar. The Hask name it the Cold Seam and count it a mark of the world's tearing, not of any god. The Khaddan of the Ember Steppe call it the White Road, and hold that horses shy beneath it at midwinter — though whether from fear or from habit, their own riders disagree. Sailors of the League use it to check a compass on a clear night, and spit when it shows through cloud.

To the Pale Choir the Wound is no scar but an eye: the opening eye of a god coming slowly into the world, whose sight, the cantors preach, is clearest in the dark months. On this reading the Choir was founded in 58 AS, and its head, Archcantor Ilyth the Seventh, has drawn the lesson plainly: the Glassmere is holy ground, and the Choir its appointed keeper. The Regency has not answered the claim, having nearer troubles; the answer, when it comes, will not be a small one.

Most people do not worship the Wound; they live under it, as under weather. A Varrow farmer reads its brightness against the coming winter and lays in peat accordingly. Mothers in the north bid their children not to stare at it overlong — why, they could not tell you; their mothers told them the same. In the Hask, certain clans will not speak of it after dark, and none will sing under the open sky in deep winter, for songs, it is known, draw the Unquiet. The old saint-signs are still made when it shows through a rent in the cloud, by folk who can no longer name the saints the signs belong to.

Bright Wound, hard frost; dim Wound, thaw. Bright at midwinter: bar the door.

The Wound, the Gods and the Dead

The old gods fell silent on the same night the Wound opened; whether it sealed them away, or only marks the place where they went, no record settles. The Unquiet rose in the years after, and common belief ties them to its light, though the ledgers of the Lantern-Wardens show risings in every season and under every sky, and the Wardens, neutral by oath, hold no doctrine in the matter. Ashcraft is the third thing laid at the Wound's door. The Choir calls the burning of memory a prayer to the Eye; the Collegium calls that unproven; the Hask, who exile the Hollowed, call the argument itself a southern sickness. The archive notes only that all three — the silence, the risings, the craft — came after the Wound, and none before it.

What the Archive Cannot Say

Of what the Wound is, the archive has no account that can be proved: a scar where something passed, a door left ajar, an eye, a candle lit in another room. Nothing has been sent to it and returned, for it hangs beyond all reach, and so each age has written its own fear upon it. For the winter brightening there are three answers in common currency — the clear cold air of the dark months, the doctrine of the Eye, and the grandmothers' answer, which is that the year is dying, and everything pale burns brightest before it goes out. The archive records the disagreement and declines to choose. Three hundred and twelve years is a long time to watch a thing that does not change, and the Wound has been watched every night of them. The watching, at least, is certain.