Chapter 4: The Listener

The extraordinary does not stay extraordinary. I have seen this across more years than I care to count. The mortals panic, and then they adjust, and then the impossible becomes ordinary, and then they complain about it the way they complain about the weather. He frightened them for three days. He confused them for two more. And then he was the large creature by the wall, and the children played nearer to him than their mothers liked, and the old woman brought him water each morning without being asked, and someone hung a blanket over the wall behind him when the nights turned cold, and no one admitted to doing it. This is what mortals do. They absorb. They incorporate. They find the edges of a thing and file them smooth until it fits inside the shape of their lives. I have watched them do this with floods and ruins and the bones of creatures that should not have existed. I have watched them build houses on battlefields and plant gardens in craters. They are relentless in their ordinariness, and I say this not as a failing. It may be the most remarkable thing about them. _I have felt them do this for centuries. That is the particular cruelty of my existence, if I may call it cruelty without self-pity. I feel everything they feel. The absorption. The adjustment. The filing-smooth. I have been inside the weather of a mother holding a newborn child and inside the weather of a soldier watching his village burn and inside the weather of an old man who sat on a hill and watched the sun set and felt, for no reason he could name, that the world was acceptable. I have felt all of it. Every raindrop, every ripple, every small reshaping of…