Chapter 10: To Follow

I went to the crater because I needed to know why. I have told you this. It was the first honest thing I said, and I return to it now because I want you to understand what happened to the question. It was not answered. I did not discover why Hul fell. I did not discover what hand cast him or what offense earned the casting or whether the casting was punishment or delivery or something I do not have a word for. The seal held. The sky did not explain itself. The stars he looked at every night looked back with the same indifference they showed every other creature on this world, and if there was a message in that indifference, it was not written in a language I could read. I went to the crater because I needed to know why, and I left the settlement carrying a different question entirely. Not: why did he fall? But: what grows from the place where he landed? I did not know the answer to that question either. But I had seen the first green pushing through the cracked earth, and I had felt the first warmth spreading through a settlement that had forgotten what warmth was, and I had watched a man kneel in the dust and offer his entire life to a being who did not want it and could not return it and accepted it anyway because accepting was easier than refusing and the difference between those two things was not yet visible. It would become visible. But that is a later story. _This one ends on a road, with a small number of people walking in the same direction as a creature from beyond the stars who did not think of himself as leading and did not…