Chapter 9: The Seat

We descended together. I have told you that. We came down from the ridge in the morning light and the valley was below us and the sky was above us and the thin place waited where I had found it and neither of us looked up. I have been invisible for a very long time. I chose it. I have told you that too. The invisibility was a decision I made after the wars, when the world no longer required me to be seen and I discovered that not being seen was easier than being seen, the way not speaking is easier than speaking, the way not feeling is easier than feeling. Except I could not stop feeling. The flaw prevented that. So I stopped being seen instead, and the stopping became a habit, and the habit became a principle, and the principle became the shape of my existence. I was invisible in the crater. I was invisible in the settlement. I was invisible on the road and in the village with the banner and in the river valley and in every moment of this telling, visible only to Hul, present only to the one being who watched me build myself from dust each morning and did not look away. I do not know how to tell you what that means to a being who has spent centuries choosing not to be seen. I do not know if there are words for the particular terror of deciding, after all this time, to let the world look at you. The seat was finished. The stone had been set and smoothed and the three steps leading up to it had been fitted and leveled and the surface was flat and wide and the back of it rose to a height that would…