The Thing I Did Not Say On Threnn

Kindling · page 23 withdrawn

Greetings again, my dear readers, page twenty three, out of the case and into my hand and on its way to the fire, the one I have been dreading since before I built the ninety one slots.

This is the Threnn page.

You already know the rule. A thing can only harm you if you have not said it out loud. Every Ovai on that wet green world grows what they call a Kept out of exactly whatever they have swallowed, and they talk constantly, to fruit sellers and children and livestock, as a matter of civic hygiene.

Ÿssa asked me twice. Once over a meal I never did learn the name of, and once at the transit dock, quietly. Whatever I was carrying, she said, she would sit with however long it took me to say it badly, because everybody says the first one badly.

I said no both times.

And here is the part I did not write down when I wrote this page. I have the sentence half formed. I have had it half formed since the transit dock lifted off. It starts, near as I can get it, with

Well.

It starts.

That is as far as I am going to take you, my dear readers. This is not artistry. This is just where the sentence stops, with the fire already going in the grate and my hand already over the slot it came from. I only have mine, and mine has never once made it all the way to the end of itself, not on Threnn, not here.

That is the whole of it. This is the one page in the entire case where the cure was sitting across the table from me with an offer already made, twice, and all it required of me was the same thing every Ovai on that world does before breakfast. I did not do it. I am about to burn the only written record that I almost did.

I am doing it anyway.

The page catches slower than the last one did. Wet paper burns slower, and I do not know why it still smells faintly of somewhere green, however many milgalaxals of ship time later, but it does, right up until it does not, and then Threnn is thirteen unnamed people, one rule, and a woman who asked twice, and nothing else, anywhere, that remembers she asked.

Is there truth in their legend? No one knows. My aim is never to prove or disprove the tales I come across. Just to report them to you, my dear readers, on the pages where I still can.

This is Lu'kifær Morkinstar. Page twenty three, withdrawn.