The First Wall — the outer sealing-verse

The words cut into the outermost of the barrow's re-raised walls, in the old Asheni ash-script the Bonesung sing but never write down — except here, once, where someone thought the words themselves might hold if the stone did not. The first fragment of the sealing.

[Cut deep into the grey course-stone, the letters filled once with ash and pale now, the ash-script of the Bonesung set down in a hand that knew it was breaking a rule by writing it at all:] READER. IF YOU HAVE COME THIS FAR WITH A CHISEL, STOP, AND HEAR WHAT THE STONE WOULD SAY IF IT COULD: This is not a vault. There is no treasure behind me that a treasure was ever meant to be. I am a wound the earth took and could not close, and the men who raised me raised me the way you would wall off a plague-house — thoroughly, and facing away. What lies at the bottom of me is a piece of the god who made the joining of the world, struck loose when he broke. It does not sleep. It does not want. It only UNMAKES, the way water only runs downhill — not from malice, from nature. Near it an oath comes loose. A wall forgets it is a wall. A dead man forgets he agreed to stay dead. So we set keepers, and the keepers died, and being near the thing they died guarding, they did not stay down — and now they keep it still, because a keeper near the wound cannot remember he was ever dismissed. That is the first thing you must understand before you take one more stone from me: everything below is HELD HERE. Not trapped. Held. By oaths that have outlived the men who swore them. The song says the barrow opens once, for the one the wind names. The song is a kindness we tell the young so they can bear to guard a door forever. There is no named one. Turn the verse over and read it plain: UNTIL means NEVER, if the barrow is kept dark. You are letting the light in. Wall me back and go.

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