THE LIBRARY · THE VALE

Only the Bill

A skeptic's tract arguing there was no god, no breaking, and no echoes — only grief, bad air off the barrows, and a trade that needs you to believe in ghosts so it can sell you stones. The third telling of the Sundering, and the one nobody in the trade will sell you.

I have stood in Vallen's Barrow at midnight and heard exactly what you would hear in any cold stone room with a dead draft and a head full of other men's stories: nothing. A creak. My own pulse. The wind doing what wind does in a broken hall. Ask who profits from a haunted stone and you will not need a god to explain the Vale. The Ledger cannot price a scrap of old bronze unless you believe the scrap is haunted, so the scrap is haunted. The College cannot draw students to a draughty hall to study wind, so the wind is a god's last word. The Mourners cannot beg bread for closing a barrow that was only ever quiet, so the barrow is called full of the unquiet dead. Grief does the rest — a widow hears her husband in a gust because she would give her teeth to, and the man at the next table, who has a crate of 'Old Work' to move, agrees that she certainly did. And the green cough the salvors get, the shakes, the mind gone soft? I have watched a relic-runner go grey and strange and forget his own children. I have also watched what he ate, what he drank from those green-glazed cups, and how long he slept in the bad, sealed air of the deep galleries. You do not need a curse to ruin a man you have already poisoned. You need a curse to sell him the cure. I am not brave and I am not a fool. I only notice that every soul who swears the dead walk has a stone to sell, a hall to fill, or a bowl to fill — and that no one has ever shown me the god, only the bill.

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