The Cairn-Scratch

scratched into a wayfarer's cairn-stone, high on the pass road; the letters are a traveler's, uneven, cut with a knife-point over what must have been a long cold hour

Words scratched into the flat capstone of a Grey Walker's road-cairn on the climb to the Rampart passes, by a traveler who lay a night in the cold and watched the sky over the sky-city and would not let the next walker pass without the warning: the lights up there are not stars, and they move.

WALKER — add your stone and read mine.

I lay here a night with a bad ankle and nothing to do but watch the dark over the Rampart where the sky-city hangs. I will tell you what no one told me. Those lights are not stars. Stars hold still and these do not. They move — slow, and with purpose, out from the city and OUT over the wastes, night after night, and some of them come back and some do not, and where the ones that do not go, the outriders stop coming home. I counted. I am not a fool and I had all night to count.

The sky is doing WORK up there, walker, and the work comes down. Do not camp under the Rampart's shadow. Do not follow a light you think is a fallen star. And if you meet a pale one on the road who tells you the sky grieves and keeps to itself — he is lying, or he does not know, and I cannot tell you which is worse. Add your stone. Go by day. — a walker who went by night, once, and will not again