Please Stop Spreading Rumors About Me — They Keep Coming True Chapter 54: Two Who Loved the Lantern

The First Author ca to us in Greywater, and this ti she did not co to test us or warn us. She ca because she had watched a grieving father choose to keep his daughters, and sothing inside a thousand-year-old god had finally cracked.

She found us at our fire. And for the first ti she did not arrive with the ocean-weight that unwrote intentions and stilled the world. She ca almost... quietly. Almost like a person. She sat down between Tao Tao and Mu Chen like a tired traveler — the most powerful being alive, on a log, at our little fire — and for a while she just watched the flas.

"I have erased eleven thousand, four hundred and six people," she said finally, to no one, to the fire. "I rember every one. That is my curse, you understand — I am the one being who is not allowed to forget what I unwrite. I carry all of them. Eleven thousand chairs, empty in my mory, where the world’s went blank." Her ancient eyes were wet. "I told myself, every ti, that I was being rciful. That a clean erasing spared everyone the grief. And then your tired fraud sat down beside a broken man and proved that the grief cos anyway — that I never spared anyone anything. I only made it so they grieved in the dark, with no na to grieve, like Reed Hollow setting an empty chair for sixty years." Her voice cracked. "A thousand years. And I never once let myself sit with a grieving person and ask them whether they’d rather hurt and rember, or feel nothing and forget. I just... chose for them. The way you almost chose for that man today. I have been the Editor’s gentlest servant, and I never even knew it."

The fire crackled. None of us spoke.

And then the Scroll, on my shoulder, said sothing it had clearly been holding for a thousand years.

"You killed them," it said. Quietly. Not cruel. Just true, and ancient, and aching. "Su Yue. I watched you do it. I have hated you for a thousand years for it. You were the only other thing in the world that knew them, and you unwrote them, and I have been alone with their mory ever since, hating you across all that ti."

The First Author bowed her head.

"I know," she whispered. "I have hated too."

"But," the Scroll went on, and its voice broke, "Today I watched you sit at a fire and weep for eleven thousand empty chairs. And I realize — oh, I realize I’ve had it wrong for a thousand years. I thought I was alone in rembering them. I thought I was the only one who carried Su Yue." A long, shattering pause. "But you carried them too. The whole ti. In the worst way there is — as the one who had to take them, who could never forget doing it, who’s grieved them in total silence for a thousand years because you couldn’t even tell anyone why you were grieving. I had their mory. You had their death. And we’ve each been alone with our half of it, hating each other, for ten centuries." The sound it made was a thousand years of solitude breaking. "We loved the sa person. We’ve grieved the sa person. And we’ve done it separately, in the dark, when we could have — when we could have —"

"Carried it together," the First Author whispered.

And the two of them — the grieving god and the grieving Scroll, the one who erased the Lantern and the one who couldn’t save them, a thousand years of separate, silent, hating grief — finally, finally grieved Su Yue together, there at our little fire. I have never seen anything so sad, or so much like healing. The First Author told the Scroll things about Su Yue it had never known — small private monts, the way they’d laughed, a song they used to hum. The Scroll told the First Author what Su Yue had been like in the end, the things she’d never gotten to see. Two beings, sharing the only person they’d ever loved, after a thousand years of being unable to say the na aloud.

My whole family sat in the firelight and let them have it. Yun Shu’s hand found mine. Tao Tao was openly weeping. Even Xue Ningzhi — who had served this god, who had thought her a monster — watched with sothing cracked open in her face.

When the grief had run its course, the First Author looked up, and sothing had changed in her. Lightened. Resolved.

"I have spent a thousand years certain there was only one way," she said, and her voice was steadier than I’d ever heard it. "Erase the bright before they wake the dark. Grieve alone. Hold the line forever. And it was always a lie, all of it — I never held any line, I just made the world forget it was bleeding." She stood, and the ocean-weight was back, but different now. Not a wall. A force, aid sowhere new. "Lin Bo. I told you to prove that rembering could be made strong enough, and I would help you reach for the brightest gap. You are not ready yet — the Editor is awake, and growing, and you are still one light learning to burn. But I am done watching from a sealed box." Her ancient eyes found mine, and for the first ti they held not judgnt, but sothing like hope with a spine in it. "I am the one who unwrote Su Yue. So I am the one who should help write them ho. When you are ready — when you are bright enough — I will not rely permit it. I will stand beside you over that gap, and I will help you bring back the person I have spent a thousand years unable to forgive myself for taking. Whatever it costs. Even if the Editor takes us both."

The Scroll made a sound of pure, shattered, thousand-year hope.

"You an it," it whispered. "After everything. You’ll help bring them back."

"I have wanted nothing else," the First Author said softly, "for a thousand years. I just never let myself believe it was possible. Your fraud in the stupid pants taught otherwise." The faintest ghost of sothing almost like a smile. "It is a very annoying thing, to have one’s entire cosmology overturned by a man who cannot put out a candle."

"You get used to it," said Ji Lan dryly, raising her cup, and even the First Author’s mouth twitched.

I looked around our fire — the fraud, the debunker, the artist, the swordswoman, the superfan, the freed weapon, the converted chessmaster, the grieving ghost, and now the loneliest god in the world, all of us drawn together by the simple, stubborn, world-changing act of refusing to forget — and I felt the shape of the endga settling over us. Not yet. Not for a while. But coming.

"Then here’s the plan," I said quietly. "We get bright enough. We bring ho every small light we can, and we grow the rembering, and we learn everything there is to learn about how this works. And then, when I’m a light too big for even the deepest dark to swallow —" I looked up, through the smoke, at the gap at the top of the sky, where the Lantern of the Nine Skies waited to co ho "— we go get Su Yue. All of us. Together. And we show the Editor that the brightest light doesn’t cast the deepest dark." I picked up the noodle pot. "It ends it."

Above us, the gap flickered. Warm now. Almost welcoming.

And far beyond it, in the deep dark, the Editor watched a grieving god join the side of rembering, and felt, for the first ti in a very long ti, sothing it had truly never expected to feel.

Outnumbered.

The war to rember had just won the most important soul of all.

And the Lantern’s long night was, at last, beginning to end.