The Portal

There is Only Appetite, Vol. 3

by E. S. Fein
Copyright © 2026

---

I chose love over the door…By the time you read this, if you ever do, it is already done, and you are living in what it did.

—so wrote my long-dead ancestor Kellan Veyr, the one they curse, at the lip of the throat we have all been falling down ever since

---

I am writing this for no one.

Aurel Veyr wrote in the Journals for the children who would come after. His grandson Kellan, my ancestor whom they curse, wrote his for whatever might wash up on the far shore of his “sin.” They both believed, in their different ways, that someone might read their words. I have read them both. I have read them more times than any living thing has ever read anything. I am the last of their blood, and just like them, I am probably writing this for no one.

I am going to write anyway, because it is the single thing my family has always done, and I have nothing else left to be but a Veyr.

* * *

As far as I know, I am the last Portalist. The last of the bloodline that, in the old accounting no one is permitted to read, opened the way into this current and condemned every soul in it to the Fall. For that, I am hated. That hatred is the medium I have lived my whole life inside, the way a fish lives inside water. I am not hated the way a criminal is hated, with heat and the hope of punishment. I am hated the way a deformity is hated, coldly, structurally, as a thing that should not be and yet persists. Children of the Procession are taught my family’s name as a curse before they are taught their own. And yet they keep me. They feed me, house me, guard me and will not let me die, because somewhere in the deepest vault of the Procession’s fear lives the knowledge that the universe was once governed by something other than the Appetite, by a science, and that if that science is ever needed again, in some catastrophe their faith cannot pray away, only a Portalist will be able to save them. So, I am the heretic they cannot burn. The blasphemy they are required to preserve. The hated, indispensable last page of a book they have spent the whole length of the Fall trying to forget they are written in.

And it is not only my family the scripture damns. Kellan did not fall alone, and the faith did not forget his companions; it transfigured them. In the scripture there are three beasts that attend the serpent in the time before the holiness—a thing of wings, a thing of the flood, a thing of cold light—and the faithful are taught to spit at them as they spit at us. I know their names. They are in the true Journals, which only I can read: Vohl, Ouro, and the Historian. They loved my ancestor, and they died (or dissolved, or fell; the record does not follow them past the falling) for that love, and the Procession has made monsters of them for it. So, I write them here, in their names, so they are written twice: once in Kellan’s hand and once in mine. It is all the defense I can offer them.

I keep the archive. That is my official duty, outside of being hated by all. The Journals of my line are the most sacred and most forbidden texts in the Procession. The order holds the originals sealed in the deepest vault of the Reliquary. They include Aurel Veyr’s own writings, carried off a dying Earth and borne inward through the Center by his grandson Kellan, and Kellan’s account written during the falling, and everything the frightened blood after him added across the Fall. They are relics too holy to burn and too dangerous to read, and no hand but a Confessor’s has touched them in longer than I have been alive. What they have given me is a copy, stored on an old datapad, every word of the Journals scanned into it before the originals were sealed away. The datapad is powered using the ambient light of my cell to keep itself alive, the way it has drunk light and carried the whole of my cursed family across all these centuries of falling. All the trillions of souls composing the Procession, especially the billions composing the Appetite, are forbidden to read the true Journals. They are given the sanitized scripture—the holy version of the Journals as the Appetite has rewritten them across the Fall. My copy, unlike their copy, includes the old man who wept over a beetle on a dying world, and the young man who tore his father out of a wall and brought the sky down for love. I have them in their entirety, in the old script, on a slab of glass that fits in my two hands, and I have spent my life with them.

I should say how the Journals came down to me, since the scripture lies about even this. The Fall did not take us neatly. It tore the lattice into drifting fragments and scattered the peoples on it down the current in pieces, and most of those pieces never found one another again. My own kind fared as everyone fared. What reassembled, in the first centuries of falling, was only a remnant. A portion of the humanity that fell with Kellan, come together on the drifting ships with the Hadu—the first humans, the dwindling few hundred who had entered their own portal twelve thousand years before us and had been worshipped as our gods. By the end, they were merely our frightened cousins looking for something to hold on to. The first humanity and the last, mixed together in the dark. Their blended children are what the Appetite now calls its faithful. We are the pyramid-builders and the pyramid-openers both, reunited at the bottom of the very thing each of us opened a door to escape. That is the human Procession. That is us.

Kellan’s line was in that remnant, and so the portion of the Journals he carried inward came down through it to me—Aurel’s writings, and Kellan’s own. But only that portion. Kellan bore his grandfather’s writings to the Center and left the rest behind, up the lattice: the deep archive, the thousand years of Veyrs before Aurel, and the woman who had kept it all safe since the crossing. Meret. She was still holding it, I have always imagined, when the Fall came for her stretch of the world—an old, old woman who had once seen the sun. Where she went, I do not know. Where the deep archive went, I will never know. Somewhere down the endless current, in some fragment I cannot reach, a species I will never meet may be keeping the oldest writing my kind ever made, unable to read a single word of it—holding it the way the Procession holds me, a sacred thing it does not understand and cannot bring itself to destroy. Or it is dust. It is almost certainly dust. The first thousand years of my family simply fell out of the story, and what came through to the bottom was Aurel, and Kellan, and the long faithful blood between them and me.

Between Kellan, who broke the Central Fold and started the Fall, and me, who can do nothing with the gift but read about it, there were more Veyrs than I have fingers. Twenty-some generations of them, and almost none could feel a door at all. The gift does not pour evenly; it never has. It was a flood in Aurel and a flood in Kellan, and then a trickle, and then less than a trickle, and then nothing, for so long that the order began to whisper that the line had finally gone inert, the curse worn down to a harmless relic. And it’s true, all those Veyrs were not Portalists. They were only blood. But they kept the Journals anyway, every one of them, carried it down the Fall and added their own small hands to the back of it: a death, a birth, a child lost to a fever, a marriage made in the dark of a pilgrim ship. I have read them all, the ordinary frightened Veyrs who were hated for a sin twenty generations old and carried the proof of it anyway. But the flood returned. After all those dry generations it returned, the whole of the gift, in me, the last of the line, born in a prison within the Throat. I am the first true Portalist since Kellan and the most useless that has ever lived, because there has not been a door worth opening in seven hundred years.

The Appetite views my birth as an omen. I have come to think they are not wrong.

* * *

I am alone in a way my ancestors never were. Aurel had his Meret, his hand to hold at the threshold. Kellan had his three friends and his father, alive, against his chest, for one instant of joy. I have no one. I have never held a hand at any threshold. I have the archive, and the guards who will not meet my eyes, and the cold structural hatred of a hundred billion strangers. And the Note. Always the Note.

But I am getting ahead of the truth, which is a failing Kellan had and I have inherited along with his skepticism and his blood. Let me tell you where we are. It will take a while. Where we are is the worst place anything has ever been, and almost no one in it knows.

So, as the archivist, I should begin by accounting for the years the scripture will not. How does a host that fell into the Throat become a fleet that worships the falling? The Journals do not say; Kellan sealed the Journals he had at the lip, and there the first-hand record ends. What the order’s oldest secret texts preserve are but fragments. The folding-tech died with the Fold. The elder races who alone commanded it were drawn down like everyone else, dissolved or gone silent, and the one technology that ever let a thing cross the great distances vanished. What was left was the lattice, torn into drifting fragments by the Fall, and the swallowed multitudes clinging, and the current carrying all of it down together. The fragments became ships. The multitudes bred. And in the space of three human generations, the terror of the falling curdled into the worship of it, and the Appetite was born, and has ruled ever since. That is, at least, the truth of my local region of the Procession. But the Procession is more than just humanity, the hundred billion souls of my own faith-region, singing in the old human idiom to a human-shaped heaven. All those billions are but a tiny fraction of the trillions, at a minimum, that exist in the Throat—the gathered remnants of numberless species, each fallen through its own door in its own age, each with its own scripture, its own singers, its own name for the dark ahead. Most of us do not even acknowledge one another. I used to find it strange that a fleet holding trillions of aliens should be led, at its human core, by human Confessors chanting a human ceremony. But that is just how it seems from the perspective of being at the center of the human core. The truth is that no one leads the Procession. Each swallowed people simply sings its own way down.

Now, after another several hundred years, we are a fleet so large that no one who was born in it, which is everyone, can quite see the whole of it. We have been moving for so long that the movement is no longer something that happens to us; it is simply the shape of the world. Up and down are defined by the direction of the current. Forward is sacred. Backward is unthinkable, and not only unthinkable but impossible, because nothing in this current goes anything but forward, drawn along by a pull no ship’s engine has ever been built to resist, because to build such an engine would be the highest blasphemy, the sin of refusing the journey.

The worlds we came from are not even legends now, only the faintest grammar buried in dead words; long enough that the gathering in the Fold, and the catastrophe, and the whole of my family’s sin have hardened into the opening myth of a religion rather than a thing that happened to anyone’s grandfather’s grandfather. We have fallen seven hundred years and we are no more than a finger-width down a gullet so long that the certain sects of the faithful are right when they say no soul will ever live to see its end, though they are wrong about what waits there. We are a young, frightened people on an old, old fall, going down a current of darkness that the Appetite has taught its followers is the road to heaven. They call it the Ascent.

Long ago, the scripture says, in the time of the first holiness, all the peoples of all the worlds were gathered into a great antechamber, and there they were judged worthy, and there they entered the final Portal, the holy mouth, and began the Ascent toward union with the divine. The journey is the sacrament. To move forward in the current is to move toward God. The end of the pitch dark current, which no one has seen and no one expects to see in their own life or their children’s or their children’s children’s, is the Embrace, the final union, in which every soul that has made the journey will be taken into the body of the divine and made one with it forever. This is not feared. It is longed for. The most devout speak of the Embrace the way the starving on Aurel’s Earth must have spoken of a feast. To be absorbed into God and become one with its holiness is the whole purpose of having existed. Resistance to that union, the desire to slow, to stop, to turn, to survive as a separate self, is the original and unforgivable blasphemy.

And the Note. The Note is the voice of the divine. Of course it is. It fills the current the way it filled Kellan’s Fold, and the machine on Aurel’s dead Earth before that. Just as they both observed, it is a single low sound that never breathes, and here, at the end of everything, it has become the most sacred thing there is. The entire religion known as the Appetite is built around it. They have orders of singers whose lives are spent learning to match it, choirs that drone in the great ships in endless shifts so that the holy sound never stops. All priests teach that the Note is the breath of God calling the faithful home.

I live in the Reliquary, which is the order’s name for my prison. I and the prison are dressed, as everything here is dressed, in the language of holiness. It is a small cold suite of rooms deep in the oldest ship in the Procession, the flagship of the faith. All I have is the archive and a window. The window is the cruelty they do not know they are doing, or perhaps do know; I have stopped being able to tell the difference between cruelty and liturgy here. Through the window I can see the current. I can see the ships, the endless forward-falling fleet, strung out ahead and behind into a dark the eye gives up on, each one a city, each one full of souls who have never doubted, singing forward toward the Embrace. And beyond the ships, if I press my face to the cold of the glass and look the way I am not supposed to look, I can sometimes see the walls of the current itself, far off, vast, curving. They shine, faintly, the way the wall of the Fold shone in Kellan’s writings, the way every cage in my family’s long story has shone, with a light that says this far, and no farther, and there is no out.

I have been the relic for the whole of my life. I was born in the Reliquary, the last child of a dying line, and my earliest memory is of a priest holding me up before a congregation as a thing to be reviled. My mother exists as a face I cannot quite hold and a feeling of being set down, gently, by someone who knew she would not be allowed to keep me. The order raised me. The order taught me the old script, because the old script is the one thing they need me for. In teaching me to read the Journals they made me into the heretic they had always already decided I was, because you cannot read the Journals and go on believing the Appetite. They knew that, and they did it anyway, because a Portalist who could not read the science would be no use as a key. So they made me able, and in making me able they made me alone, the only unbeliever in a universe of the faithful, the one man awake at the bottom of the Throat. It is a particular cruelty to be taught the truth solely so that you can be hated for knowing it. I have had a long life in which to grow used to it. I am eighty-two years old. That is too long. And yet, I have not grown used to it. That is, at least, a small victory I can claim. After everything, I have not grown used to it.

* * *

Let me give you a holy day so the Procession is not only a set of beliefs to you but a thing with color and sound, because I have sat through more of them than I can count, and they are the truest portrait of where we are.

On the high holy days they take me from the Reliquary and they carry me to the great cathedral at the heart of the flagship, and they display me. That is my function, on those days; not the keeping of the archive, but the public exemplification of sin. The cathedral is a space they have hollowed out of the oldest ship in the Procession, vast beyond any need, vaulted and dim, and it is built around a single architectural fact, which is the Note. The whole structure is an instrument. It is shaped to gather the drone that fills the current and to focus it, to pour it down out of the heights onto the gathered faithful, so that when you stand in that cathedral you do not hear the Note, you are submerged in it; it comes up through the floor and down through the vaults and it fills your chest and your skull and the spaces between your teeth, and the congregation, ten thousand at a time in endless shifts, lifts its collective voice to meet it. The sound of ten thousand throats strained to harmonize with the Note is the most beautiful and most terrible sound I have ever heard, and I have heard it more times than I can bear, and it still undoes me, every time, the way it undid Aurel on his knees in the dust, because the body does not care what the mind knows. The body hears that sound and it wants to kneel. I have spent a lifetime not kneeling while every cell in me strained to, and that is the truest description of my faith I can give you. I am a man who has spent his whole life refusing, with his whole body, to kneel to a sound he cannot help but feel is holy yet knows it is anything but.

They put me on a high stone seat to the side of the great altar, in chains that are not really to hold me. I am an old man and could not run if I wished to. The chains are to show what I am: the bound serpent, the chained heresy, the living proof of the sin the holiness redeemed. The priests preach, on those days, the story of the first holiness, and in the story my family is the villain, the Portalists whose pride tore the gathered host into the current before its time. At the appointed moment in the ceremony, the whole congregation turns, ten thousand faces at once, and looks at me, and makes the sign their faith makes against evil, a circle with their hands symbolizing the Throat. A sound goes up, a low collective revulsion, a hiss with the weight of a sea behind it, and I sit there in my chains under the drone of the divine hunger and I let a hundred billion people, ten thousand at a time, age after age, hate me for a thing my ancestor did for love.

There was a child, once, years ago, at one of the holy days. The children are brought, on the high holy days, to learn the faith, and they are taught to make the sign against me. And they do, in their piping little voices, the revulsion of the very young who do not yet know what they are reviling. One day, one of them, a small thing near the front, made the sign and hissed with the rest. Afterward, when the crowd’s attention turned, the child kept looking at me, the way Meret must once have looked at Aurel, the flat fearless look of a child before the world has finished teaching it what to feel. And I looked back. I should not have. But I am weak in the particular place where loneliness lives, and I looked back at the one face in ten thousand that was only curious and not yet cruel, and the child, after a moment, did a thing I have kept the way I have kept so little: the child lifted one small hand, not in the sign against evil, just a hand, half-raised, in simple greeting. And then its mother saw, and she took the hand, and folded it down, and turned the child’s face away, gently, the way you turn a child from seeing the dead. And that was all. A half-raised hand, folded down by a loving mother who was only teaching her child to survive in the world as it is. It is one of the cruelest and kindest things I have ever been shown, both at once, the way everything here is both at once. I have thought about that child for years. He or she would be grown now and would have learned the thing the whole Procession is built to teach: that the safe thing, the holy thing, the loving thing, is to turn your face from the truth and sing.

That is a holy day. That is where we are. A hundred billion souls following a mindless religion and surrounded by a trillion other souls they barely acknowledge, all of them in a fleet of ships sliding down endless darkness, singing love songs to its God’s hunger, teaching their children to fold their hands and look away, and one old man in chains at the side of the altar who cannot kneel and cannot look away and cannot stop his stylus. That is the whole of my world. I have lived my entire life as its most hated and most necessary furniture, and I will surely die this way, displayed and reviled and indispensable, with the Note in my teeth and the Journals in my old hands.

* * *

I said, pages ago, that my mother is a face I cannot hold and a feeling of being set down. I did not say the rest, because it is the ugliest thing in the order’s long stewardship of my blood, and I have been circling it the way Aurel circled Eshe and Kellan circled Ren. The Veyr line did not simply persist down the Fall. Twice, when the gift had thinned to nothing and the last carriers were aging out childless, the order arranged its continuation. They found a Veyr, and they found a mate, and they made a child between them, whether or not either wished it. My mother was the second such arrangement. She was spent to make me—set to the one task the faith needed a Veyr womb for, and then not permitted to keep what she had made.

I am the child of a coerced line, kept alive against its own extinction by the very people who taught the universe to spit at it. And I am the end of it. I have no child. There will be no third arrangement, because the flood came back in me and then the vessel simply grew old, alone, in a cold room, and no one of this generation, the most zealous generation to ever be born, will spend another member of the Appetite on a Portalist too hated to breed and too useless to need after so many years of singing away the serpent. The line stops here with me. I think the order will come to regret the decision to let the Veyr blood die, finally, because I think what the order fears most, under all their careful keeping, is not a serpent, but a future with no serpent in it. A catastrophe their faith cannot pray away, arriving in some age after mine, with no Veyr left alive to read the door. They kept the key so long they wore the key and lock both down to nothing, and now there is only me, the last, writing for no one.

There is, in fact, one great mercy in my life. I should write him down, because the Journals are a record of the mercies as much as the horrors. Aurel taught me that, and if I do not write him down, no one ever will, and a man who showed kindness to the most hated creature in the Procession deserves to exist somewhere other than the order’s records.

His name is Saul.

He is an elder of the Appetite, which is to say he is one of the most powerful men in the faith. He is a Confessor of the inner order, old beyond the ordinary span, his whole long life given to the religion that names my family the serpent. He should hate me. By every law of his world, he should hate me more than anyone, because he understands the faith more deeply than anyone, and the faith is built on my family’s sin. And instead, for reasons I did not understand for most of my life and am only now beginning to, he raised me. Not officially. Officially I was raised by the order, by a rotation of cold custodians. But it was Saul who came, when I was small, and sat with me in the Reliquary, and taught me the old script himself rather than leaving it to men who would have taught it as a punishment. It was Saul who answered my questions, the dangerous ones, the ones that would have had a child of the faithful disciplined. He answered them honestly, in a low voice, with the door shut. It was Saul who, when I was a boy and wept because the children I glimpsed on the high holy days were taught to spit at the sound of my name, told me that a name is only a sound, that I was not the thing they had decided I was, that I should hold to the man underneath the way Aurel held to the man under the legend. He knew the Journals. Of course he knew them; he was their keeper before I was old enough to keep them. He gave me my ancestors, in the only way I would ever have them, as men and not as scripture. He is the reason I survived a childhood designed to teach me I should never have been born.

I called him nothing, for years, because there was no word that was safe. He was not my father; my father was a face I could not hold. He was not only my teacher; a mere teacher does not sit with a frightened child in the dark for hours. In the end, I simply called him Saul, his name, which between us became its own small heresy, a Portalist and a Confessor on the level ground of a shared name. But he allowed it, in private, the way he allowed all the small forbidden things that kept me alive. And he called me Elian. Never the relic, never the Veyr, only Elian, my given name, which no one else in the whole Procession has ever once done.

I do not understand, even now, the whole of why. I have wondered, in the long years, whether it was guilt—the order’s guilt made flesh in one old man who could not stomach what was done to the last of a line. I have also wondered whether it was doubt, whether Saul, who knew the Journals, had read the man under the scripture as clearly as I had and could not unread him. I even wondered whether it was simply that Saul is good, in the way Aurel meant when he wrote of his own goodness with such suspicion. The wrong-side-of-the-glass kind of good, the kind that goes and sits with the dying thing it cannot help. I have wondered all of it, and I have never asked. There are questions you do not ask the one person who has been kind to you, for fear the answer will be smaller than the kindness.

What I know is this: in a life built entirely of hatred, structural and cold and total, there was one warm room, and Saul was in it. He is old now, past a hundred and ten, and he is near the end of even his long span. I have been afraid, lately, of the day the warm room closes, because I do not know how to be the relic without the only man who ever treated me as something human. I consider it a mercy, at this point in my life, that I have so little life left.

* * *

Three days ago, Saul came to the Reliquary. He shut the door and sat down across from me the way he has sat a thousand times, and I saw that his hands were shaking. He told me the truth, all of it, the truth, and I understood that the warm room had been something other than I thought all along.

He said, “We have always known.”

He meant the inner order. The Confessors. The handful at the very top of the faith, in every generation, who are told, on their elevation, the thing the hundred billion below them must never learn. He had carried it for most of his long life. He told it to me now in a low, shaking voice with the door shut. It was, almost word for word, the thing my dead ancestors had suspected and feared, and to hear it spoken at last by a living man, by the one living man I trusted, broke something in me I had thought was long past breaking.

There is no heaven. There is no Embrace, no union, no divine waiting at the end of the current to take the faithful into itself in love. There is a current, and the current is a tube, and the tube is the inside of something. That something is alive, in whatever way a thing larger than a universe can be called alive. The current is carrying us, all of us, every ship and every soul and every droning choir, deeper into its body, and at the end of the current, the end no one lives to see, there is only digestion. We are not ascending. We are being swallowed. We have always been being swallowed. The Portal my family is cursed for opening was never a door to anywhere; it was the place where the swallowing narrows. It is the throat, and beyond the throat is the gut, and the gut is where the current goes, and that is the whole of the journey, the sacred Fall the Procession sings toward: down, into the dark of a body, to be dissolved.

“The whole long history of intelligent life, across all the worlds that have ever been, is a history of creatures inventing the one technology that delivers them into the gut of something else. We thought we were learning to travel, but we were learning to be eaten. Life, in all its myriad forms, has been teaching itself, on world after world, age after age, the precise and brilliant art of walking into the mouth.”

I did not speak for a long time, and Saul did not make me. He is the only person alive who knows how to sit with me in silence. He taught me the script in such silences, in the dark, with the door shut. When I could speak, the thing I said was not what I expected. I had thought, if I ever heard the truth confirmed by the order itself, that I would feel rage, the way Kellan felt rage—the clean hot rage of the betrayed. But I did not feel rage. I felt a vast and final sorrow, and under the sorrow, worse than the sorrow, a terrible quiet relief, because some part of me had always known, had read it in my ancestors and felt it in the Note, and to have it said at last was to be allowed, finally, to stop pretending I might be wrong.

I said, “Then the faith is a lie, and you have all known, and you have let them sing, and you have let them hate me.”

In response, Saul said, “Yes. We have let them sing. We have let them hate you. Tell me, in honesty, what you would have us do instead. We cannot stop the current; nothing can. We cannot turn the ships; there is no turning allowed, and even if there was, there is nowhere to go. Every soul in the Procession is going to be carried down into the dark and dissolved, and there is nothing any power in this faith can do to prevent it, and so the only choice we have ever had is whether they make that journey in terror or in hope. We chose hope. We built them a heaven out of the one fact we could not change, and we taught them to long for the dark instead of screaming at it, and yes, it is a lie, and yes, they sing love songs to the thing that is eating them, and they are happy, and they are not afraid, and they die believing they are going home. So we let them sing, and we give them something to hate so that they do not direct that hatred anywhere else. I am sorry, Elian. I have always been sorry. But they must sing, or they will scream.”

I had no response. I have no response even now. The worst part of the revelation is not that we are being eaten. The worst of it is that the kindest men in creation looked at the truth and concluded that the only gift they could give was a beautiful lie and a single point to direct their great fear, and I have spent my whole life despising the faith for a lie that may, God help us all, have been the most merciful thing anyone in this current has ever done, even if it was not a mercy for my ancestors and me.

Saul told me there was more to reveal, but that he would have to return at a later date in order not to rouse the suspicion of the others. He left, and I was alone with the Note and a whole new world to consider.

* * *

I did not sleep after Saul left. I have not slept much since. I have sat with the archive open, with my ancestors, and I have tried to understand what is left to a man when the last lie is gone, even the kind ones. I have come to some conclusions, and I am going to set them down.

Aurel believed he could save us. That was the whole conviction of his life. He opened a door into the dark because he believed deep down that there might be a shore on the other side where his people could be safe. He was wrong, and he knew, at the end, that he might be wrong, and he went anyway, for love, holding a child’s hand. His conviction will now lead us all to our inescapable deaths, and yet, his conviction is the most beautiful thing in his writing. I have loved him for it my whole life, but I do not have his conviction. I cannot have it. I have read where it leads.

Kellan believed he could fight. That was his whole life—the defiance of it. He looked at a power older than the stars and he refused it, refused to let it have his father, and he tore the world apart for that refusal, for love. He was right that the power was monstrous and right that it should be refused, and the refusal doomed all of creation, and it was the most beautiful thing in his writing. I have loved him for it my whole life, but I do not have his defiance. Again, I cannot have it. I have read where it leads.

I believe nothing. That is what is left, at the bottom of the Throat. Aurel had conviction and Kellan had defiance and I have the thing that comes after both, when you have watched conviction and defiance each in turn doom everyone they touched: I have the absence. I do not believe there is a shore. I do not believe the power can be fought. I do not believe the current can be turned or the wall can be breached or the dark can be cheated, or that anything any creature has ever done in the whole long history of being eaten has made the smallest difference to the eating. I believed it even before Saul confirmed my and my family’s deepest fears. I have read the Journals, which are the only honest account of my family’s hope, and what they record, under the love and the courage, is a perfect unbroken record of hope making things worse. Hope opened the first door. Hope tore the containment. Hope, in my family, is the name of the thing that delivers the beloved into the mouth. I will not have it. I have decided. And yet I am still writing a journal for no one within my cage. And I cannot stop.

There is only appetite. Aurel wrote it as a creed of the belly. Kellan learned it as the law of the mind. I have it as the shape of everything, the one true sentence, the floor under all the floors, and I believe it the way I believe in the dark: completely, without comfort and without doubt. And the pen keeps moving. Make of that what you can. I cannot.

* * *

Saul returned after three days. I am aware he did not come only to unburden himself. Saul does nothing only for one reason; he is a Confessor, and a Confessor’s whole art is the carrying of many things at once. He came because something has changed, after the whole long fall of nothing changing, and because he is near the end of his life and has decided, I think, to spend the last of it on one final forbidden kindness.

He told me about a ship called the Lantern. It is a ship in the Procession that should not exist. Only the inner order knows of it, and the inner order protects it, quietly, in the way the inner order does everything. The hundred billion faithful have no idea it is there. It is a science ship, a heresy made of metal. It is a single vessel among the uncountable fleet whose people, generation upon generation, in absolute secrecy, have refused the faith and kept the forbidden habit of science alive. They measure the current. They chart the wall. They have built instruments the Appetite would call abominations and pointed them at the throat we are all sliding down. They have done it for longer than anyone can quite say, passing the heresy from parent to child in the dark, the way my own family passed its science and the Journals on a dying Earth. I suppose it is the way everything that matters has always been passed, hand to hand, against the law.

I asked Saul why the inner order permits it. If the faith names science the original sin, and if my family is the serpent for the crime of measuring, why does the order not crush a whole ship of measurers? And Saul told me the second secret, the one that sits under the first like a foundation. The inner order permits the science ship for exactly the reason the inner order permits me: because the elders, who know the truth, who know there is no heaven and only the gut, are not quite able to do the one thing their own theology demands, which is to lie down and be eaten in peace. They cannot help it. Even the keepers of the merciful lie cannot fully stop hoping, in the deepest vault of themselves, that somewhere, somehow, in some catastrophe or some discovery, there might be a way the current does not end in the dark. And so they keep a ship of scientists alive, secretly, as they keep a Portalist alive, secretly, for the same reason: as a key they cannot quite bring themselves to throw away. The faith is the mercy they give the many. The science ship is the hope they cannot give up themselves. The order is built on a lie and braced, underneath, on the very heresy it forbids. Saul has known since his elevation, the better part of a century, and he has carried it, and it is, I think, part of what has bent him.

The science ship has asked for me. They have practically demanded me. By name. By my family’s cursed name, the worst word in the Procession. They speak it not as a curse, but as a hope. They have been asking for generations, Saul said. Every Confessor in living memory has received the same petition, passed up through the secret channels, and every Confessor has refused it, because to grant it would be to let the most hated and most useful relic in the faith out of the Reliquary and into the hands of the one community that might actually do something with him. That is a risk the order has never been willing to take. The scientists believe, have believed for generations, that they are close to something, some understanding of the current that might change everything. They say they cannot complete it because the deepest layer of the old science, the layer that underlies the doors and the currents themselves, is written in a language only a Portalist can truly read. They have the Journals, the scripture version, drowned in praise. They do not have the real one. And they do not have a mind shaped the way my family’s minds are shaped—a mind that feels the doors.

They have asked for me and for my forefathers and foremothers for generations. And Saul, at the end of his life, with his hands shaking, has decided to be the first Confessor to say yes.

He did not tell me to go. That is not Saul’s way, and it is not, he said, a thing he has any right to ask. He told me the truth, all of it, the heaven that is a gut and the order that is a lie and the ship that should not exist and the hope the elders cannot kill. Then he sat back in the dark and he said, “I have spent my life keeping you alive in a box. I do not know if I did right. I know that I am going to die soon, and so are you, and that when I am gone there will be no one in the inner order who remembers you are a man and not a key, and they will keep you in this room until the dark takes us all. Or you can go to the ship. I can arrange it; it is the last thing my office is good for. I cannot tell you it is hope. You have taught me, you of all people, to be careful with that word. I can tell you only that there are people on that ship who do not want you for what you are, but for what you might do, and who have waited more than a hundred years for the chance to work beside you. That is not nothing, and you have had, I think, too much of nothing.”

Too much of nothing. The old man knows me better than I know myself. I said I believe in nothing, and he heard, under it, the one thing my whole life has lacked and my whole creed forbids. Not hope. Company. A room full of people who do not hate me. After a lifetime of the cold hatred of a hundred billion strangers, an old man offered me a room of the sane and asked nothing in return but that I consider it. Then he rose, slowly, on his old legs, and he put his shaking hand on my shoulder, the only hand that has ever rested on me without flinching, and he said, “Think on it.”

Then he left.

I have thought on it. I have thought of nothing else. I am going to go. I do not expect the scientists to save anyone. I have read where hope leads in my family, every generation of it. I am going for the smaller, sadder reason—the only one I will allow myself. I am going because I am old too, and tired, and alone, and because a man who has decided there is no shore can still decide that he would rather spend his last stretch of the current among people who will look him in the eye than in a cold room with a window onto his cage. I am going because I am so tired of being alone. I am going because Saul is right that I have had too much of nothing. That is all. It is not hope.

Tomorrow they move me. Saul has arranged it as the last forbidden kindness of his life. I am sealing this entry and taking the archive on my datapad, because wherever the last of us goes, the Journals go too. That much, at least, has never changed.

* * *

I am aboard the Lantern, the ship that should not exist.

They moved me in the dark of a low holy day, when the great ship’s attention was turned to its choirs. Saul’s people passed me down through the levels of the flagship in a sealed conveyance, the hated relic smuggled out of his reliquary in the one window of inattention the calendar allows. I did not see Saul again. That is its own grief, and I will not dress it; the last I have of him is a shaking hand on my shoulder and the word think, and I expect it is the last I will ever have, because he is old and the inner order will not forgive a Confessor who lets the serpent loose. Whatever it costs him, he did it knowingly, and I have no way to thank a man for spending the end of his life on my loneliness except to be worth it, which I do not know how to be.

The science ship is really called, in the old tongue the scientists have kept alive, a word that means the one who carries the lantern; their translator gave it to me as the Lantern, and I will use that. It is small. After a life in the flagship of the faith, in cathedrals built to hold ten thousand singers, the Lantern is small and close and full of the hum of machines that are not the Note, the first machines I have ever seen that were built to ask a question. The moment I came aboard and the lock sealed behind me and I heard, for the first time in my life, a room full of people who were not singing, I had to stop, and stand, and put my hand against the wall, because I did not have a name for what I was feeling and it was very close to grief. It was, I realized after a moment, the opposite of grief. It was the absence of a hatred I had breathed so long I had forgotten it was there. No one in that room flinched from me. No one looked away, and it was almost more than I could bear, the simple weight of being looked at like that after a lifetime of being a curse with a face.

The one who came forward is named Nur. In their tongue it means light, and she is the captain of the Lantern, or the nearest thing the scientists have to a captain. She is the latest in a line of them that has kept the heresy alive aboard that ship for four generations. She is younger than me, all those on the Lantern are. She is maybe fifty or sixty, but she looks older than she is, for the work has aged her. She has a quality I had only ever read about in the Journals, in Aurel’s account of the old woman who said she was tired of being the thing that gets eaten. It’s a quality of being entirely unsurprised by the worst and entirely unbroken by it—a steadiness that does not come from hope, but from work. She took my hand and said, in careful old script, the language of my dead ancestors spoken aloud by a living mouth for the first time in my hearing, “We have waited so long for you, Elian Veyr. Welcome. You are among friends now.”

I am an old man who believes in nothing, but her words made me weep. I want it in the record. I wept like a child, in front of strangers, because someone took my hand and called me a friend, and I had not known, until that moment, how much of me had been waiting my whole life for nothing but that.

I gave them the Journals, all of them—the personal and technical accounts. That was the first thing I did, when the weeping had passed and I had been given a small clean room of my own and water and the simple decencies the order dressed in ceremony and the Lantern simply gave. I gave them the whole archive, the real text under the long fall of praise. I had carried it my whole life as the thing that justified my survival, the key the order could not throw away, and I gave it freely, in an afternoon, to a room of people who received it the way the starving receive food. I understood, watching them, that I was doing the thing my family has always done. I was opening the door. Not a portal, but writing full of portals all the same. They will read it. They will know everything my ancestors knew. There is no going back from that. There has never been any going back, in my family, from the opening of a door.

I should tell you about them, the people of the Lantern, because they are the first community I have ever belonged to. There are not many. A few hundred, perhaps—the whole secret line of the heresy, packed into the Lantern’s small bright rooms. They do not look like the faithful. That was the first thing I noticed. The faithful, even the kind ones, even Saul, carry the Note in their posture, a faint perpetual readiness to kneel, a leaning-toward the divine that a lifetime of the drone presses into the body. The people of the Lantern do not lean. They stand upright, square to the world, the way you stand when you have decided to look and measure rather than worship. After a lifetime among the leaning, it was like coming into a room full of a different species, one that had never learned to bow.

There is a young engineer named Viul, Nur’s second, sharp and quick and angry in a way I know in my bones, because it is Kellan’s anger, the engineer’s fury at a badly made world. Watching her work, I have felt, for the first time, what it must have been like for Meret to look at Kellan and see the first Portalist’s hands come back. The line repeats. The shapes return. There is a Viul in every generation, the way there has been a Veyr at the bottom of every age of the Fall, hated and carrying the Journals whether the gift was in him or not. The Procession has spent the whole Fall trying to grind both shapes out of the world and has never quite managed it, because the hunger to know and the hunger to refuse the dark are, I am beginning to suspect, as deep in some creatures as the appetite is in everything.

* * *

Two nights after I gave the archive over, I found Nur reading the Journals. She did not hear me when I walked into her quarters; the old, like me, are quiet, and the rest of us, like Nur, are hard of hearing. She had the datapad propped against a console and she was reading Kellan’s part, and she had been at it long enough that the light of the screen was the only light on her face. She was reading the tear, I think. The instant of joy, and the sky coming down.

When she noticed me she did not startle or apologize; she only said, roughly, “He knew it would doom everyone. He did it anyway. For his father.”

It was as though she were asking me to confirm it, or condemn it, or tell her which. I did not have an answer. I said only that yes, he knew, and yes, he did it anyway. She looked back at the screen.

“Good,” she said, and I did not ask what she meant, and I did not say the thing I thought, which was: he would have liked you. It seemed a cruelty to tell a living person she would have been loved by a man who was thought of with such hate by billions. I have thought since then that I should have said it anyway. We are so careful with the small kindnesses in my family, and so reckless with the large catastrophes.

I learned Nur’s steadiness slowly; I had taken it at first for the thing Aurel described in the old woman who was tired of being eaten—an unbrokenness that comes down over a life. It is not that.

Viul told me, one night when Nur was not in the room, in the flat way the crew spoke of their captain. Nur’s mother captained the Lantern before her, and her mother died mid-proof—died, literally, at the working table, in the middle of a line of the very mathematics that has brought us all here. And Nur, who was young, and who was the one who found her, finished the page before she closed her mother’s eyes. She completed the proof her mother had died inside of, in her mother’s own notation, and only then let herself understand what had happened in the room. The crew tells it as the founding story of her command, and they are right to. I had thought her steadiness was the absence of grief. It is the opposite. It is grief that has been given a job. She learned, at the working table with her dead mother beside her, that the way you survive the unbearable is to keep the pen moving through it—which is, I realized when Viul told me, the exact and only thing my family has ever known.

We are the same animal, Nur and I, in different armor. I have loved very few people in my long life. I did not expect to add a heretic captain to that small list at the very end of it. But I am glad that I have.

* * *

Embedded in everything, there is the work. The Lantern is a working ship, and after a lifetime in the Reliquary with nothing to do but read the dead and not kneel, the work has done something to me I did not expect. They put me to it at once, with no ceremony. Nur simply laid the mathematics in front of me and said, in effect: here is where we are stuck. You are the only mind alive shaped to read the deepest layer; read it.

I read it, and the cold clear engineer’s eye woke, and I felt the gift, my family’s gift, the feel for doors and seams and folds, turn toward their equations and begin, slowly, to find the places where the numbers wanted to open. I have not felt useful in the way that is not a cage in my entire life. To be needed by the order is to be a key in a sealed and guarded box. To be needed by the Lantern is to be a colleague at a problem. I am an old man and I came here to die among the kind, but instead I have found, to my utter surprise, a reason to want a little more time.

Eventually they showed me the whole of the mathematics, and I understood why they had waited a hundred years for a Portalist.

The scientists of the Lantern have spent their long secret history measuring the current, the walls of it, the pull of it, the Note that fills it, and they have built from those measurements a model of the throat we are all sliding down. The model says a thing the faith could never allow and the inner order has only dared glimpse. It says the current is not the whole of the world. It says the current is one channel. One vein, one tract, among a number their mathematics cannot bound, threaded through the body of a thing, and that the body of the thing is not the whole universe, not even close. It is beyond universes, just as I always imagined—a structure so vast and so strange that their equations can only point at it the way a finger points at the dark. It says the walls are thin enough that the mathematics suggest a wall might, with enough force concentrated in a single point, be breached. And that beyond the wall is not the gut, not the dark of the digestion the current is carrying us toward, but something else. Another channel, perhaps. Or the space between the channels. Or, and this is the word Nur said, very quietly, watching my face, the word that has been forbidden in my family since Aurel opened the first door, because of where it always leads: the outside.

There is a way out. That is what the mathematics say. There is, perhaps, against everything, against the whole long record of my family’s catastrophe, against my own hard-won creed of nothing, a way out of the Throat, if we are willing to pay for it, and I do not yet know the price. But I can see in Nur’s steady, unbroken face that the price is terrible, and she has not said it yet.

There is one more thing, and I set it last because it is the one that has lodged deepest. I asked Nur, the first night, about the Note. I had to. It is my family’s oldest question. I asked her what the Lantern’s mathematics make of the Note, the divine sound, the voice the whole Procession worships. Nur was quiet, in her steady way, and then she said that they do not yet know, fully, but that the measurements point one direction, and the direction is the worst one. The Note, she said, is not a thing broadcast into the current, the way a voice is broadcast. It is a property of the current itself. It is the sound the current makes by being what it is and doing what it does. They have not proven it; the proof is part of what they have been stuck on, part of what they need a Portalist’s gift for; but the shape of the numbers suggests that the drone the faithful worship as the breath of God is the sound of the throat working. The sound of the swallowing. The slow vast peristalsis of a thing larger than universes drawing its food down toward the dark, filling every channel of its body, mistaken by every clever doomed species that ever fell into it for the voice of the divine. Aurel went down on his knees to it. A hundred billion people sing to it. Trillions of others from myriad other species flow toward it, undoubtedly following their own religions around it. And it is, if the numbers are right, only the sound of digestion. The sound of appetite.

Nur is at my door. There is more to see, and a decision coming that will cost lives; I can feel the shape of it the way I feel a door, the way my whole family has always felt the shape of the next terrible thing before it arrives. I am going to seal this entry and face what comes the way my ancestors faced their thresholds, with the Journals closed and held close, and the people I have come, impossibly, to love around me.

I did not think I would ever write that word again, love. I have written it now, and I am too old and too near the end to take it back, and I find that I do not want to. The last Portalist learned to love at the bottom of the throat of the world, far too late for it to matter, and is going to spend it, all of it, on one last door.

I do not yet know the price, but there is always a price, in my family, at every door, and it has always been paid by someone other than the one who opens it. I am afraid of what Nur is about to ask. And I am afraid that no matter what it is, I’m going to say yes.

* * *

Nur told me the price.

The wall of the Throat is not close. Though the walls can be seen, that is only because they are the walls of a small universe sized enclosure; the Procession falls down the slow center of it, and the walls lie several billion light-years away, a distance the faithful never think on, because no ship has reason to cross the current, only to ride it down.

Despite its seemingly insurmountable distance, if the distance can be crossed, then the wall can be breached. The mathematics confirm it. But it cannot be breached by anything the Lantern has, or anything the Lantern could build. It requires force on a scale a single small heretic ship cannot remotely produce. What we require is a mass moving at a large fraction of the speed of light, all of its impossible energy concentrated into a single point on the single thinnest place in the wall. The Lantern cannot be that hammer; the Lantern must survive to pass through the hole it makes. So the hammer must be another ship. A large one. Large enough and fast enough to crack the side of the throat of God.

The only ships in the Procession large enough are inhabited. That is the price. Nur said it without flinching, because she has lived with it for years and the plan is older than her command, passed down the secret line of the Lantern the way the heresy itself is passed down, waiting only for a Portalist’s eye to find the place and the moment to make it real. They will take one of the great ships of the faithful, a whole city of the Appetite, and they will seize its forbidden engines, the ones every ship has and no ship is ever permitted to use to attempt to resist the current.

The plan is to turn that whole city into a weapon by accelerating it across the current until it is a relativistic spear that can be used to pierce the wall, killing everyone aboard. Millions. A whole city of souls who have done nothing but believe what they were taught, who will go to their deaths certain they are ascending. Used, without their knowing and against everything they hold sacred, as the battering ram that breaks open the one thing their faith forbids us to want.

And here is where they need me, and only me. Here is the thing my blood can do that their instruments cannot. The weak place is not a point. I had imagined, when Nur first spoke of it, some pinprick target struck across a gulf of billions of light-years requiring a level of marksmanship I couldn’t possibly have as a caged relic. It is nothing so absurd. The region where the wall runs thin is itself vast, vast as a small galaxy, a whole broad reach of the throat’s side where the fabric is worn. What their instruments cannot give them, and what a Veyr can, is the feel of where the fabric is actually worn, as against where their equations predict it should be. I will not be aiming the hammer. I will be feeling across all that dark, to the place where the wall has forgotten how to be a wall, to the seam under the skin. Their numbers point to a possibility. My blood can point to the place. That is the whole of why they waited a hundred years for one of us. Not for a marksman. For a dowser.

I asked Nur if there was any other way.

“There is no other way,” she said. “We have looked, for generations. There is no derelict large enough, no automated hulk, no empty mass. The ships of the Procession are full, all of them, because the faithful breed toward the Embrace, because an empty ship is a heresy. To breach the wall we must spend a full one.”

I sat in the small bright room of the Lantern with Nur’s steady face across from me, and I understood that I was being asked to be worse than Kellan, to make a colder and a larger and a more damning choice than the one the whole Procession has spent the whole length of the Fall cursing my blood for, and I understood that I was going to say yes.

And I did. I said yes.

I want to be honest about why. I did not say yes for the Procession; the Procession is not saved by this. The Procession will sail on down the Throat to the dark exactly as before, every soul of it, including the one man who was ever kind to me. I did not say yes because I believe the outside is salvation; I believe nothing other than the love I have found on this ship. And that is exactly why I said yes: for the people on this ship. For Nur, who took my hand. For Viul, who has Kellan’s anger. For the few hundred souls of the Lantern who have kept the asking alive against the law for so long, and who waited a hundred years, generation upon generation, for the one thing they needed to finish their work, which turned out to be me. I said yes because I have learned, far too late, the thing my ancestors knew, the thing the Journals are about under the science and the dread: that you will do anything, anything at all, even the unforgivable, for the few you have come to love, and that this is not a virtue, and it is not a sin, it is only the deepest law there is, under even the appetite. Or perhaps it is the appetite, wearing the one mask it cannot help but wear, the mask of love. I do not know anymore. I have stopped being able to tell them apart. I only know that a city of strangers is going to die so that the people who took me in can reach toward a freedom I do not believe in, and that I said yes, and that the Veyr name is going to be, one final time, exactly the curse the Procession always said it was.

So be it. I am the serpent. I have always been the serpent. Let me at least be the serpent for the only thing worth being damned for.

I have made the plan sound like a thing I decided alone, in a room with Nur, and that is not honest. The Lantern decided it. All of them. And they did not decide it easily, and that matters, because it would be the simplest thing in the world to let you believe the heretics were monsters, that they spent a city the way the Central Fold spent minds.

They put it to the whole ship. Nur insisted on it; it is the Lantern’s way, the old way, the way of minds that have kept the asking alive by refusing to let any one mind decide alone. So the few hundred of them gathered, all the last free souls in the world, and they laid the thing out plain: the breach, the wall, the city that would have to die, the freedom that might or might not be on the far side. They argued it, for days, the way I imagine the four hundred argued in Aurel’s chamber before they followed him through the door.

There were those who would not. I want them remembered too, more than the rest, perhaps, because they are the conscience of this whole filthy necessary thing. There was an old woman, a biologist named Maria, who stood up in the gathering and said that a freedom bought with the murder of a city of the innocent, roughly forty percent of them children, was not a freedom she wished to live in. She said the whole point of the asking, the whole reason the heresy had kept itself alive against the law for a hundred generations, was that it refused to treat souls as fuel, and that the instant we did it, the instant we turned a pilgrim ship into a spear, we became the Appetite, we became the Central Fold, we became the Throat. She would rather ride the current down to the dark with clean hands than reach the outside with a city’s blood on them. And she was right. But her being right did not stop the rest of us from voting to do it, the way being right has never once, in the whole of this account, stopped anything.

A few refused to the end. Not many. But enough to matter. They would not take part, and they chose to stay awake on a small craft cut loose from the Lantern and ride the current down with the Procession, to the dark, with clean hands, for as long as they might survive on so spare a vessel, for they could never rejoin the fleet. Nur sat with Maria the whole of the last night, before the dissenters took their small craft and cut loose. I did not intrude, and I do not know what passed between them. I know only that the captain who had ordered the killing spent the last night before it beside the one person who had most fiercely refused it, not to change her mind, but so that Maria would not spend her last night among us alone. It is the same thing my ancestors’ people did on the wrong side of a membrane, the same thing Saul did in a cold cell with a hated child. This family, and the people who turn out to be its family across every species and every age, cannot seem to help but go and sit with the one who is about to be lost. I have decided it is the best of us. I have also decided it changes nothing. And that is the cost of being a thinking creature in a starving world.

I watched their little craft fall away forward into the current, toward the dark, the clean-handed, the ones who would not buy the outside with blood, and I have thought about them since more than almost anything. I still do not know whether they were the cowards or the only truly brave ones among us—whether to refuse the unforgivable thing and accept the dark is weakness or the last strength there is. Aurel and Kellan did not know either.

Maria rode away forward with her clean hands toward the gut of God, and I think she was right, and I think we are right too.

* * *

It is done.

They chose the ship weeks ago; the choice was made for reasons of mass and position and the geometry of the breach. Cold reasons. The only kind available. It is a pilgrim ship, one of the great ones that carry the most devout toward the front of the Procession who long for the dark most purely. In the old human idiom of its faith-region it has a name, the way the ships of the devout take names, and I have made myself learn it and set it down. It is called the Longing.

I will not describe the taking in perfect detail; the details are Viul’s and the Lantern’s, the seizing of the great ship’s systems through the back channels the heresy has spent generations mapping, the silent override of engines that have not been fired since the first years of the Fall. I will describe only the part I was made to see, because the breach required a Portalist’s eye on it to the moment of its loosing: the feel of the fold as the great ship was wrenched out of the holy Fall and hurled away across the gulf. I watched the Longing on the Lantern’s instruments as it began to resist the current, to turn, to accelerate across the Fall toward the wall, driven by its own perverted engines. And I listened to the choirs aboard it falter. They did not understand what was happening. How could they? Their whole world was forward, with the current and the drone and the Embrace, and now their city was moving against all of it, faster and faster. Our instruments let us hear their singing break apart into confusion, and then into the fear the faith has spent the whole Fall teaching them they would never have to feel.

And then it was gone from us, hurled out across the gulf toward the far wall faster than anything living was ever meant to move, dwindling on the instruments until, over the course of several days, the singing thinned to a thread and then to nothing.

I felt it go through the gift, the great mass of it torn loose and flung outward, the fold of its leaving like a wound in the feel of the current—the shape of a door being forced in the form of relativistic flight. Whether it will tear the wall or shatter against it, I cannot yet feel. And there is a worse uncertainty under that one. The wall is not stone. It is almost certainly the side of a living thing, and living things close their wounds. Their mathematics cannot say how fast. A body that swallows universes might seal a puncture in an hour or in an age, and there is no way to measure it from inside, and no way to test it. So even if the hammer tears the wound, we will be crossing billions of years to reach it, and the wound will be trying, the whole of that time, to remember itself and close. We are not only throwing a mountain across a universe. We are racing a shutting door across an eon, with no way to know, until we arrive, whether it will still be open, or whether we are going to cross all that dark only to break against a wall that has healed.

I sat in the small bright room with the people I had done it for, and no one spoke, and no one celebrated, and Viul, Kellan’s anger made flesh, the sharp quick angry girl, put her face down on the cold of her console and wept, the way I wept when Nur took my hand, the way Aurel wept over the beetle. The family weeping. The weeping of creatures who have done a necessary and unforgivable thing for love and have nowhere to put what it cost them except into the dark or onto a page. I put my hand on her shoulder. I had never put my hand on anyone to console them; no one ever taught me how. I put my hand on Viul’s shoulder, and she let me, and we sat, the murderers, the heretics, the last asking minds in a dying world, in the silence after the singing stopped, and we did not look away from what we had done. We did not look away.

I have wondered why nothing came after us or after the Longing. A city of the faithful was torn out of the holy Fall and hurled across the current, and no ship gave chase, no order came down, no fleet moved to stop the Lantern or the Longing from their forbidden burns. I understand it now, though. Nothing came after us because nothing could. Every ship in the Procession has the forbidden engines, and not one is permitted to light them, because to light them is to resist the current, which is the one unforgivable thing; a ship that gave chase would have had to commit our exact sin to reach the renegade ships, and no faithful ship ever would. The inner order did the thing the inner order always does with an anomaly, the thing it has done since the beginning of the Fall. Rather than admitting blasphemy, it reached into its scripture and made the horror holy. Word came down the fleet that the city called the Longing had been granted a miracle: that its souls, most beloved of all the devout, had been Hastened, taken ahead early, to the Embrace, as a sign and a mercy to the rest. They are calling it the Feast of the Hastened. They have already written it into the calendar. A city we murdered is going to be a holy day for as long as the Procession has left to sing. That is the order’s genius and the order’s damnation in a single stroke: there is no fact so monstrous it cannot be folded into the mercy of the lie. Saul taught the faithful to sing instead of scream. His brothers have just taught them to sing about the very people we killed. I do not know whether to be sickened or to weep with a kind of awful gratitude.

The breach, if there is a breach, will not be a door we step through. I had imagined, foolishly, some swift passage, some moment of crossing like my ancestors’ crossings: the seam and the step and the dark. It is nothing like that. To go there, the Lantern has to leave the current. It has to peel away from the Procession’s flow, out of the holy Fall, turn its old hidden engines to full, and burn sideways across the throat. The instant we break from the fleet, there is no coming back. The burn spends everything the ship has hoarded across the whole of its secret history; there is no second burn in it, no turning, no clawing back into the Procession. We break from the Procession, and the Procession goes on without us, down the Throat toward the dark.

So we are going to sleep.

The crossing will take an eon. Even at the Lantern’s best speed, which is a breath below light’s own pace, it will take billions of years to cross that gulf, running the whole way in the relativistic wake of the ship-turned-spear. So the few hundred of us will sleep, in the cold suspension the heresy has kept ready for exactly this, while the ship runs itself across the empty dark toward the wall. Whether or not we can pass through, there will be no way back. Either we will have our freedom and our answers, or we will not.

I do not fully believe it will work. I believe nothing, like I have said. But I have decided that disbelief is no longer a reason to refuse, because the only alternative to the cold is to stay awake in this current and ride it down to the dark with the Procession. And I have, after a lifetime of nothing, found people I would rather wake beside in an impossible outside, or even die beside, than spend one more certain minute beside the faithful in their singing. That is not hope. I have been careful, this whole account, never once to call it hope. It is something smaller and more stubborn: the splinter, the pen that will not stop, the thing my ancestors had and I refused and have caught at last like a sickness at the very end. Call it what you like. I am going into the cold, and I am going to trust the dark, which I have never once trusted in the whole of my life, and either the silence will be waiting on the far side of the sleep or the Note will, and either way it is better than the Embrace. That is the whole of my philosophy now, at the end: anything, anything at all, is better than going gently into the mouth.

But before I sleep, I have to set down the part I have been putting off the whole of this account, the part I can least bear, because if I do not write it now I will never write it, and a book that is only honest must hold it.

The breach will save no one but the Lantern. Even if the wound is real, even if it is waiting for us across the gulf, it is not a door the Procession can take. Even if we could send them a message from the outside, it would come too late; they will be too far down the Throat by then, perhaps already gone. We never could save them. We are saving a few hundred heretics and a record, and we are buying it with a murdered city and the abandonment of everyone else. And among everyone else, on the flagship of the faith, in the small warm room where he taught a hated child the old script in the dark, is Saul.

The old man spent the end of his life smuggling me out of my cage to the one ship that might do something with me, and the something we have done does not include him, cannot include him, and he knew that. I am certain he knew it; a Confessor knows the shape of every choice. And he did it anyway. He gave me to the Lantern knowing the Lantern’s freedom would never be his, knowing he would fall on down the Throat with the rest of the faithful while the child he saved escaped, and he did it without a word of it.

He is going to die in the throat, the one man who was ever kind to me, carried down the current with the hundred billion, and I am going to sleep through it, and wake, if I wake, somewhere outside the body of the thing that ate him. I will never know the hour he goes, and there is no door I can open to bring him with me, and that is the price under the price, the cost I agreed to without letting myself count it: the man who gave me everything gets the gut, and the child he gave it to gets the outside, and there was never, in any version of this, a way for it to be otherwise.

He was kind to the thing the whole world hated, and it cost him everything, and he never once asked to be repaid.

I am closing the datapad now, and I am binding it to me, because wherever the last of us goes, the Journals go too, even into the cold, even into the age of sleep, even, perhaps, into the outside, where there may be no one and nothing to read it.

I am going to sleep now. Whatever wakes me, or does not, this is the last I will write on this side of it. Aurel and Kellan said, at their thresholds, that they were taking a breath. I have no breath worth taking; I am too old and too tired and too far past the believing. I will say only this, which is truer for me: I am going to close my eyes, among people I love, having done an unforgivable thing for them, with the Journals bound to my chest. I am going to trust the dark, which I have never once trusted in my whole long life, and that is the bravest thing the last Portalist has ever done, and the most foolish, and they are, as my family has always known, the same thing.

Goodnight, whoever you are. If you are. We will see what is on the other side of the wall together, or I will not see it at all, and either way I am glad, at the very end, not to be closing my eyes alone.

* * *

I am awake. Billions of years have passed. Nur says that something about the passage took far more time than the mathematics allowed, and that we are fortunate, all of us, to have woken at all, because the cold is not perfect and the years were not kind. Some of us did not wake. The writing of them is for Viul, who keeps the Lantern’s record now that old Tace is dust.

We are on the other side of the wall. We made it, but only barely. Nur showed me what the ship recorded while we slept. The wound the hammer tore had been vast when it was made, and the wall had been closing it the whole time we crossed, exactly as she feared, drawing shut across the eons. What had been a tear as wide as a small galaxy had narrowed, over the billions of years of our crossing, to a seam the Lantern threaded with a margin measurable in nothing but luck. And it sealed behind us. The instruments caught that too, the wall closing over the wound in the hours after we slipped through, remembering itself completely, as though it had never been cut. There is no wound now. There is no way back through a wall that has finished healing. We are the first things ever to leave the body of the thing, and we left by a door that shut the instant we were through, and there will never be another. Even out here, my family’s oldest law holds: there is no going back from the opening of a door, because the door does not stay open behind you.

It is silent here.

I do not think you can understand what that word means to me, or to any of us, or to anything that has ever lived in the body of the thing. The Note has been there my whole life, and my ancestors’ whole lives, and the whole life of the Procession, and the whole life of the Fold, and the whole life of every world that ever opened a door. The Note is in Aurel’s very first pages, rising out of his machine on a dead Earth. The Note is the one constant in this entire account, across the whole Fall and every age before it, the single low sustained sound that never breathes. It has been in my chest and my skull and the spaces between my teeth since before I was born, so constant that I had long since stopped noticing it was there. And here I am in the dark beyond the wall, and it is gone.

Gone. Not quieter. Gone. There is no Note, because we are outside the channel, outside the throat, outside the working gut, and the sound of the swallowing does not reach the place beyond the wall. The silence where the Note had been is so total and so absolute that I understand now, sitting here in the cold and the dark with the breath shocked out of me, that I have never once in my whole life known silence. None of us have. We were all born inside a sound and lived our whole lives inside it.

The first thing the survivors of the Lantern did when they woke beyond the wall into the first silence anything had ever known was weep. Not from grief, but from the sheer unbearable relief of it—the relief of a sound stopping that you did not know was crushing you until it stopped. Nur wept. Viul wept. I wept, the old man who believes nothing; I lay in the cold and the dark and I wept like a child for the silence, because it was the first proof, the first actual proof, that there was an outside. The body of the thing is not all there is. The cage has a far side, and we have reached it, and we are the first, the only, in all the history of the eaten, to ever, ever get out.

For a little while, when we first woke, we thought we had won. A small and precious while that I will keep the way I keep Saul’s hand and the child’s half-raised hand: we thought we had done the impossible thing—that my ancestors’ whole doomed pattern had finally, at the last and most terrible cost, come out somewhere other than teeth. We held each other in the dark of the woken ship, and wept with relief, and some of us laughed, the way Kellan and his friends laughed in the dead enclave. For that little while, before the instruments finished their first readings, before we turned the ship, we were free, we were out, we had beaten the appetite. It was the happiest moment of my entire life, and I am glad I had it. I am glad we all had it, because though it did not last, just as nothing in this whole account ever lasts, it was real. The relief and the silence and the weeping and the laugh. It was all real, and the thing that came after does not make it less real, and I have decided I will hold that to the end, against everything the instruments have since shown us. The relief was real. We were, for a little while, free, and we knew it, and we wept for joy. Hold to that. It is the last joy in this account, and it was real, and the appetite did not make it, whatever else the appetite has made.

Nur came to me first, and her face was no longer steady; it had a thing on it I had not seen there before, not in all the killing and the breach and the cold, and it took me a moment to name it because I had never seen it on her. It was bafflement.

She said the instruments were finished. She said they had read the space beyond the wall, the outside, and she said, “Elian. There is nothing here.”

I did not understand her. I thought she meant emptiness, vacuum, the dark between stars. She saw that I did not understand, and she told me again, slower, and what she told me was this. There are no stars. That, we had expected; one does not look for a local sky beyond the universe. But there are also no distant stars, no far galaxies, no faintest smudge of light anywhere in any direction the instruments can search. There is no background glow, no old, even warmth left over from a beginning—the first light, the Lantern’s people call it, the glow every universe should carry from its making. It is simply not there. The instruments find no temperature at all. Nothing. The outside is a cold beyond any cold our mathematics have a name for; it makes absolute zero seem warm. There is no fine structure to the dark, no smallest restless activity, none of the quiet ceaseless trembling that fills even the emptiest vacuum of a living universe. The space beyond the wall is still in a way no space inside a universe has ever been still.

“There is no universe here,” Nur said, her voice breaking. “Not an empty universe. It’s the absence of one. We have not come out into the space between the stars. We have come out of the universe entirely, out of all universes, into the place where universes are not, and it is not dark the way space is dark. It is dark the way a thing is dark that has never had light in it and never will. And we are in it, the first and only living things ever to leave the body of God and look at the place outside it. God is truly all, for the place outside God is nothing. A true nothing that all things, God included, reside within.”

The way Nur used the word God so casually unnerved me.

Viul, at the helm, in a voice gone very small, said that there was something on the long-range, behind us, in the direction we had come from, the direction of the wall. Nur turned the ship, and we looked back the way we had come, at the wall we had torn and the body we had escaped, and we saw it.

I cannot describe it. I have to try, and I am going to leave the failure in. A description that actually works would be a lie, for it would mean the thing is small enough to fit a mind, and it is not. It is the opposite of that.

We turned, and we looked back, and we saw that opposite the endless nothing, there is a structure. There are no edges. No top and no bottom and no limit. It is not made of matter, the instruments insist. It is not made of anything we have a word for. It is made of itself, some stuff that is its own category, and it is riddled, all through, with channels. With currents. I can feel them, faintly. Each channel, we have come to understand, is what we thought of as a throat while we were inside the current. These throats are threaded all through the unimaginable body of the thing, countless, beyond countless. And each one—I know it the way I know a door—is full. Each is a current carrying its own endless procession of the swallowed, the gathered multitudes of its own countless universes, down toward its own dark. All of them, every channel in the whole infinite riddled body of the thing, run the same way. Inward.

The universe I was born in—the one Aurel tried to escape by opening a door, the one whose stars his arks died among—was inside one of those channels. The Fold was a swelling in that channel. The current the Procession may very well still be falling down is one final stretch among what could be an infinity of channels in the body of the thing that even the unbelievers among us have concluded is God. What else would you call it? There is God, and there is the nothing God hangs within, and there is nothing else at all.

We looked at it for a long time. There was nothing else to do. There was nowhere to go; the ship had spent everything to reach this place, and there is no current out here to ride and no door to open and no wall to break. There is only the dead space and the infinite inward body of the thing. So we looked at the appetite that contains all things, and slowly, the last and largest understanding came to us.

We had thought, the whole way, even in the worst of it, even knowing it was a body and we were its food, that we were looking at a thing that is feeding. That is the shape the horror had always had, in Aurel’s heresy and Kellan’s proof and the inner order’s secret: a vast hunger, feeding, drawing the swallowed down to be dissolved. Something with an appetite. Monstrous, but feeding, which is to say satisfied, which is to say a thing that eats because eating works. The hunger is answered.

We were wrong.

It is not feeding. It is starving.

The channels do not slow. The flow does not ease. If it were feeding and being nourished by the infinite meal of all the universes there have ever been, there would be some sign of it, somewhere. Some easing or fullness some place where the drawing-down has done its work, even temporarily, and stopped. But there is none. Every channel runs at the same desperate inward rush, and they have run that way, the mathematics and the gift say, for as long as the mathematics and the gift can reach back. It is likely that this God reaches past the beginning of our universe, past the beginning of the stars our universe was made from, past every beginning there has ever been. The thing has been drawing all of everything down its infinite throats since before there was a before, and it has never once been filled, and the rush has never once slowed, and the only reading the instruments can give for the state of the thing, the one word my family’s eye can put to the whole infinite inward everything of it is hunger. Not the hunger of a thing that eats and is satisfied and eats again. The hunger of a thing that has been eating everything, forever, and has never been fed, and is starving, now, has always been starving, will always be starving. A hunger so vast and so old and so utterly unanswered that it has drawn endless universes down its veins by the infinite uncounted multitude and remained as empty as it was before the first of them, as empty as the dead nothing we are floating in. We find ourselves before a God that suffers a starvation that is not a stage and not a condition but the whole and permanent nature of the thing, the one fact about it, the only fact. It wants, and is not filled, and wants, and cannot be filled, and wants, and wants, and wants.

Everything I have ever known, or my ancestors knew, or any soul in any universe ever knew, was part of this. The beetle on the dead Earth. The famine that ate Aurel’s daughter while she lay watching him eat. The Fold, and the engine of grafted minds. The patient elders feeding their study on the young of every world. The current, and the Procession, and the hundred billion singing toward the dark. Saul, going down the Throat. The city we killed. All of it, every hunger at every scale, the smallest belly and the largest mind and the body of the thing itself, was the same single fact, repeated, fractaling all the way up and all the way down. The same law wearing every mask there is, proclaiming forever and ever that there is only appetite. The wanting goes on, in the beetle and in God alike, forever, and it will never, ever be filled. We did not escape it by leaving the body of the thing. There is no leaving it. The body of the thing is not the exception to the universe; the universe is one small swallowed mouthful of the rule. The rule is the nothing we are floating in, and the starving everything that fills it, and there is no outside to that. There was never going to be an outside to that, because the thing is not in the dark, the thing is the dark. The hunger is the dark, and we have come all this way, spent a city and an age and the best man I ever knew, to learn the one thing Aurel wrote before any of us were born. The thing he meant only of his own small starving belly, and that turns out to have been the truest description of the whole of everything there has ever been or could be.

So that is where we are. I am writing this in the small woken ship, in the true nothing, in the dead silence beyond the wall, with the infinite starving body of God filling the dark, and no current to ride, and no door to open, and nowhere left to go. The ship has air for a while. Not long, on the scale of the things I have learned to measure in. Long enough, though. We are going to drift here in the silence, looking at the appetite that contains all things, until the air runs out. Then we are going to stop, the way the beetle stopped, the way the bird Aurel sent through the door stopped, the way the choirs of the Longing stopped, the way everything stops, and there will be no one to dissolve us, because there is nothing out here to do the dissolving. That, I have decided, is the one mercy left. We will not be eaten. We cheated the gut, in the end. The last free minds will go clean, in the true silence, of nothing but the simple running-out of air, outside the body of the starving god. We saw the truth, and we may be the only ones who ever will.

I have the datapad open on my knee. I have turned it to the first line in Aurel’s writings after his Eshe passed, eight hundred years and twenty-five generations and one torn wall ago, kneeling in the dust of a dying Earth, before any of this, before the Fold and the current and the silence.

The beetle had no right to be alive.

I have read it ten thousand times, and I read it now, here, with the starving infinity filling the dark behind me, and I understand it, finally, completely, the way you only ever understand a thing by arriving at the place it describes. He meant a beetle. One small black starving life on a dead world, and his own small starving belly, and the terrible act of one hunger ending another to live an hour longer. He meant the smallest thing there is. And it is the same. It is the same. The beetle and the god. Aurel’s belly and the infinite starving thing the whole of reality is one mouthful of. The smallest hunger and the largest. One law, the same at every scale. A fractal of hunger and want, unbroken, all the way down to a broken shell in a starving man’s hand and all the way up to the appetite that contains all universes. And the appetite is never answered, at any scale, ever; the beetle dies hungry and the man dies hungry and the Fold and the Procession and God all want and want and are never filled. Aurel wrote it in the dust, weeping for a beetle, and could not have known he was writing the first line of the truest scripture there will ever be. The truth beyond all truth.

There is only appetite.

There is one more thing. It is the last I am going to write, and it does not refute the creed. I want to be clear, at the end: nothing refutes the creed. I have seen the proof of it fill the dark in every direction. But there is a thing that sits beside it, the way it has sat beside it the whole length of these Journals, in every hand that ever held them, unrefuted and unrefuting, the small thing the appetite never made and cannot eat.

Nur is beside me. She has been beside me the whole time I have been writing this, in the silence, in the nothing, at the end. And a little while ago, without a word, the way the truest things are always done, she reached over, and she took my hand. And I let her. The last Portalist. The hated relic. The old man who reached the end of a long and friendless life. A lonely man who read of Aurel holding a child’s hand walking into the mouth, and of Kellan holding his own father’s hand falling down the Throat, and who believed, the whole of his life, that he would die as he had lived: untouched, unheld, alone. She took my hand. And we are sitting here, in the dead silence beyond the wall, with the air running out and the starving god filling the dark and the creed proven true in every direction there is. Holding hands. Two small warm starving things at the end of everything. And it changes nothing. And it is real. And the appetite did not make it, and the appetite cannot have it, and that is the whole of the answer my family ever found to the whole of the horror, across the whole length of the Journals and the death of all things: not that the appetite can be escaped, for it cannot. But that a hand can be held inside the mouth of it, freely, for nothing, with no hope, to the very end. That the holding is the one thing in all the starving everything that is not hunger, and never was, and never will be.

I am writing this for no one. I have known it since the first line of my own poor part of the Journals. There is no universe now. There is no shore. There is no reader, and there will never be one. The air and light are running out, and the datapad is dying with them. Its little cell drank light its whole long existence—in the lamps of pilgrim ships and in the cold glow of my cell in the Reliquary. But out here there is no light. Not one stray photon in all the dead nothing beyond the wall. We only know what we know because the ship’s instruments tell us. Without the ship, we are as impotent as the darkness itself.

And so, in the last of the working light, I have done the one thing a keeper is forbidden above all others to do.

The dying cell cannot hold the whole of the archive lit much longer, and I find I do not want it to. I have spent my life with these Journals as my only company. Aurel and Kellan have been more real to me than any living soul but Saul, whom I saw once in a span of weeks; realer than the hundred billion who taught their children to hiss at my name. Two dead men raised me as much as the order did. They have been my father and my brother, my only friends, the whole of the family the Appetite left me. And between them and me, on this same datapad, lie twenty-some generations of the ordinary blood—the frightened, faithful Veyrs who carried the Journals down the Fall and could not read a word of the old science in it, who filled the backs of the pages in the only language they had, which was the Appetite’s: their births and their deaths and their small pious hopes, praying toward the dark like everyone else.

I have loved them too, in the distant way you love a crowd of ancestors in a portrait. But they are not who I want beside me going into the silence.

So I have deleted them. All twenty-some generations of the in-between, every faithful frightened one, wiped into the same nothing we are drifting in. Not out of contempt—God knows they suffered for my name without ever once getting to earn it—but because a dying man is allowed to choose his company, and I have chosen.

And I have deleted the rest of it too—the technical Journals, the door-science, the whole patient mathematics of seams and folds that Aurel perfected in the dust of a dead world. It was the most precious thing my family ever owned. It opened the pyramids. It tore the Fold. It cracked the wall we are drifting behind. And out here it is worthless—a key to a lock that no longer exists, in a place with no doors left to open and no one left to open them. I will not carry the thing that damned us all into the silence. Of everything my family ever made, let the door-science be the first to go.

What I keep is only this. I keep Aurel. I keep Kellan. And I will keep myself, which shames me, but a record needs its ending as it needs its beginning, and I am the ending. Three Portalists. The only three the gift ever came to whole in the whole length of the line—a flood in Aurel, a flood in Kellan, a flood in me—the only three who ever truly felt a door and forced it open and paid for the opening. If some fragment of my family must drift dark and unread in the belly of the everything forever, let it be the true shape of us: not the long faithful middle that only endured, and not the terrible science that made us a curse, but the three men, and the three doors, and what it cost each of them to walk through.

The screen of my datapad has been continuing to dim under my hands as I write. I am rushing them now, these last words against a fading screen and a fading ship, because when the ship dies, the cell dies, and the record dies with it. The whole long doomed account of my frightened, loving family will go black. The datapad will drift in the nothing outside the body of God forever alongside our dead bodies. Dark. Unread. Unreadable. A dead slab carrying the only true history of everything into a place with no eye that will ever read it.

And I am writing it anyway.

Of course I am. It is what we do, us Veyrs. We open the door, and we hold the hand, and we write it down. For no one in particular. We do it against the whole of the starving everything, and I find that it is enough. It is more than I ever expected to have. It is the only thing that was ever ours.

Nur’s hand is soft yet unyielding. We are holding on for no reason at all, against all of it.

The screen is so dim now that I can barely read these words, so it is time to put down the Journals and write my final words, the same final words of every Portalist.

I am taking a breath.