The Portalist

There is Only Appetite, Vol. 1

by E. S. Fein
Copyright © 2026

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We were not the first to go hungry, and we will not be the last. The ones who raised the great stones of the Pyramids understood a thing our governments later killed to keep buried: that doors can be opened in creation. I have given my life to learning how to open and maintain such a door, and I have hesitated all the while, because I know the dark behind the door may not be empty, and may not be kind. I pray only that my children and their children prove braver than I am, and that the dark on the far side is something other than teeth.

—from the Journals, written by an unnamed Veyr, a thousand years dead

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The beetle had no right to be alive.

Nothing else is alive. Not down here. Not this far along the dead seam of the river, where the water has hardened to a vein of gray glass and the sky hangs the color of a rotting abscess from one ruined horizon to the other.

I had walked the channel since the cold hour before dawn, and the valley gave me what it always gives: bone, ash, and the wind-scoured ribs of the great ships that once promised to carry us all to the stars and became instead our grave markers, half-buried in the dust like the skeletons of beached leviathans.

The familiar silence pressed in from every side, thick and total. Then a sound. Small, dry, insistent. The click of chitin on stone.

I went still the way the starving have learned to go still, every nerve in the body drawing down to one bright point of want, and I looked, and there it was. A beetle. Black as spilled oil and no larger than the last joint of my thumb, dragging itself across the baked clay with a slow, laboring patience that struck me, even then, as a kind of devotion. Its shell caught the sick light and threw it back in oily greens. Six legs working. Two feelers tasting the poisoned air. Alive. Improbably, obscenely, miraculously alive.

My mouth flooded. My stomach folded in on itself like a fist closing on nothing.

Food. The word came before I could think it, up out of the long red corridor that runs beneath every prayer I have ever spoken and every figure I have ever solved, and it spoke in the only grammar that corridor knows. Take it. Crack it open and drink the wet from inside and be, for one more hour, a thing that goes on living.

I did not move.

I crouched instead, slowly, my knees lodging their stiff complaint, and I watched the small black miracle haul itself toward whatever rotted promise its senses had made it, and I wondered if that rotting was my own body. Nineteen days had passed since I last saw a living animal that was not a man. I had counted them. A man counts, when the counting is the only thread left between him and the grave he is becoming by degrees. And there, at the very bottom of a dead river, two starving creatures had found one another, and only one of us understood what was about to happen.

You want, I thought, watching it. You hunger, exactly as I hunger. We are the same animal, you and I, in different armor.

The thought should have stayed my hand. In another life it had, up in the cool stone rooms where the Journals wait in their iron case. My forefathers and foremothers argued in faded, patient ink that all life is holy for the single reason that so little of it remains. I believe that still. I built my faith on it, half physics and half prayer, and I have carried that faith down to the hollow-eyed and the gaunt who look to me now for a door that leads out of this hell.

My hand was already moving. That is the horror of it, the thing the Journals never found the courage to name. The hand does not wait for permission. It came down with a tenderness more dreadful than any violence, and I felt the shell give under my fingers, a small clean crack, a wet collapse, a brief frantic scrabble of legs against my skin that I would go on feeling for hours, that I am honest enough to know I will go on feeling until the day I die. The beetle went still. The miracle ended. I had ended it.

Too late. The hand is always faster than the prayer.

There is only appetite.

Such is the creed of this valley, the first prayer and the last. I have spoken it over the dying and intoned it over the dead. I cut it myself into the stone above the door of my laboratory, where the great machine holds its low and endless note. And not once until that morning with a ruined beetle weeping its one thread of life across my open palm, did I understand what the words are for. They are not philosophy. Philosophy is the pretty cloth frightened men hang over the corridor so they need not look down its length. This is the bare floor of the world. Everything eats. Everything is eaten in its turn. The drought devoured the river, the sky devoured the drought, and somewhere far back in the dark, hunger devoured God himself and went on calmly wearing his face. So the last keeper of a murdered science knelt in the wreck of everything and lifted a broken insect to his mouth, because the corridor had spoken, and every living thing that has ever lived obeys the corridor in the end.

It was bitter, and it was foul, and for the space of three slow heartbeats it was the finest thing I have ever tasted. Relief poured through me, warm and shameful, a pleasure so total it pulled at the back of my throat like grief, and I loathed myself for the wholeness of it, and I did not stop. I chased the last of it into the creases of my hand with my tongue. Live, something far beneath my thinking begged me, the same wordless thing that begs inside every dying creature that has ever drawn breath. Just live. One more hour. One more, and one more after that.

And then I wept for a beetle. For a beetle, when I have not been able to weep for my own daughter in four years.

That is when I knew I would begin to write again.

I have not added to the Journals since she died. What was there to set down? The slow subtraction of the larder and the living, a column of figures that only ever ran one way. My ancestors filled these pages with discovery; I had nothing to add but loss, and loss does not need recording. It records itself, in the body, in the rooms that used to hold more people than they hold now.

But this morning I wept for a beetle, and I understood that the silence in me had become its own kind of cowardice. So I take up the pen again, and I write for you.

Whoever you are. Whenever you are. If the door I am building opens onto a living world, then you are my blood, reading this on some far shore I will never see, and I want you to know how it was at the end of the only home our kind ever had. And if the door opens onto nothing, then there is no you at all, and these words will lie sealed in their case in the dust of a dead planet until the swollen sun comes to take it. In that case, I am writing to no one—which is only what every man does in the end.

Either way. I will set it down. Someone should. A Veyr should.

* * *

Three days now since I wrote those words, and the strangeness of having written anything at all has not yet left me. The pen feels foreign in my fingers. The mind, it turns out, is like a muscle gone to rope and gristle from disuse: it does not come back all at once.

Let me set down the shape of things, for you who come after, since you will not have stood in this valley nor heard what I have heard.

We live in the stone bellies of giants. The great stones piled high on the plateau above the river were old when the oldest histories were young. Every child of the dead world knew them as the Great Pyramids, and they were taught that kings from a few thousand years in the past raised them to house their corpses. That was the lie the schools told, in the years when there were still schools and children enough to fill them. My family knew better. The hands that quarried these stones and set them with a precision our own lost machines could never match were not burying their dead. They were building engines. A lost civilization raised the pyramids over seventeen thousand years ago, in the last green age before the long cold the old texts name the Younger Dryas, and when their world became inhospitable, just as ours has, they woke the engines and walked through them, out of the world.

The world did remember them, in its way, though it never knew that remembering was what it did. Every people that ever lived kept some splinter of the same story: a golden age before a great flood, a race of bright teachers who raised impossible stones and gave the first cities their letters and their numbers and their gods, and who were then swallowed by deluge or fire and left nothing behind them but legend. The drowned kingdoms beneath the waves. The watchers from before the waters. The shining ones who came down and walked among men and went away again. My ancestors read those myths with knowledge passed down for generations, and they saw what every other scholar of the dead world had missed: the stories were not fictions. They were a memory worn smooth by the whole long telling of our kind. The Shining Ones, the oldest of the Journals call them. What they called themselves, no hand in my line could ever have set down; that name went through the door with them and never came back.

But I will add one small thing here, which the Journals return to again and again and which the schools’ lie could never explain. The engines are made to our measure. The passages stand to a man’s height. The waking-sequence is cut for five fingers. The steps rise to a human stride. Whatever the Shining Ones were, they were shaped as we are shaped, and some nights I think the myths made gods of them only because the simpler explanation was unbearable.

They left the great engines behind them, the doors shut but unbroken, standing in the sand for someone who might one day grow desperate enough, and clever enough, to open them again.

I am that one. The last of the Veyrs, a line that was hunted for more than a thousand years for knowing this single thing.

You should understand what it cost, the knowing. Every age has its priesthood, and the priesthood of the dead world at its height was the World Order, and the World Order did not love a truth it had not first approved. When my great-grandmother proved on paper what the stones were, the men from the ministries came in the night and took her papers and took her. They gave the work out years later under other names, gutted of the one conclusion that frightened them. So it went, generation upon generation. We learned to write small. We learned to bury what we found and pass it mouth to mouth and hand to hand, down a thinning line of sons and daughters who inherited a small library they could be killed for owning.

And here is the answer to the question you are already asking, you who come after: if the ministries knew what the stones were, why did no one else ever wake them? Why, at the end, did the rich build ships instead of walking through a door that was already standing in the sand? Because the stones do not wake for everyone. The engine answers to a shape of mind—a way of feeling the seams and folds of the world that cannot be taught, only inherited—and in all the centuries of looking, the old records never found that shape in any line but ours. The ministries learned this early, and it is why they hunted us for a thousand years and never once simply ended us. A dead Veyr opens nothing. We were kept the way you keep a key to a door you pray you will never need: hated, watched, and never, ever thrown away.

I grew up believing the most dangerous object in the world was a true sentence.

And then, slowly, the world ended, and the ministries ended with it, and there was no one left to forbid us anything. That is the bitter joke of my life. I am free at last to do my work in the full light of day, for the simple reason that there is almost no one left at all.

The wealthy did not stay to see it. When the air first began to turn and the harvests failed for the third year and then the fourth, the men who owned the world built great interstellar arks and left it. Many of the ships, the ones with failed or sabotaged engines, still linger half-buried on the planet. The rest poured the last of the earth’s treasure into their hulls and went up on pillars of fire toward the stars, certain, as their kind have always been certain, that money is a kind of grace and that grace would purchase them a second world.

I have followed what became of them, the only way the distances allow: by their voices. My ancestors passed down a far-seeing glass married to older mathematics, and a listening dish beside it, and across the years I have tracked the arks by their beacons—thin, regular, confident at first, like men whistling in the dark. One by one the beacons changed. One by one they thinned, and stuttered, and stopped. I will not set down all the ways a ship of souls can die in the long black between the stars, the slow ways and the sudden, the cold and the silence and the turning of men against one another when the air grows thin. It is enough to say that the last of the drive-lights guttered out years ago, and the heavens have been silent since. The heavens are not a refuge. The heavens are a desert with no far side. Every soul that fled upward fled into a grave so vast it has no walls, and I have wept over them too, in my time, for strangers who would have let me starve.

There is no out, going up. I learned that young. The only out is down. Down through the floor of reality itself, into the stream.

I do not know how to make you understand the stream if you have not touched it, and I pray you never have to. The Journals call it many things in many hands; my great-grandmother called it the underriver, and I have kept her word for it, because it is the truest. Beneath the world we can measure there runs another, a current with no banks, older than the world and indifferent to it, and it is threaded all through with doors. The pyramids on the plateau are a mouth pressed to that current. Wake the engine, and the mouth opens, and a door opens with it, and a thing may pass from here to there. To where, I cannot say. That is the whole of my torment, and I will come to it.

But first I must tell you about the sound, because the sound is the thing I think about when I cannot sleep, which is most nights now.

When the door opens, even the small door of the prototype, the air grows dense and begins to hum. The hum is a single note that lies lower than the lowest string of any instrument men ever built, so low that you feel it in the wet of your eyes and the sockets of your teeth a long moment before your ears will admit it is there at all. It does not waver. It does not rise or fall. It does not breathe. It simply is, the way the dark is—a thing that was already sounding before you came and will go on sounding after you are gone.

There was a faith once, long dead now with all the rest, whose holy men taught that beneath all the noise of the turning world there lay one sound, a single sustaining syllable, OM, the voice of the cosmos holding itself in being. When I first woke the engine and heard that note come up out of the floor of reality, I went down onto my knees in the dust of the chamber and I wept, because I believed, with my whole starved and grieving heart, that I had found the voice of God humming in the foundation of the world.

I am no longer certain that is what I found.

A note that does not breathe is not a hymn. A hymn is made by a throat, and a throat must pause to draw breath, and this note never pauses. It is more patient than any living thing has the right to be. Some nights, lying in the dark with it still ringing faintly in the stones, I have caught myself thinking that it sounds less like a voice raised in praise and more like a voice raised in want. A low, endless, unhurried wanting, sounding up from somewhere very far down. I cannot prove this. It may be only my own hunger, hearing itself echoed back. But I have learned to trust the things that frighten me in the small hours, and that one frightens me more than anything else in this valley.

I will write more of it when I am braver.

* * *

They have a name for me now, the people who shelter in the lee of the great stones. They call me the Portalist. They say it the way the old books say messiah, with wet eyes and half-raised hands, and I hate it, and I cannot make them stop. I am a man who works sums and reads the Journals, both the technical and personal books, that his ancestors left him. I am not a miracle. I have buried my own child in the poisoned ground exactly as they have buried theirs. But the starving will kneel to anything that promises bread, and I have promised them a door out of famine, and so I have become the door, and there is no reasoning with a hope that hungry. So I have stopped trying.

Only Meret speaks to me as though I am a man.

She is nine years old, or near it; no one kept the count through the bad years, and her mother is four winters dead, so there is no one left to ask. She attached herself to me the way a small animal attaches to whatever does not kick it. I teach her the old letters in the evenings, by the light of the last good lamp, and she learns faster than I have any right to expect, faster than I learned, faster, God forgive the thought, than my own daughter ever did. She does not call me the Portalist. She uses no title at all, only comes and sits at my elbow while I work and asks me questions no one else dares ask, in that flat, fearless way children ask before the world teaches them to be afraid or too calloused to care.

Tonight she watched me work the last figures of a long calculation, and she said, without looking up, “If the door goes somewhere bad, will you tell us, or will you lie?”

I did not have an answer ready. The others want me to be certain, and so I perform certainty for them, the way a man performs strength at a graveside. Meret does not want me to be certain. She only wants me to be honest.

“I will tell you,” I said at last. “Whatever I find. I will tell you the truth of it.”

She nodded, satisfied, and went back to scratching her letters in the dust, and I sat there with the pen gone still in my hand and understood that I had just made a promise I may not be able to keep. Because the truth, Meret, is that I do not know. I am building a door, and I cannot see what is on the other side of it, and I am going to ask you to walk through it anyway, with your small hand in mine, because the only other thing I can offer you is to stand here and watch you slowly turn to bone.

There is only appetite. The creed does not comfort me tonight. Tonight it only sounds like the note in the stones, patient and low and endlessly wanting.

* * *

I meant to write of the work today. Instead I am going to write of my daughter, because I have circled her name in these pages twice now and flinched away both times, and a record that flinches is not a true record. If this book is to hold the truth, it must hold her. She was the truest thing I ever made, and she is not in these pages, and that is a worse erasure than anything the ministries ever did to my family.

Her name was Eshe. It means life. Her mother chose it, in the second year of the dying, when there was still bread most days and we could still afford a joke as bitter and as hopeful as that one—to name a child life in a world that was visibly losing the habit of it. Her mother, Talia, is gone too; I will not write of that tonight. One grave at a time. A man can only dig one grave at a time.

Eshe was four years dying and four years dead, which is to say she lived eight years, which is to say she lived no time at all. Eight years. It is not enough. It is an obscene fraction of what a life is owed. And worse, the famine does not take a child the way the old fevers took children, in a week. It takes them by degrees so small that you can almost convince yourself, each morning, that there has been no change since the morning before, and then one day you lift your child and she weighs nothing, like a dying bird in your two hands, and you understand that the thing has been happening all along, under your love, beneath your watching, in the one place you were not allowed to look.

I had food. I have never said it aloud, but I want it set down. As keeper of the work, the man the dwindling community already half-worshipped, I was given more than my share; they pressed it on me, they needed me strong, they needed my hands steady on the engine. And I took it home, and I divided it, and I gave her the larger part every time, every single time, and it was not enough, because the larger part of not-enough is still not enough. I watched her grow lighter in my arms across four years while I ate the smaller part of nothing and stayed, monstrously, alive.

She did not complain. She was a gentle child, gentler than I deserved, and near the end, when she could no longer rise from the pallet, she used to watch me eat my small portion with her huge dark eyes, and she never once asked for it, never reached for it. And I know it is because she had decided in her own small failing mind that I needed it for the work, for the door, for the saving of everyone, and she was proud of me. She died proud of me. She gave me her share of the saving by not asking for the bread, and I let her, God help me, because I told myself the work would save children just like her. But the work could not save her, for the work was not finished in time. And it was never going to be. And I knew it. And I ate the bread anyway.

There. It is written. Let it stand.

I held her when she went. It was at night; it is always at night, the worst of it, as though the dark has an appetite of its own. She was very light and very calm, and she had not spoken in a day, and then near the end she opened her eyes and looked at me and said, clearly, as though she had only been resting and was surprised to find it so late, “Did you finish it?” Meaning the door. Meaning the saving. And I said yes. I lied to my dying daughter with the whole of my heart. I said yes, it is finished, you helped me finish it, everyone is going to be saved because of you, and she smiled, and she closed her eyes, and a little while after that she stopped, between one breath and a breath that did not come.

I have built the door for her. I know that is not a reason; a door cannot be built for the dead, and Eshe is past all doors now, or through the only one that matters. But a man’s reasons are not always reasonable. I am opening a way out of hunger because hunger ate my daughter while she lay watching me eat. I will not be able to bear it if it eats Meret too. There are limits to what even the patient note in the stones can ask of a man, and mine is this. Not twice. Not this child. Whatever it costs, whatever door I must open, whatever hunger I must walk us into. Not twice.

When I call the famine the thing that eats, I make it sound like a philosophy. It is not a philosophy. It is a small light girl in my arms saying did you finish it, and me saying yes. That is what there is only appetite means. It does not mean anything grand. It means a child can be consumed so gently that she thanks you for it. That is the law of the world my ancestors wrote down, and I have lived inside the worst of it, and I am about to test whether there is any room in all of creation where the law does not hold.

I do not think there is. I have stood in the note; I have heard what is at the bottom of things. But I am going to look anyway. For the one I could not save, I am going to drag the rest of them out of the mouth of starvation if I can, and if I cannot, then at least we will have refused, together, to lie down quietly and be gentle about our own devouring the way an innocent child was. At least we will have shown the great hunger our teeth.

I will write of the work tomorrow. I have said the hard thing now; the rest will come easier. It always does, once you have said the hard thing. That is the one mercy in honesty, and it is a real one, and I had forgotten it until tonight.

* * *

It is done. They have seen it. There is no unseeing it now, and no going back, and I cannot decide whether what I feel is triumph or the particular nausea of having just lit a fuse that I cannot reach to put out.

I gathered my followers this morning in the great chamber at the heart of the largest pyramid, the room the Journals call the resonator, where the engine’s throat opens widest. There are perhaps four hundred of us left in the valley. Four hundred, out of the millions this river fed when the world was young. They came in slowly, by the light of the failing lamps and the few torches we can still spare, the whole shuffling remnant of mankind, likely the only remnant left on Earth, though I do not know for sure. They filled the chamber and pressed back against its cold walls and stood shoulder to shoulder in the dark, and they waited for me to work the miracle they had decided I was.

I will tell you what they look like, my people, because you who come after should know what was spent to send you wherever you are. They look like a thing the desert has been chewing on for a long time and has not finished. Their faces have gone to angle and are as brittle as the bone visible just beneath their sun-eaten skin. Their children do not run; they have learned not to waste the energy. There were old men in that chamber who had been engineers and judges and fathers of large and important families, and they stood there with their ribs showing through their rags and their eyes huge in their skulls, and they looked at me with a trust so total and so undeserved that I could hardly meet it.

I went to the engine and I woke it. I have done it a hundred times alone, and it never fails to undo me. So, to do it before four hundred souls was very nearly more than I could bear. I will not set down the working here; the working is in the technical Journals, sealed separately, and if you are my blood you will have them. Suffice to say, I touched the sequence, and the great machine drew its breath, and the note began.

It came up out of the floor as it always does, that single low unbreathing tone, and four hundred people felt it in their teeth at once and went silent in a way I have never heard a crowd go silent. The torches guttered. The air thickened until it was like breathing wool. And then, in the center of the chamber, in the empty space above the engine’s throat, the world simply came apart.

There is no good word for how a portal opens. It is not a hole; a hole is an absence, and this is a presence, a holy wrongness with edges. A seam appeared in the air, a vertical line of something that was neither light nor dark but seemed to be both folded very tightly together, and the seam widened into a circle, and through it I saw, as I always see, nothing I can name. Not blackness. Blackness is restful. This is a churning, a depth the eye refuses to hold, a color the mind reaches for and cannot grasp. The underriver. The current beneath the foundations of this reality showed its face through the door I had taught the stones to make.

Someone screamed. Several someones. And then several began to weep. Several more began to laugh. An old woman named Hessa near the front of the crowd went down on her knees and pressed her forehead to the stone and recited the creed over and over, there is only appetite, there is only appetite, as though it were the most tender lullaby ever sung, and perhaps to her it was.

They believed. I had shown them a door, and they believed there was bread on the other side of it, and the hope came off them in that dark chamber like a heat, like a fever breaking, and it was beautiful, and it also terrified me past all telling. You see, I have looked through that door a hundred times, and I have never once seen what waits behind it.

I held it open as long as I dared and then I let it close. The seam sealed, and the note died away into the stones, and the chamber was only a chamber again, full of ragged weeping people and torch smoke.

That was when Joran spoke.

I have not written of Joran yet. I should have. He is the one man in this valley who has never once called me the Portalist. Meret withholds the title out of love; Joran withholds it out of a flat refusal to pretend. He calls me only Aurel, my given name, said the way you say the name of a man you have consciously decided not to be afraid of. He was a builder of real things in the old world—bridges and dams—a man whose whole life was the discipline of not believing a structure would hold until the numbers said it would.

The famine has not softened him. It has filed him down to something hard and exact and very tired.

He waited until the weeping had quieted. Then he said, into the hush, in a voice that carried, “Where does it go?”

I had known it was coming. I have asked it myself every night for years. But it is one thing to ask it in the dark and another to be asked it by a hard, tired man in front of four hundred people who have just confirmed, in their own minds, that you are their one and only salvation.

“I don’t know,” I said.

The hope did not leave the room all at once. Hope always leaves slowly, like water out of cracked ground. I watched it begin to go.

“You don’t know, Aurel,” Joran said. Not cruelly. He said it the way he must once have read out a flaw in another man’s calculations, with no pleasure and no malice, only the grim duty of the truth. “You’ve built a door you can’t see through, that you can’t steer, that nothing has ever come back from, and you want to put four hundred living people into it on the strength of a hope. Have I understood you?”

“You have understood me exactly,” I admitted.

“Then it isn’t a door,” he said. “It’s a cliff. And you’re not a savior. You’re a man telling the starving the fall might have a soft landing.”

I let his words stand a moment, because it was true, every word, and the people deserved to hear it said by someone who was not me.

Then I said the only thing I have. “Joran is right. I cannot promise you the far side is a kindness. I have looked, and the door does not show me. But I can promise you what the near side is, because you are standing in it. The near side is this valley, and the figures in my book, and the figures only run one way. If we stay, every soul in this room will be in the ground inside two years, and most of us far sooner, and our children will go first, because they always go first. That is not a hope or a fear. It is simple arithmetic. Joran will tell you: when it comes to the figures, I do not lie, and I do not make mistakes.”

Joran said nothing. He is an honest man, and I knew he would not deny my words.

“So I am not asking you to choose between safety and a gamble,” I said. “There is no safety. There has not been safety since the rivers died. I am asking you to choose between a certain grave here and an uncertain door there. That is the whole of the choice. I will not make it for you. But I have made it for myself, and for the child I look after, and when the great door is finished I am going to carry her through it with my own hands, because I would rather die walking toward a hope than rot waiting on a certainty.”

It was quiet for a long time.

Then old Hessa lifted her head from the stone, and in a cracked voice she said, “There is only appetite. And I am so tired of being the thing that gets eaten.”

She got to her feet, slowly, and she came and stood beside me, facing them all, and one by one, in twos and threes, the rest of them came too.

Not all of them. Joran did not move. And a few others who were loyal to him. But most followed Hessa and stood alongside me.

I should be glad. I have what I wanted; the valley will follow me through the door. And yet tonight, writing this, all I can think is that I have just persuaded four hundred starving people to trust a man who told them, in plain words, that he does not know whether he is leading them to salvation or feeding them, by their own consent, into the dark.

There is only appetite. God help me. I have begun to think the creed is not a description of the world, but a prophecy, and that I am its instrument.

I have done a terrible thing today, and a necessary one, and I cannot decide which it was more. So I will write it down exactly and let you, whoever you are, be the judge I cannot be.

* * *

Joran came to me three days after the gathering. I had half expected him to take whoever shared his doubt and strike out across the dead lands on the small chance of some other refuge, but he did not. He came instead to the door of my laboratory and stood in it, filling it, and he said, “You owe these people a test.”

“There is no test I can give them,” I said. “Nothing comes back. That is the nature of it. The door does not return what passes through.”

“You might know that in theory, and you might trust your theory implicitly. But you need to show them proof,” he said. “Prove a thing can pass through whole. Prove the door is a door and not a furnace that burns whatever touches it. If you cannot show them even that, you are not asking them to gamble. You are asking them to die on your word alone.”

He was right again. He is so often right. It is an exhausting quality in a man.

So we made a test, he and I, the believer and the unbeliever, working side by side in the chamber. I confess there was a kind of peace in it, the old peace of two men solving a problem with their hands, which I had not felt since before my daughter died.

I woke the engine, and the note came up. I could see Joran’s jaw clench against it, but he did not flinch, and his not-flinching was its own small courage. The seam opened, and I picked up a length of rope, a strong dry cord as long as the chamber. I fed the rope into the door, hand over hand, while Joran held the near end and braced against the stone. The two of us paid it out into that churning nothing until half its length had vanished through the wound in the air.

I held it there a moment, and then we drew it back.

The far end came through, and as we hauled it into the lamplight, we both went very still.

The end that had passed through the door had aged. There is no other word. The cord that went in was new, dry, pale amber; the cord that came back was frayed to grey threads and bleached white as old bone. It was brittle, as though it had hung for a hundred years in some hard wind under some alien sun. I ran it through my fingers and it crumbled. It had undergone a century of weathering in the space of one breath.

Joran said nothing for a long time. Then, quietly, in a voice I had not heard from him before, he said, “Time runs differently in there.” It was not a question.

“It seems so,” I said.

“How differently?”

“I don’t know. The rope says a hundred years for a breath. But the rope is only rope. It tells me time passes there, and faster, and that is all it tells me. It does not tell me whether a man would feel a breath or a century. It does not tell me whether what comes out the far end arrives in a moment, or arrives having drifted alone in that current for a hundred lifetimes.” I had not meant to say so much. The honesty came up out of me like sickness. “It does not tell me the one thing I need to know, Joran. Nothing tells me that. I have built a door into a current, and I cannot see the far shore, and I cannot know whether the current carries a soul gently across or grinds it to nothing on the way. That is the whole of the truth. Now you know it as I know it.”

He looked at the ruined rope in my hands for a long while, and then he reached out and took a few of the bleached threads from me. He gently folded them into a scrap of cloth and put them in his shirt, against his chest, the way a man keeps a relic.

“I’m going to show this to them,” he said. “All of it. The aging, and what you just told me. They have a right to it.”

“I know,” I said. “Show them. I would show them myself.”

After he had gone, I sat with the crumbled end of the cord and worked at the problem the way I work at every problem, and I arrived at a conjecture. I have written it into the technical Journals, and I will set it here too, because it is the only comfort my mathematics can offer. The rope was held. We anchored it in this world and made it stand in the current, and the current wore at it the way a river wears at a piling. A thing that is released—a thing that falls with the current instead of standing against it—may take no more of the current’s time than the current itself does. That is the hypothesis. It is untested and untestable from this side, and so, like everything else in this valley, it must be walked through to be known.

I think it was watching him fold those grey threads against his heart that I understood Joran and I are not enemies at all. We are the two halves of the same dreadful question, walking around in two different men. He carries the doubt so that I am free to carry the hope. Between us we are almost honest enough to deserve these people.

We sent a living thing through, after. I had put it off as long as I could, but Joran was right that the people would ask, and so we did it.

It was a bird. One of the last. A dull grayish-brown desert thing we had kept in a cage of wire, fed on the scrapings of our own scant rations because no one could quite bear to eat it; it had become a kind of mascot to the children, a living thing that was not dying. Meret had named it Crumb. I took Crumb from its cage and sat it in my two hands, light as a breath, its heart going against my palms faster than thought, and it looked at me with one black bead of an eye, trusting me the same undeserving way everyone in that valley had learned to trust me. I apologized to the bird, woke the engine, then put my hands near the edge of the door and opened them.

The bird was there, and then the bird was not.

No sound. No struggle. It did not burn, did not cry out, did not resist. It simply passed from the world I could see into the world I could not, and the door churned on, indifferent, and gave nothing back. I stood there with my empty hands still cupped, as though I might call it home, and of course it did not come. Nothing comes. I have told you. Nothing comes back.

I do not know if it lives. Somewhere on the far side of the world, in a current I cannot see, that small warm life is either flying in some new air, or it is dead, or it is something I do not have the imagination to fear. I will never know which, because I sent it there with my own hands and I cannot follow it with anything but a prayer.

Meret found me afterward. She had heard. She always hears; the children miss nothing.

She did not cry. She stood in front of me with her thin arms wrapped around herself and she asked, “Did it hurt him?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “It was very fast. I don’t think he felt anything at all.” This was true, as far as it went. I did not tell her the rest, the hundred years in a breath, the not-knowing. I told myself I was sparing her. I think now I was sparing myself.

She thought about this. Then she said, “When we go through. Will it be fast like that?”

And here is where I broke my promise to her, the one I made to be honest, or perhaps here is where I kept it in the only way a coward can. “I think so,” I said. “I think it will be very fast.”

“And then we’ll be somewhere with food,” she said. Not asking. Telling me. Telling herself. Holding it up between us like the last good lamp.

“And then we’ll be somewhere with food,” I said.

She nodded, and she leaned her head against my arm for a moment, just a moment, the way she used to lean against her mother, the way Eshe used to lean against me, and the whole weight of what I am doing came down on me at once, and I had to set my teeth against it and breathe until it passed.

I am going to walk with this child through the door. I have decided it. There is no figure I have not checked a hundred times, and there is no other road that does not end in watching her starve. I have already watched a child of mine starve, and I will burn the whole of creation down before I will watch it twice.

* * *

Old Hessa died in the night, three days after I wrote the last entry. She was the one who first came and stood beside me at the gathering, the one who said she was tired of being the thing that gets eaten. She did not live to see the door finished. We buried her in the poisoned ground at dawn, whole, the way we bury all of them now. I know how that sounds, to put meat in the ground in a starving valley, and I will not pretend the thought does not come; it comes to everyone, in the long hours, whether we say it aloud or not. In the early years, some of us could not bear the waste and would leave the dead out instead, staked at the edge of the camp, hoping the smell would call something down out of the empty sky to be caught and eaten. Nothing ever came. Not once, in all those years, did the dead bring us anything but more dead. So now we dig, and we give them back whole, and we read the creed over them, and we call the burying the one law we have kept when every other law has gone into the ground ahead of us. We are starving, but we are not yet that, and the day we are, there will be nothing left worth carrying through any door.

I read the creed over Hessa because it is the only liturgy this valley has left, and as I said the words there is only appetite over her wasted body I thought: yes. The famine ate her, after all her defiance, the way it eats everyone who stays. And that is my whole argument, standing over a grave. Stay, and be eaten by something you can see. Go, and be eaten, perhaps, by something you cannot. I am offering my people a choice of mouths. God forgive me, it is still the better choice.

* * *

The great door is finished.

I have been working for three weeks on the final preparations. I have not written because there was nothing left in me at the end of each day but the working, and because I was afraid that if I stopped to put words to what was happening I would lose my nerve entirely. But it is done now. Tonight I woke the full engine for the first time, the true engine, the whole of the great stone throat and not the small prototype. I am still shaking as I write this, and I do not think it is only from hunger.

I did it alone. I sent everyone out of the chamber, even Joran, even Meret, who wept and was angry with me for the first time since I have known her. I told her it was not safe, and that was true, but it was not the whole reason. The whole reason is that I needed to be alone with it. I needed to know what I had made before I let it be seen, the way a man needs a moment alone with terrible news before he can carry it to those he loves.

I touched the full sequence, and the engine did not draw breath the way the prototype draws breath. The engine woke the way a mountain would wake.

The note, when it came, enveloped me. It came up through the soles of my feet and the bones of my legs and took hold of my whole body and rang it like a tuning fork. The dust leapt up off the floor of the chamber and hung in the air, every grain trembling, and the flames of the lamps stretched flat and thin and pointed all in one direction, toward the throat, as though the very light were being drawn in. I have called it a low note, but it is so much more than low. It is the floor beneath the floor of low, a sound that does not so much enter the world as remind the world that it was here first.

The complete portal opened for the first time, and it was enormous, a seam as tall as the chamber through which a multitude could pass. Beyond it churned the underriver, vast now, no longer a glimpse but a vista, a depthless roiling dark-that-is-not-dark stretching away past the edges of sight, and I stood before it, one small starved man in the trembling light, and I will tell you the truth of what I felt, because I have promised myself this book will hold the truth or it will hold nothing.

I felt worship. And I felt like prey. Both. At once. The two together and indivisible, the way you cannot pull the heat out of a fire and still call it fire. Standing in that sound, before that doorway, I understood for the first time why so many of my ancestors wrote of the underriver the way the old mystics wrote of God, with the same trembling mixture of love and terror. The thing on the other side of my door is so far beyond me, so vast and so old and so utterly without need of me, that to stand in its presence is to be returned all at once to the size you actually are, which is the size of a beetle, which is nothing, which is a brief warm morsel of want in an ocean of older want.

And the note, with the full door open, did the thing I have been afraid of since the beginning. It changed. Not in pitch; it held its single tone. But there was a quality in it that I had only half-heard through the prototype, and now I cannot unhear it. It was not a sound of being. It was a sound of wanting. I stood in the full voice of the thing beneath the world and I heard, unmistakably, under all that majesty, a hunger. Patient. Bottomless. A wanting so old and so deep that it has forgotten it is wanting and has simply become the want, the way the sea has forgotten it is wet.

But maybe that is, again, just my own hunger projected onto the ineffable.

The old mystics believed they heard the voice of the cosmos sustaining itself. I think they were half right and half blind. I think the sound that underlies all things is real, and I think they could not bear to hear what it was actually saying, and so they called it praise. It is not praise. I have stood in it now, in the full flood of it, and I will set the heresy down here in my own hand and let it damn me. I do not think the foundation of the world is a hymn. I think it is an appetite. I think there is something at the bottom of everything, and it is hungry, and the note is the sound of its hunger, and the door I have built opens directly into its throat.

I hope that I am wrong.

I closed the engine and knelt in the settling dust for a long time. Here is the thing, you who come after. Even if I am right and the note is a hunger and the current runs into some vast slow mouth at the bottom of creation…what is the alternative? To stay? To keep my people here and let the smaller, nearer hunger have them, the famine that is already in the room, that has already taken Hessa and my daughter and is reaching now for Meret? If everything eats, if the whole of existence is one mouth inside another mouth all the way down, then there is no door anywhere that does not open onto teeth, and the only choice a man ever truly has is which teeth, and how, and whether he walks toward them with his head up or is dragged.

I would rather walk. I would rather carry my people toward the great old hunger with our heads up and our eyes open than feed them by inches to the small one while we wait. If we are to be eaten, let it be in the act of reaching for more. Let it be appetite answering appetite. There is a terrible dignity in it that staying does not have.

We go in three days. I have told them. The chamber will be opened at dawn on the third day, and all who will come will come, and we will walk through together into the current, toward whatever waits. I will hold Meret’s hand, and I will not lie to her, but I will not tell her this last thing either, because some truths a man must carry alone, and this is mine: I think I am leading my whole species into the mouth of God. And I am going to do it anyway. Because the only thing worse than walking into that mouth is standing still and being chewed.

Three days. I must sleep, if I can. There is so much still to set down, and I find that now, at the very end, I want to leave a complete record more than I have ever wanted anything. It’s as though the writing itself were a kind of door, a way to pass some part of myself across to you, whoever you are, on the far shore I will reach or fail to reach.

If you are reading this, then something came through. Then the door is not only teeth. Let that much be true. I am begging it to be true. Please, God, may your mercy outweigh your hunger.

* * *

Two days now until we enter the portal. I meant to spend tonight checking the engine, but I have checked the engine eleven times in the last day alone. So instead I am going to keep two promises, one old and one older.

The older one first. I wrote, pages ago, one grave at a time, and I have dug every grave in this book but hers. So, let me write about Talia while there is still time. My wife went in the third winter of the dying, of the coughing sickness that came through the valley ahead of the worst of the hunger, and she went quickly, which was the only mercy that year gave anyone. She was better than me at every part of living except the sums. Near the end she took my hand and gave me my orders, because she knew me: feed Eshe first; finish the door; and do not make either of them into your grief. I kept the first. I have kept the second. The third was beyond my strength, and she knew it when she said it, and she said it anyway, because hope was a thing she handed out whether or not it could be used.

There. Both graves are dug now. The book is honest. That is as much as I can bring myself to write of Talia for now. If I pass through, I will write more.

The newer promise was to Meret, and it was only to sit with her by the last lamp and teach her letters, as though the world were not ending in two days and we had all the evenings there have ever been.

She is past the simple words now. Tonight I taught her to write a whole sentence of her own choosing, and she bent over the slate with her tongue between her teeth and her brow furrowed like a tiny scholar’s, and she labored at it for the better part of an hour, guarding it with her arm so I could not see. When she finished, she turned it around to show me with enormous gravity. It said: the bird went somewhere with food.

I did not trust my voice for a moment. Then I told her it was perfectly spelled, which it was not, and that it was the finest sentence I had ever read, which was nearer the truth than I would have liked.

“When we get there,” she said, putting the slate down, “I’m going to find him.”

“The bird,” I said.

“Crumb went first. So he’ll already be there. He can show us the good places.” She said it with the absolute confidence of a child who has decided how a thing will be and will brook no argument from physics or grief or the obvious. “Birds always know the good places. Especially Crumb.”

I did not tell her that the bird, if it lives at all, might still be in a current where a breath could be a hundred years, and would be older than the pyramids now, a thing of grey threads and bone if it is anything. I did not tell her that I do not know if anything that passes that door arrives anywhere at all. I have stopped telling her the worst of what I know; I decided that, with the bird, and I have held to it. There is a difference between not lying and emptying the whole black bag of your dread onto a nine-year-old two nights before you ask her to follow you into the dark. The first is a duty. The second is cowardice wearing the mask of honesty, the need to be unburdened, and she is not mine to unburden myself upon. So I let her have the bird. I let her have the good places. It costs me nothing, and it is the only gift I have left to give her.

We sat a while after, not speaking. The lamp was burning low; we are nearly out of oil, and it does not matter, because in two days there will be no one here to need light. She leaned against my arm, the way she does, the way Eshe used to, and I let her, and I did not think of Eshe, or I tried not to, and mostly I failed. But it was a gentle sort of failing, the kind that is almost company.

“You’re not scared,” she informed me as she rubbed her tired eyes into my ragged sleeve. Again, not a question. The children decide what is true and then tell you.

“I’m terribly scared,” I said. “I’m the most frightened man in this whole valley, I should think.”

She considered this, and she seemed to find it acceptable, even reassuring, which surprised me until I understood it. A god is not frightened, and a frightened god is a useless contradiction. But a frightened man who picks you up and carries you toward the door anyway—that is a thing a child can understand and trust, because it is a thing she might do herself, for someone smaller. I have spent years wishing they would stop seeing me as the Portalist. It took a tired child and a low lamp to show me that the cure for being worshipped is simply to be honestly afraid in front of the people who worship you. They cannot kneel to a man who admits he is shaking. They can only take his hand.

She fell asleep against my arm not long after, and I sat very still so as not to wake her, and I watched the lamp gutter, and I thought: this. Whatever the note is, whatever waits at the bottom of the world with its bottomless patient want, it does not have this. It is only hunger. It only takes. It cannot do what I am doing now, which is to sit in the dark at the end of all things and love something more than I love my own continuing, and choose, freely, to spend myself for it. If everything eats, then this is the one thing that is not eating: a starved man holding still so a child can sleep. It is a small light. It is going out, like the lamp. But it is mine, and the great hunger never made it and cannot have it, and I will carry it through the door in front of all my other reasons.

Two days. I have written enough for tonight. The child is sleeping, and I am not going to move.

* * *

It is the third dawn. I am writing this in the chamber, in the last hour before I wake the engine for the final time, with my people gathered behind me in the dark. My hand is steadier than I expected, and I do not know why. Perhaps a man uses up all his fear in the waiting, and he arrives at the edge with nothing left but the doing.

I will be brief. There is not much time, and what there is I want to spend looking at them, not at this page.

They came. Almost all of them came. In the grey before the light they gathered their nothing into bundles, their children and their dead mothers’ rings and the last scraps of the world they were born into, and they walked up the long causeway to the great stones in a thin silent line, four hundred souls, the whole remnant of the human story. They filed into the resonator and they stood, and they waited, and they put their lives into my hands as simply as a child reaching for a parent’s hand for comfort. I do not deserve it. I have never deserved it. But at the end a man must take up the weight he is given, deserved or not, and carry it the last few steps without complaint.

Joran is not among them.

He came to me an hour ago, while the people were still gathering, and he stood before me one last time. He still had the scrap of grey thread folded against his heart; I could see the shape of it through his shirt. He said, “I’m not going through.”

I had known. I think I had known since the day I drew that ruined rope from the door. But it struck me harder than I had braced for, and I had to wait a moment before I could speak.

“I cannot make the figures lie, Joran,” I said. “If you stay, you die. You know the column. It only runs one way.”

“I know the column,” he said. “I’ve checked your figures myself, every one. They’re sound. If I stay, I starve, inside the year.” He said it without a tremor, the way he says everything. “But I have spent my whole life building things that hold, and I have spent it refusing to trust a structure I cannot see the whole of. I am too old to start now. You’re asking me to step off a cliff because the fall might be soft. And maybe you’re right. Maybe there’s a green world on the other side and bread enough for everyone, and I’m a fool, and I’ll die alone in this dust while you all sit down to a feast I was too stubborn to reach.” He almost smiled, then. It was a terrible thing to see, Joran almost smiling. “But it’ll be my death. On the only ground I ever understood. Not a stranger’s death in a current I can’t measure. I’d rather be eaten by the devil I can see.”

And there it was. The whole of the question, said plain, by the harder half of it. I had no answer. I have never had an answer. The two of us have carried the same dread between us all this time, the hope and the doubt, and at the last hour the doubt set down its half of the load and chose the grave it could understand, and the hope picked up the whole weight and turned toward the door. That is all the difference there has ever been between us. It is not a difference of courage. I want you to understand that. Joran is not a coward. In some ways his is the braver choice. He is only a man who would rather be devoured by a truth than saved by a hope, and I cannot say, even now, even here, that he is wrong.

We embraced. I have never embraced him before. He felt like a bundle of dry sticks in my arms, as we all do now. “Tell them,” he said into my ear, low, so only I could hear, “if you make it. Tell them a man stayed behind who didn’t believe, and wished he had. That’s all I have left to give you and our people. Give it to them on the far side, if there is one.”

“I’ll give it to them,” I said. And I will, if I can. I am setting it here first, so the words survive me, whatever happens. A man named Joran, a good man, stayed behind who did not believe, and wished he had.

He has gone back down the causeway now, to the empty valley, to wait for the devil he can see.

* * *

So. The hour is here.

Meret is at my side. She has not let go of my hand since the gathering began; her small fingers are wound into mine, and her grip is the only warm and certain thing in this trembling dark. She looked up at me a moment ago and said, “You’re not lying to me. Are you? About the food.” And I looked down into her gaunt yet fierce face, the face that has never once asked me to be a god, only ever to be a man who tells the truth, and I made my choice, the last choice, the one I have been circling all this time.

“I don’t know what’s on the other side, Meret,” I said. “That’s the truth. I have never seen it. It might be a world with food. It might be something I can’t imagine. I don’t know. No one knows. But I know that I love you, and I know I would rather walk into the not-knowing holding your hand than let you stay here in the certain dark. So I’m not promising you food. I’m promising you that whatever’s there, we will go to it together, and I will not let go of your hand.”

She was quiet. And then she said, gravely, the way she says everything, “That’s better than the food,” and she tightened her fingers in mine, and I had to look away so she would not see my tears.

I am glad I did not lie. Whatever comes, I went through that door having finally, at the very end, told the one person who matters most to me now the whole truth, and that is more than I have managed in years, and it feels, strangely, like the only thing I have ever truly built that will hold.

Before I close this book and seal it in its case to carry against my heart, I find I want to write down again the words from the front of the oldest book composing the Journals, set down by a Veyr a thousand years dead. He wrote: doors can be opened in creation. I have given my life to learning how to open and maintain such a door, and I have hesitated all the while, because I know the dark behind the door may not be empty, and may not be kind. I pray only that my children and their children prove braver than I am, and that the dark on the far side is something other than teeth.

Did he feel it the way I have felt it, standing in the small voice of his prototype? Or did he only suspect, and never find the courage, or the cruelty, to learn whether his suspicion was true? I cannot know. But I understand him now, my thousand-year-dead forefather, in a way I never could while the words were only ink. He was afraid. That is the thing the line has truly handed down, under all the physics and mathematics: not an answer, but a fear. We have always known how to open the door. And what waits behind it, we have only ever dreaded. He dreaded it and could not prove it, and he hesitated his whole life in the shadow of it, and then he did the one thing a Veyr has always been known to do with a fear that size. He wrote it down, and he passed both the door and the dread to whoever came after, all the way down the thinning line, to me.

It has fallen to me to learn that the fear was right. I stand now in the full voice of the engine, where he stood only at the threshold of a prototype, and I have heard what he could do no more than dread, and I am as certain as a living man can be that there is nothing behind any door but another hunger. And I am going to open it anyway. Because that is the inheritance too, and it is the better half of it. To be hungry. To be afraid. To know, or very nearly know, that the dark on the far side is teeth. And to open the door regardless, and walk toward the mouth with our heads up. I see now, as clear as the dying Earth itself, that the only thing a starving creature can do that is better than being eaten is to be reaching for more at the moment the teeth close.

I am going to power the engine to its full capacity now.

The note will rise, and the door will open, and I am not going to flinch from the sound this time. I am not going to brace against the hunger in it. I am going to stand in the full voice of whatever waits beneath the world, and I am going to breathe it in, all the way down, the way you breathe before you go under water. I am going to take the first step into the current with this child’s hand in mine and the last of mankind at my back, and I am going to find out, at last, what is on the other side of the only question my family has ever asked.

If you are reading this, then we came through. Then the door was not only teeth. Then somewhere on the far shore my hand is still holding hers, and I kept my word.

Hold to that. I am holding to it with everything I have left.

The engine is awake. The note is rising. I can feel it in my teeth.

I am taking a breath.