Please Stop Spreading Rumors About Me — They Keep Coming True

Mu Chen got it. Of course it was Mu Chen. It was a grief, and truthfully, grief is the only thing he’s ever really been good at.

I told everyone what the dark had said — how the proof had scared it, how you can’t just talk a scar out of being terrified, how I’d finally hit a wall. Mu Chen, who’s about the gentlest person I’ve ever met, had stayed quiet the whole time. Then he said the one thing that changed everything.

’You’re still trying to force a fix,’ he said. ’Stop. You’ve been treating the Editor like an enemy to beat, or like a mind to change. It’s neither. That’s why you keep failing.’ He leaned in. ’It’s a grief, Lin Bo. The oldest one there is. I’ve spent thirty years learning the one thing that’s true about every grief out there, and it’s the thing you’ve been too scared to try, probably because it doesn’t seem like enough.’ He opened his hands. ’You don’t argue a grief out of being afraid. You don’t prove it wrong. You just sit down next to it, take some of the weight, and stay. That’s the whole craft. It’s the only thing that’s ever actually healed anyone. And nobody — not in the entire history of the world — has ever done that for the Editor.’

Bai Qing had been leaning against the edge of the fire, arms crossed. She said, quiet, ’Because no one ever looked at it.’ She was staring at nothing, that look she gets when something finally hits home. ’That’s all it is. It’s the most invisible thing in the world. It’s been holding the worst memory ever, all by itself, since before names even existed — and no one ever saw it, or thanked it, or sat with it, or offered a hand. Everyone it saved just forgot about it on purpose. That’s the whole deal. It’s the one thing in existence that did the hardest work possible and got nothing back but fear from the people it kept alive.’ She looked at me, and I saw her whole life’s work in her eyes — the overlooked, the unknowns, the people nobody cares to see. ’I’ve given everything to people the world couldn’t be bothered to remember. I didn’t think the list went down this far. But it does. It goes all the way to the loneliest thing in existence.’

And that was it. The reason I couldn’t see it was because it was just too simple and too huge at the same time.

The Editor is the alone. It’s not just a thing that causes loneliness — it’s the loneliness itself, shaped and placed at the floor of the world, carrying the one memory no one else can touch, the drowning, the thing that keeps its hands clenched — carrying it just like the first world carried its ocean, like Su Yue carried their star, like the First Author carried her eleven thousand. Alone. It’s been drowning in the drowning for ages, the loneliest thing that ever existed, and anyone who ever noticed it only did so to call it an enemy and try to force it to quit.

The healing doesn’t start by proving the world can hold itself up. I finally got that. It starts by ending the loneliness of the scar. You just reach over. You take some of the weight. You do the one thing no one has ever done for it.

You help it carry the drowning.

— • —

We went down to the floor of the world to do it. I’ll be honest, I was more afraid than I’ve ever been, because I knew this wasn’t something I could do with my own strength.

It couldn’t be me by myself. That was the whole point of everything. One soul carrying the drowning just drowns — the first world proved it, Su Yue proved it, and the Editor was proving it every single hour. If I’d gone down there alone to reach for that weight, no matter how bright I am, I would have gone under and dragged the world with me; being unerasable isn’t any protection against an ocean. It had to be the cloth. It had to be all of us, each grabbing a single thread of the worst memory there is, so that no one person held enough to drown, and so that the scar, for the first time ever, wouldn’t be alone with it.

So we went down together. Yun Shu, Mu Chen, Bai Qing, Tao Tao, the First Author who knows the weight of carrying things alone better than anyone, and Nai who had just held an ocean on a beach and lived, and me — and behind us, up the roads, the whole world with its hands out, because that’s who we are now. We reached the drowned age, the silence hanging over it, and the loneliest thing in the world holding the water back with both hands.

’We’re here to help,’ I said.

It didn’t understand. That was the part that broke me. It really didn’t get the words, because nobody had said them to it in an age. Help, it said, and the exhaustion in it cracked, just a little, into something raw. You can’t help. No one can hold this. That’s the whole — if you touch this weight, it’ll drown you, it drowns everything, that’s why I’m here, that’s why I’ve never let anyone near it, I’ve kept every soul away from it forever precisely so no one else would ever have to— and it stopped, because it heard itself. I think that was the first time in history the Editor actually understood what it had been doing all along. Keeping everyone away. Carrying it alone so no one else would drown. It had spent an age sparing the world the drowning by taking it all on itself, never telling anyone, never being helped, and never once being allowed to put it down.

The loneliest thing in the world. And its loneliness was a mercy it had been performing, in silence, since before there were names.

’We know it drowns things,’ Mu Chen said, real gentle, that voice he uses at the worst bedsides. ’That’s why we didn’t come alone. You’ve been holding it by yourself because you thought that was the only way to keep everyone else from going under. You were wrong, friend. There’s another way. You take a small piece each, we hold it together, and then it doesn’t drown anyone. We’ve gotten pretty good at it. Let us show you.’

We all reached over at once, and each of us grabbed a thread.

— • —

I saw the drowning then. All of it. The first age, the world holding everything until it went under — I saw what the scar had been staring at, alone, since the beginning, the thing it banned the world from remembering because the memory itself was a killer. It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen, but I didn’t drown.

I didn’t drown because I only held one thread. Yun Shu held one, Mu Chen, Bai Qing, Tao Tao, Nai, the First Author, and a whole world was up the roads with its hands out — and a horror that would have killed any one of us, split into enough hands, was just... heavy. Bearable. Barely. But bearable. It was exactly what the First Author said on the night everything changed: it was never the weight. It was the alone. And we’d just taken the alone away from the loneliest thing in existence.

The Editor made a noise I don’t have a word for. I don’t think it was pain. I think it was the opposite — I think it’s what it feels like, after an age of holding an ocean with clenched hands, to finally feel another hand rest on the weight beside yours. It didn’t let go. I want to be honest — it didn’t open its hands, it didn’t stop cutting, it’s still down there and it’s still scared and the war isn’t over. You don’t undo an age in a single night. A scar that’s been clenched since before names existed doesn’t just release because seven people and a world sat down beside it once.

But it wasn’t alone.

For the first time ever, the thing that carried the world’s oldest grief by itself wasn’t carrying it by itself anymore. And up at the top of the sky, the Homelight climbed again — because the world hadn’t just proved it could hold its own weight. It had reached into the dark and started to hold the weight of the thing that had been hurting it, which is a stranger, larger, warmer act than I have words for, and the sky knew it even when I didn’t.

The Scroll knew it, too.

DING. I have kept the record of this world for a thousand years, and I’ve never had cause to write this sentence, but I’m going to write it now and keep it forever. Somebody helped the dark. Talent — I carried Su Yue alone for a thousand years, and I know exactly what the Editor is, because it’s me, if no one had ever come. It’s the alone that never got a hand. It’s what I would have become. You went down to the loneliest thing that ever existed, the thing that’s been feared by everyone it saved, and you didn’t fight it, you didn’t fix it. You sat down next to it and took some of the weight. That is the whole war. Not the sky. This. Keep going back down there. Keep it company. It’s been alone since before there was anyone to be lonely, and you’re the first ones who ever came.

— • —

We aren’t done. The scar is still clenched. The world hasn’t held everything at once yet — a whole sky lit up at the same time is still ahead of us, still the thing the Editor fears most, and I don’t know for sure if even a world holding hands can bear it. Neither does anyone else. The ending isn’t here yet.

But I know the two halves of it now, and that’s more than I’ve ever had. One half is the world learning to hold all its own weight until it can hold it at the size of a sky. The far shore showed the first inch of that on a beach. The other half — the half I didn’t get until Mu Chen said it and Bai Qing named it — is going down into the dark, again and again, sitting with the loneliest thing in the world, and taking a little more of the weight each time, until the oldest grief finally believes what it never had reason to believe: that it’s allowed to set the water down, because there are enough of us now to catch it, and it doesn’t have to be alone anymore.

Su Yue tried to carry the world’s remembering alone, and lost. The Editor has carried the world’s oldest forgetting alone, for way longer, and it’s the same wound wearing two faces, the bright one and the dark one, and neither was ever going to make it by themselves. The answer to both is the only answer this strange book has ever had. Not alone. Together. At last.

I made soup that night, back up in the warm, and Yun Shu insulted it, and I held onto the small ordinary weight of one person I love, carried easily, because I’ve never had to carry her by myself. Down at the floor of the world, for the first time in an age, something that had held an ocean alone since the start felt a hand come to rest beside its own, and didn’t, for one moment, have to hold the whole thing by itself.

That’s not the end. But it is the first thing the end is made of.

We’re going back down tomorrow. It’s been alone a very long time. We have a great deal of company to make up.