Diogenes Gravemind's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Diogenes Gravemind stopped walking because a dead girl had hooked her fingers into the wire cage of his lamp. He could not see her. He had not seen anything since before he died. But he felt her weight tug the handle down, and he heard her breathing, which the dead should not do. He was blind in life too, and he had carried a lamp then, holding it up in daylight so honest men might notice they were being looked for. He never found one. Now he walked the Old Mist with the same lamp raised for the same reason, and he had been told, by something older than him, that when a truthful mortal finally stood in his light, the flame would go out and he could rest. Until then he walked. The girl was in his way. "Judge me," she said. "I can't go on till someone does." Diogenes set the lamp on the ground between them. He asked her what she had done. She said she had shot a thing in the shallows that had been pulling swimmers under for a year, and that the thing had worn a face she knew, and that she had fired anyway. She said her name had been Mary Contrary, and that afterward the tide took her too. She said a teacher of hers had guessed which old gods were waiting instead of hiding, and she had gone to finish what he started, and she was not sure now if she had murdered a god or a man. Something moved behind her voice. Diogenes heard three mouths breathing out of one throat, slow and patient, coiled around her ankles like a debt. The serpent had followed her down. It was waiting to see what he said. "You told it straight," Diogenes said. "You didn't shave the story to make yourself clean." He lifted the lamp again and held it toward her face. He waited for the flame to gutter, the way he had been promised it would when honesty finally stood in front of him. The flame did not move. It burned the same steady yellow it had burned for a hundred years. He lowered the lamp. She was truthful, but not truthful enough, or not the one, or truth alone was not the thing he needed. He told her to walk on. He told her the three-headed weight around her feet was her judgment and that she could carry it forward now. She went. The breathing went with her. Diogenes stood alone in the mist with a lamp that would not die and a road that would not end, and he understood, for the first time, that finding one honest mortal down here might not be enough. He would have to learn what else the light was asking for. Then he took a step.