Fenwick Crane had lost his own name to the river, and he meant to buy it back one stranger at a time. He stood on the misty dock before dawn, leaning on his carved staff, and waited for travelers who wanted to cross. He asked each one a riddle. Those who answered gave him more than passage fare. They gave him their true name, spoken aloud, and for a moment his own lost name felt close. Then the fog thickened, the traveler stepped onto his ferry, and the name slipped out of his head like water through his fingers. Last night a woman had crossed. She told him her true name. This morning he could not remember a single sound of it. He had gathered dozens this way. Not one stayed. Each name he lost felt like losing his own again. He needed somewhere to keep them. His memory had holes. The river had taught him that cruelly. At the edge of the dock, half-sunk in mud, lay a broken slab of stone. Flood water had dragged it down from some old shrine. Fenwick had passed it a hundred times. Now he knelt and wiped the muck away. The face of the slab was carved with grooves and old marks, like letters no one spoke anymore. Deep channels. Carved deep enough to hold a line that would not wash out. His hands shook. He could scratch a name into stone. Stone did not forget. He dragged the slab up the planks. It took him until the mist began to lift. Under the drooping branches of the willow beside the dock, he propped it upright. Then he took the sharp edge of a river rock and tested it against the stone. It bit. A pale scratch showed clear against the gray. A young man came down the path, wanting to cross. Fenwick asked his riddle. The young man thought, then answered true. "My name is Edrin," he said, and told the rest of it, the full secret shape of it. Fenwick made him wait. He pressed the rock to the slab and cut the name in, letter by letter, while the sounds were still warm in his ears. His hand ached. When he finished, the name sat there in the stone, fixed. He poled the young man across. He returned alone. He read the slab. The name was still there. He remembered it. Fenwick sat under the willow and laughed, a dry sound he had not made in years. One name saved. He only needed a thousand. Then he looked at the slab and counted the grooves already there. He had room for perhaps forty names. No more. The stone was small, and the river had given him only this one. He would fill it before the week was out. Then he would need another way to hold the rest.

By week's end Fenwick Crane had filled the stone slab. Forty names, cut deep, crowded every face of it. He traced the last groove with his thumb and found no room for one more. Travelers still came down the path. He still needed hundreds. He had a way to hold names now, but not enough stone to hold them. He searched the shore at low water. He pried loose river rocks and turned them over. Each one was too small, too round, or cracked through. A name or two, then nothing. He would spend his life dragging pebbles from the mud. Then he looked at the dock itself. He lived on it. Weathered planks ran under his feet, fog drifting between the mooring posts. The wood was wide and long. Thick posts stood at each corner, taller than a man. He knelt and pressed his river rock to a plank. It bit. A pale line showed against the gray. Wood was not stone. Rain would gray it. Boots would wear it. But a deep cut would last years, and the dock held more surface than a hundred slabs. He set to work that evening. He carved Edrin's name again into the plank nearest his bench, copying it from the slab so it would not be lost. Then he waited for the next traveler and carved her name beside it. He cut each letter deep, past the soft gray skin of the wood, into the hard grain beneath. For three days he carved. Names ran along the planks in rows. They climbed the mooring posts. He worked by the light of his lantern, bent over, his hand raw and bleeding at the knuckles. He read the names back each morning. He remembered them. The dock was becoming a ledger he walked on. On the fourth morning he stepped back to see his work, and his boot caught a fresh groove. His foot slid. He had carved the planks until they were slick with cuts. The surface he stood on was the surface he was ruining. He steadied himself on a post and looked down the dock. The names were clear. But every letter he cut weakened the wood that held him over the water. He ran his hand along a plank and felt it flex. The river waited underneath, the same river that had taken his name. He sat on his bench and counted. Perhaps three hundred names would fit across the whole dock, posts and all. Not a thousand. And by then the planks might not bear his weight. Fenwick wiped the river rock clean. He had traded a small stone for a large one, and bought room for more names. But the thing he carved was the thing he lived on. He could fill the dock. He could not stand on it and the river both. He needed something larger than his home, and something that would not sink him while he wrote.