Day fifty-three.
He had been counting.
Not divine-realm days, which were their own strange and elastic thing, but mortal days in the valley — the specific sunrises and sunsets of a single river valley on a single temperate continent, each one distinct enough to track if you were watching closely, each one blurring into the last if you weren't. He had been watching closely for fifty-three of them, and in that time he had catalogued more than three hundred individual behaviors, seven distinct social negotiations, two apparent disputes that resolved without violence, and one extraordinary night when both moons rose together at the edge of the world and his people sat on a flat stone and felt, for the first time, that the universe owed them an explanation.
He had been counting the days since the intelligence revised Stone-Speaker's window.
Today was day eleven of that revised window.
The shorter estimate, the intelligence had said, was more probable.
Stone-Speaker was still alive. He was sitting in his usual place at the edge of the fire circle with his stones arranged before him and the morning light doing its horizontal gold across the valley, and he was teaching.
He was teaching in the only way he knew how, which was the same way he had always thought through arrangement, through demonstration, through the particular quality of sustained attention that made things visible that would otherwise pass unnoticed. He had Wren beside him and the clay tablet she had started three days ago a flat section of riverside clay she had levered free and carried to the fire circle, still damp enough to hold marks, slowly hardening in the dry air and he was pressing his finger into the clay's surface while she watched.
He was not writing numbers. He did not know the concept of writing numbers.
He was pressing marks that were *about* numbers. The relationship between them. The way that adding one more to a group of three made something different from three in a consistent, reliable, repeatable way different in the same direction, by the same amount, every time. He was pressing the marks that described this consistency, and Wren was watching with her full body, the way she watched things that mattered.
Arrow sat nearby sharpening something. She was always sharpening something. First had taken the remaining members of the group toward the northern fruit trees the nut surplus Atlas had confirmed in his observation three days ago. The valley was quiet in the way that valleys are quiet when nothing has gone wrong yet and the sun is doing its work and everything that is alive in it is occupied with being alive.
Atlas watched Stone-Speaker's hands.
The stiffness was worse. The old male moved his finger across the clay with deliberate care now not the kind of care that meant precision but the kind that meant managing something. Working around an edge. Each mark pressed with concentration that had nothing to do with the mark itself and everything to do with the act of pressing.
He was making the marks hurt.
He was making them anyway.
Atlas did not intervene. He had nothing to intervene with, not that he would have used it here this was not the kind of moment that divine energy could address, and he had nineteen percent, and he had told himself thirty days of austerity, and none of that was why he wasn't intervening.
He wasn't intervening because Stone-Speaker didn't need him to.
The old male knew something. Not the clinical truth of it he had no word for *dying*, no framework for the cellular mechanics of what was happening inside him but the shape of it. The approaching gap. He had been oriented toward the gap for days, the way a person turns toward the source of a sound they expect to hear any moment.
He was not afraid.
He was finishing.
-----
The morning passed.
First returned with the group from the northern trees in the early afternoon, and they ate together in the fire circle with the comfortable disorganization of people who have been doing something long enough that it no longer requires negotiation. Stone-Speaker ate little. He had been eating little for several days. No one had a word for this either, but First had noticed Atlas could tell by the way the broader male watched the elder, the particular angle of watchful attention that was different from his usual threat-assessment scan, directed inward at the group rather than outward at the forest.
You know, Atlas thought, watching First watch Stone-Speaker. *You don't know what you know, but you know something is changing.*
After the meal, Wren brought the clay tablet to Stone-Speaker and they worked again. She had learned, in the last three days, to press more carefully her marks were cleaner now, more consistent in their depth, less likely to collapse at the edges. She had also learned, though she could not have articulated how, that different depths made different kinds of marks, and that different kinds of marks could be made to mean different things.
She was developing a grammar.
Not language not yet. But the precursor to grammar, which was the understanding that the *way* you made a mark was part of the mark's meaning. That a deep press and a shallow drag were not the same thing even if they left similar shapes.
Stone-Speaker watched her discover this and made the sound he always made when she got something right. Not praise he did not have the concept of praise, which requires knowing that you are better than you might have been. More like recognition. *That. Yes. That.*
Arrow came to look at the clay tablet at some point in the afternoon.
She picked it up — carefully, both hands, the way you hold something heavy — and turned it to look at it from the side. She was looking at the marks as physical objects, Atlas realized. As things that had depth and shape in three dimensions rather than symbols with meaning in two. She ran her thumb along the edge of one of the deeper press-marks, feeling the ridge it had pushed up on either side.
She made a questioning sound.
Wren made a sound that meant: hard clay. marks stay.
Arrow looked at the clay for a long moment. Then she looked at the stick she had been sharpening, which had a particular point to it that she had been developing with the specific persistence of someone who believes the right tool exists and is willing to work until they have made it.
She pressed the point of the stick into the clay's edge.
The mark it left was finer than a finger-press. Cleaner. More precise.
All three of them looked at it.
Stone-Speaker made a sound a short, soft sound that Atlas had not heard from him before. It was not the recognition-sound he made when Wren got something right. It was different. Something older. Something that existed before recognition or teaching or any of the transactional sounds they had been making at each other.
It was, Atlas thought, a sound of satisfaction.
Not at the mark. At the moment. At sitting in the afternoon light with Wren and Arrow and the clay tablet and the fine-pointed stick and the sense unfelt but structurally present that something had been passed from one place to another, and would continue past him into whatever came next.
He sat with his stones arranged before him in their final configuration.
One row. One through six. The only arrangement that put them all together in order, each distinct, nothing hidden.
He did not touch them again.
-----
MORTAL POV — STONE-SPEAKER
*He was cold, but the stone beneath him was warm, and the warmth came up through his legs and into the base of his spine, and this was enough.*
*The women had taken the clay tablet inside inside being the rough shelter First had begun constructing against the valley's northern rock face, woven branches and packed mud, the first thing any of them had built that was not a fire and he could hear the sounds they made working with it. The particular small sounds of concentration. He liked those sounds.*
*The sky was doing the thing it did in the late afternoon, the light going long and amber, the shadows of the trees reaching toward the eastern bank. He had looked at this sky for fifty-three days. He knew its colors now in the way you know someone's voice — not as a thing you think about but as a thing you simply recognize, immediately and completely.*
*He arranged his stones.*
*One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.*
*He had been trying to understand the gap — the thing that lived between six and what came next. He knew there was something next. He could feel it the way he could feel the structure of the world's rules in the stones themselves, the way he had always been able to feel rules before he could state them. Something came after six. Something consistent. Something with the same relationship to six as six had to five.*
*He did not know what it was called.*
*He did not know it would one day be called seven.*
*He picked up another stone from beside the path — a river-worn one, grey and smooth, that he had not counted before — and placed it at the end of the row.*
*One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. And this.*
*He looked at the arrangement for a long time.*
*He had found the next one.*
*He pressed the stone into the soil slightly, firming its position. He looked at the row. He was satisfied with this. He was satisfied with many things today, in a way that was different from other days — a fullness rather than a hunger, which had been his usual orientation toward the world. Hunger to know the next thing, hunger to understand the rule he hadn't found yet. The fullness was new.*
*He thought about Wren. He thought about the clay tablet and the stick with the fine point, and Arrow discovering that a sharper tool made a finer mark. He thought about the arrangement of two stones for two moons and six stones for the sky between them, and how Wren had made that arrangement permanent without needing the stones, because she had found a way to hold it in something that the rain couldn't touch.*
*He thought: the things I know are not going to stop when I stop.*
*This seemed important.*
*He thought about the gap he was approaching — the one he had been aware of for some days, the way you are aware of the edge of something before you reach it. He was not afraid of the gap. He had been comfortable with gaps for a long time. Gaps were not absences. They were the spaces that made arrangements meaningful. A row of stones with no spaces was not an arrangement. It was a pile.*
*The gap was part of the pattern.*
*He was part of the pattern.*
*The cold was in his chest now as well as his hands. Not painful. Just present. A kind of information, the same as always. He processed it the way he processed everything — with attention, without panic, trying to understand what rule it was expressing.*
*The amber light went long across the valley.*
*Arrow came out of the shelter and sat with him for a while, which she had not done before, and he was glad of it. She did not make sounds at him. She just sat with her throwing stick across her knees and looked at the sky in that particular direction-focused way she had, like she was tracking something that hadn't moved yet.*
He liked her.
He liked all of them.
*He thought: this was a good place to be. This valley with its river and its gold afternoon light and these people who were learning the shape of the world alongside him.*
*He thought: I would not have arranged this differently.*
*He reached into the bark pouch beside him and took out the six original stones — the first ones, the ones he had carried since the beginning — and added the new grey river-stone to them. Seven stones now.*
*He arranged them in a row.*
*Then he closed his hands around all seven at once, cupping them together.*
*He held them.*
The light continued its amber work on the valley.
He did not open his hands again.
End of chapter 7