Eddard could not sleep, so he went down to the kitchen.It was the hour before dawn, the hour when the villa was at its quietest. The fires had burned down to embers. The hall was dark. The only light came from the moon through the high windows, pale and thin, enough to make out the shapes of the table and the chairs and the kettle on its hook by the hearth.He had not come down here with a purpose. He had come down because lying in bed awake had become unbearable, and because he had learned over the years that the kitchen was the one room in any house where a man could be alone without being lonely. He put the kettle on. He sat down at the long table. He looked at the wall.He did not hear Arya come in. He only realized she was there when she spoke."Are you going to accept the offer?"She was standing in the doorway with her arms folded and her hair loose and her feet bare on the cold stone floor. She had followed him down. She must have woken when he got up, and waited to see wheth

The climb to the ridge took most of the morning.They had left before first light—Eddard, Kaelen, and Sera—and they had gone the long way, up the western path and around the shoulder of the mountain, because Kaelen did not trust the direct route and Sera did not trust Kaelen's paranoia and neither of them trusted the dark. So they had gone the long way, and the long way was steep, and the sun was already high by the time they crested the final stretch of broken stone and stopped at the top of the world.Eddard had seen the ridge a hundred times from the valley. He had never been on top of it. He had never needed to be. It was the edge of the valley—the edge of the world he had built—and he had always been content to leave it alone.Now he stood on top of it, and he looked down, and he saw what the glow had been."By the light," Kaelen said.Sera said nothing at all.---It was a tear.Not the cut—Eddard had seen the cut, he had spent years of his life dealing with the cut, he knew wha

The second tear was not on any ridge.It was under the deep weave—under the layer that ordinary reality rested on, under the place where the Shadow's memory was stored, under everything that Eddard had ever walked through when he had gone down looking for answers. He had not found it on his own. He had found it because Elara had told him where to look.She had known where to look because she had been there before. Not in this life—not as the redeemed Nameless One who sat at the long table and drank tea and helped the inner circle plan. In the other life. The one she did not speak about. The one she had spent eons inside, sealed away from the world, pressing against the underside of everything.She had known the second tear was there the way a person knows an old scar. She had not been able to name it. She had not been able to describe it. But when Eddard had told the inner circle about the presence he had felt underneath the memory—the deep, quiet, enormous presence that the Shadow it

The first memory hit them before they had gone a hundred paces.It came without warning—no shift, no transition, no moment of adjustment. One step they were walking through the ordinary darkness of the deep weave, with Lily's lamp throwing a small circle of light around them, and the next step they were standing in a world that was not their own. The darkness was gone. The lamp was gone. Everything was gone except the memory, and the memory was so complete that for a moment Eddard forgot he had ever been anywhere else.They were standing at the beginning of everything.A single thread hung in the void in front of them—thin, bright, and warm, the first warm thing in the universe. It was being drawn out of the dark by something Eddard could not see, something that had no shape and no name, and it was the only thing in existence. There was no world yet. There was no light yet. There was only the thread, and the warmth of it, and the vast patient dark that surrounded it.Eddard felt the S

Seam was sitting at the long table when Eddard came in, and it had the look of someone who had been waiting for a while.The expedition had returned to the valley three days ago. The wall was still there, still failing, still holding back whatever was on the other side. Eddard had spent those three days walking the valley, thinking, not deciding. He had known, somewhere at the back of his mind, that he would have to talk to Seam eventually. Seam was the only one who carried the first guardian's memories. Seam was the only one who might know who the woman behind the wall really was.Seam had known he was coming. It had the tea ready and everything."Sit down," it said. "I have a story to tell you."---Eddard sat.Seam told him about the first guardian's mother.Her name was Aelith. She had been one of the old world's inhabitants—one of the beings who had lived before the division, before the light and the dark, before the weave had been cut into two halves. She had not been a god. Sea