CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR:

THE BOOK OF NAMES

Seven days after the descent, Enock called Aradon to his dwelling at the edge of the valley.

The old seer's house was small — a single room with a sleeping mat, a writing table, and shelves that held more scrolls than the shelves were properly sized to hold, the overflow stacked in careful columns on the floor and along the windowsill and in the corner by the door. Aradon had been here many times in the years of their acquaintance, and every time he came the scrolls seemed to have multiplied, as though the act of writing prophecy caused more prophecy to require writing, an endless generation of words from words.

Today, however, many of the scrolls were gone.

The shelves held only a few — seven, Aradon counted, arranged with careful spacing so that each had room to breathe. The rest of the overcrowded columns and stacks had been replaced with open space, and the open space had the quality of something deliberate, something chosen rather than merely empty.

Enock sat at the writing table with a lamp burning beside him despite the morning light coming through the window.

"You cleared the scrolls," Aradon said.

"I burned them," Enock said.

Aradon stared at him. "Seventy years of prophecy—"

"It was finished," Enock said simply. "It was always meant to be finished. Prophecy is not an end in itself — it is a road, and when you have walked the road and arrived where the road was going, you do not carry the road with you. You arrive, and you are there, and the road has done what it was made to do."

He gestured at the seven scrolls.

"These I kept. Not prophecy — record. The account of what was seen and heard, from the hall of fire to the summit, from the first vision to the seventh word. These are not for us. These are for the ones who come after, the ones who were not on the mountain, the ones who will need to know what the mountain was before the sky opens again."

Aradon sat down across from him.

"You think it will open again," he said.

"I know it will open again," Enock said. "What we saw on the summit was not the end of all things. It was the end of this age and the beginning of the next. The One who descended is not finished. He came to this valley, to this mountain, to these people — and the valley and the mountain and the people are changed, and the change is real and permanent. But there are other valleys. There are other mountains. There are other people in other ages who have not yet heard the decree, who have not yet been brought to the summit, who have Watchers of their own standing in the high places."

He paused.

"The work is not finished," he said. "It has only been completed here."

Aradon thought about this for a long time.

"The seven scrolls," he said. "What do they say?"

"Everything," Enock said. "The hall of fire. The decree. The road to the mountain. The Shades and the Watchers and the night before the summit. The seventh word. The descent." He paused. "The face."

"Will anyone believe them?"

"Some will," Enock said. "Some will not. That is the nature of record — it cannot compel belief, only offer truth. The ones who are ready to receive it will receive it. The ones who are not yet ready will come back to it later, when they are."

He looked at the scrolls with the careful attention of a man who has made something with great labor and is releasing it.

"In the end," he said, "belief is not the point. The point is that it is true. Truth does not require belief to remain true. It waits."