CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN:

THE LAST VISION

Aradon did not know he was dying until he was almost finished doing it.

He had gone to bed on a night in late autumn — the kind of night when the air has a quality of completion to it, when the year is clearly preparing itself for the long rest of winter, when the light on the hills in the afternoon has the golden weight of something that knows it is ending and is at peace with that. He had lain down on his sleeping mat with the ordinary intention of sleeping and had felt, with the first breath of lying still, that this particular lying still was different from all the others.

Not frightening. Not urgent. Simply — final.

He thought about calling for his daughter, who slept in the next room, and then decided against it. She would know soon enough. There was nothing she needed to do that she had not already done, nothing he needed to say that he had not already said. The years had given them ample time for the saying of things.

He lay still and looked at the ceiling and thought about his life.

It was a strange inventory to take in the dark — all the roads walked and all the decisions made and all the people met and loved and lost and carried forward in memory, all the moments of fear and courage and failure and recovery that made up the long account of a man's particular existence. He had been a trader and an exile and a wanderer and a decree-speaker and a father and a grandfather and a keeper of stories, and each of those had been a real thing, not a phase or a preparation but a genuine life lived genuinely.

But what came to him most clearly, lying still in the last dark of his last night, was not the inventory.

It was the face.

The face on the summit, the face in the hall of fire's light, the face that he had been made to know from before his birth and had finally, finally seen with his own eyes on the day the sky opened and the host gathered and the figure descended to the summit of the mountain.

He had spent the rest of his life carrying that face the way Enock had carried the prophecy — not as a burden but as a lamp, something that gave light in the dark passages, something that made the direction clear when the road was uncertain. Every time the dark places had tried to close in again, every time the valley had faced something that pressed down on it in the old familiar manner of Watchers and their darkness, he had called the face to mind and the proportions had rearranged themselves correctly — the dark places shrinking to their true size, the light filling its proper volume, the presence of the One who had descended making everything that was not that presence smaller by comparison.

He had told the story every year until he could not tell it anymore.

He had given the seven scrolls to Sorah's granddaughter, who had her great-grandmother's careful hand and her great-grandmother's gift for faithful transcription.

He had done what he said he would do, that night at the council table when Sorah had asked what they were going to do now: he had built, and he had remembered, and he had told the truth about what he saw.

It had been enough.

He closed his eyes.

And in the space behind his closed eyes — in the place where the hall of fire had been, where the throne room had blazed and the decree had settled on him like the most specific weight he had ever carried — he saw, one last time, the face.

Not at a distance. Not on a summit across a valley.

Close.

As close as the breath of the One who had made him from dust and given him breath, as close as the word Mine in the moment it had been spoken over the people on the mountain, as close as the most intimate thing he had ever experienced, and it was —

The last word Aradon spoke, barely audible, was not a word anyone in the room would have understood as particularly significant.

He said: Yes.

And then he was still.

And the autumn night moved on around him, indifferent and cold and carrying the smell of pine and stone and the faint, distant promise of rain.

And in the hall of fire, in the place that is not a place and the time that is not a time, the decree that had been written before the mountain existed was marked: Completed.

And the One who had written it smiled.