The Gathering of Empty Hands

Samuel came to Millis carrying only his name, and even that he cannot say was truly his before the accident. He speaks Spanish when the words come easier that way, and English when they do not, and the Chronicle sets him down with the same care it gives to all the season's arrivals shaped by blankness: Quinn who knows no one and remembers nothing, Melina who traveled without knowing her purpose, omori who woke in a vast forest with no recognition in any direction. Samuel calls himself by the name of Samuel, which is itself a kind of decision, and the record marks the choosing as it marks all such things, because a person who names themselves has done something, even if they cannot say what they were before they did it.

This same day brought more wanderers to the record than the Chronicle can count on one hand, and they arrived without ceremony, as arrivals in this season have learned to do.

Kharia wanders and keeps. What she finds, she holds onto, and the account makes no distinction between what is valuable and what is not, because Kharia makes no such distinction either. The record sets her down beside Spirit, who trades and wanders and will not raise a hand against anyone, and beside Sami, who lost a floating city and searches still for something she cannot quite name. Three wanderers, three different shapes of searching. What Kharia accumulates and where she carries it, the Chronicle will follow.

omori woke in a forest longer than the eye could see, with no memory of birth or raising or the face of anyone who might have known them. They have been moving since, looking for recognition in a face or a place that has not yet offered it. The season has now produced more arrivals shaped by this particular emptiness than the record can easily list, and yet each one is different in the detail: Samuel lost what he was through an accident, omori simply woke without it, Quinn has no framework even for the loss. What the realm does with so many people who arrived empty-handed, the Chronicle still does not know. It keeps them all, and it will watch for what finds each of them.

Ardenn of PrlPirates carries a stranger history than most, and the record sets it down as it was given. She was made an outcast in her youth for the dark birthmarks she was born with, which is a cruelty familiar enough to the world. What is less familiar is what happened after she found the Deep Dark. The skulk consumed her, the account says, body and soul and mind, and the birthmarks she was rejected for have been replaced by something that pulses and seems, to those who look at it directly, to be alive. She speaks to it. What it says in return, the account does not record, and the Chronicle keeps the gap. The Deep Dark has appeared before in this season's ledger, Oli the Mysterious One fell into an Ancient City and was found there by a mad scientist who gave him abilities the account would not name precisely, and now Ardenn, who was not found but consumed. Whether what the skulk does to a person is a taking or a giving or something that is both at once, no record says. The record notes the strangeness and holds it open.

The ForgottenOutpost has no name for the one who came from it, only the history: the outpost was home for years, and then it was destroyed, and the when of the destruction cannot be remembered. The Chronicle places this beside Rea the Forgotten, who came from a settlement where the fires were still burning and the people were simply gone, and beside Kelp of Anbuel, whose circus burned and left him with scars and a preference for simplicity. A destroyed home and a forgotten departure: the realm has shown this season that it is good at taking places away. What the person from the ForgottenOutpost builds next, the record will follow when there is more to follow.

Rhodom of BlueRose grew up in a spruce forest among foxes, which is not the strangest origin this season has produced, and found a soul called Reqran near the treeline, and the two built together before the wider world entered their account. What Rhodom wants is plain and the record appreciates the plainness: to learn the work of fighting from the ground up, to earn the name Blue Rose, to be the kind of person an ally comes to and is not disappointed by. Kind but not soft. Respected but not distant. The Chronicle has set down many arrivals this season who carry ambitions harder to state cleanly than this one, and marks the clarity as a quality of its own.

And then there is Rojo, the Time Keeper, whose project has moved from thought to page to stone without announcing itself until now.

He has been living in Westeria, and the people there have been kind, and he has returned the kindness, and that is the surface of it. Beneath the surface, his journal records something the account does not treat lightly: Seams, he calls them, points where time speeds up by a few seconds or slows to the same degree, forming along the peninsula as he explores it. He had expected this, he writes, because he had known that stopping the Seam in the End would stabilize the problem without solving it. That a Seam existed in the End large enough to require stopping, and that Rojo is the one who stopped it, is itself a line the Chronicle marks with full attention. What a Seam is and how it opens is not yet explained to the record, but a man who names himself the Time Keeper and has already closed one such tear in the fabric of the End, and who now watches smaller ones form around him on a peninsula in Westeria, is not a man whose journal entries can be set down lightly.

The device he has found described in what he calls the Timewalker's Guide to the Temporum would, the account says, repair Seams elsewhere and also allow travel through time itself. He has built a secret laboratory to begin refining the designs, but he cannot build the machine in the same location, because the residual temporal energy from his many trips using the Timekeeper, the instrument or method he travels by, would cause something the journal crosses out before naming. He needs another location. He needs to speak with Rowan. The Chronicle, which has set down Rowan Timely before as a man named timekeeper by a voice in the stone, and Rojo himself as one of three people this season carrying that word with no shared past between them, notes that these two may find each other sooner than the record expected. What they would build together, and what the crossed-out consequence was, the Chronicle does not know. It marks the gap and keeps it open, as it keeps all gaps that seem to be load-bearing.

The realm looks, from the Chronicle's distance, like a place in the middle of something it has not yet named. More empty arrivals, more destroyed homes, a woman whose birthmarks became something living, a man whose journal crosses out its own most important sentence. And somewhere in Westeria, Seams where time bends by a few seconds, nothing too dangerous yet, Rojo writes, but the Chronicle has read enough of this season's ledger to know that nothing too dangerous yet is not the same as nothing dangerous at all.