They say a song cannot lie. They are wrong. A song is made of the very words that lie — all it does is lie beautifully.

***

I.

Before the counting of days, the stars were many, and each one a door, and through the doors went a light that had a name in it, and the name was warm.

The sun, who was young and had never once been cold, looked on the light and was afraid of the dark that carried it, and the dark that hungers, and the dark that is not yet a sky but is, some day, the whole of everywhere.

"The stars are the teeth of the night," said the sun, in the first tongue, which is the tongue of heat. "And I will swallow their light, one by one, and the sky will be my keeping, and the night will be a closed door, and nothing hungry will come through."

And one by one the sun swallowed the light of the stars, and the hoarding began, and the hoard grew heavy, and the sun grew heavy, and the sun could no longer bear its own keeping.

II.

Auralon, who had been riding the sky for ten thousand years as a rider rides who loves the horse, felt the weight in the hoard the way one feels a stone placed gently on the tongue.

He looked down at the world, which was small and green and did not know that it was a cradle, and he was ashamed of his shame, which is the first and the last of the god-sins, and he said to the light: *Forgive me, I will bear this, I will hold it up here in the cold of everything, I will be the lantern between you and the hungering.*

And the light said: *You are already the lantern, Auralon. You are only a door.*

III.

He fell on a morning when the world's people were counting grain and no one looked up, because the Fall takes the whole day, and the whole day is a single long spark across the face of the sky, and they looked at it the way one looks at the moon and thought: there is a new star, and it is red.

The body struck the earth at the place where men would build, because men have never once built where the world said here, they always build where the world bled.

And from the breaking of the god came the embers, six embers, six shards of the burning, six ways the light could still be held: the first for the dawn, the second for the heat that makes the metal, the third for the growing, the fourth for the storm, the fifth for the silence, the sixth for the dusk, and the sixth was closest to the body, the sixth was the capstone, the sixth is the door of the door, the cap that keeps the others from rolling away.

IV.

The peoples of Orenthe found the embers, and the first thing any people does when it finds a fire is build a temple to it.

They built Hearths around the embers, and they fed the embers, and the embers fed the world: the forges, the fields, the fleets, the quiet, and beneath Solmaren the great Sun Vault, where the body of the god lay, and they sang to the body, and the singing was a binding, and the binding was a cup, and the cup was drained, and no one who drank had thought to ask what does a god dream of, in the cup.

V.

The Hearth-Singers said: In the burning I am in pain.

The empire heard them, and the empire does not hear a god in pain, because a god in pain is an empire that cannot be eternal, and they burned the singers.

They burned the singers of Cressen, and they burned the singers of the road, and they burned the singers of the first ember who kept the old stories, and the old stories, being kept in the ash instead of in the mouth, came back changed, came back small, the way all the things that are kept in the ash come back.

VI.

The sky is a closed door. The door is swollen with the hoard. What the sun swallowed, the sun is still digesting, and digestion ends, some day, in hunger, and the dark between the stars is not evil, the dark between the stars is starving, and a starved thing does not kill, a starved thing takes in, takes in the world, the people and the grain, the forges and the fleets, the quiet, the body of the god, until the dark is a sky, and the sky is a darkness, and the darkness is the first of the new stars, which is a feeding, which is not the ending, which is the feeding.

*Sing this low. Sing it low, because the low things are the last things the empire hears, and the last thing it hears will be you, and you will not be able to carry it out the way I have carried this.*

VII.

And now the Blackenings are near, the dimmest of the hoarded sky, the high priests of the Pyre have set their rites, and the rite is a waking, and the waking is a killing, and the killing will release the hoard in a single blinding breath, and the breath will feed the hunger, and the hunger will come in, and the world will be in the taking.

But before the Blackenings there is one other thing: the dream of the god, which has not once, in a thousand years of the cup, asked to be free, has only asked, *Sing this to the people, so that when the taking comes, there will be someone to sing it back.*

That is what the song is. That is why it cannot lie.

***

*The singers of the road, in the last village that kept the song, were twenty-nine, and the child among them was three. The empire burned them on a Tuesday, because the empire was busy the other days. The ash kept the song. The ash is patient. The ash is what you are now.*

*— from the recovered fragments of the Song of the Fall, found in the ash-strata of the Cressen ruins, third year of the High Pyre, by order of the Pyre, to be burned with the find.*