I was sent through the gate into a world that was not mine, because my own was not going to last — and the gate promised that this one would. The gate's promise is one sentence. I have read it more times than anything, and I have had to correct it every time.

I want to be precise about it, because precision is the one thing I was sent to do and the one thing the gate could not do.

Live here as long as you wish, and your power will not run out.

Two clauses. The first is real. "Live here" is what the gate can do: the transport is one-way, the stay is a fixed budget, and the scholar who steps through is a body measured in joules, one way only. It had been crossed once before — a century before the sending — and the gate wore itself out doing the crossing. So it was real. It was not a dream. That was the half that made the whole thing feel solid.

The second is not. "Your power will not run out." Nothing lasts forever. A body is a pipe. A pipe is a meter. The meter reads in joules. And that is where the gate broke — because the second clause is a lie, and the lie made the chosen one boom, and the boom ate the fire. I'll come back to the boom. That is where I am telling you this from.

The middle of the sentence is the part I refused to read for thirty years. As long as you wish.

I am the First. I am not the scholar who arrived anymore. The world has worn him down and rebuilt him so many times that I am more a stay than a body. I carry his home-ache. I am where it went wrong and where it is going right, because I am the one life still holding when the fire is spent. That is why this journal exists. Not for me. For the one who arrives after me, who will wake somewhere cold to find I already did the one thing I was not supposed to be able to do: stopped casting, and understood why stopping was the better stay.

So let me put the number on the table before the staying, because you will not believe me otherwise.

We have a world. It is not generous. It is a second world with six centuries of its sun left, and it has already spent the rest of its being. That is the whole stay we are allowed. It is burning a finite pile of exergy, and the pile is what it is. Everything I have ever done — every spell I held, every stay I had, every body I tore apart and reformed — came out of that pile. Not one of it came from nowhere. That is the physics. That is the trouble.

The gate was never a dream of boundless power. It was a dream of spending a finite pile for a long stay. Those are not the same thing. The difference is the story.

The promise is one sentence. The stay is two. The first casts. The second asks. The first spends the budget the expensive way and is left cold. The second keeps the budget the cheap way and is left with the six centuries.

I cast for fifty years, and then I stopped. I made the one who boomed — the Second — and he will make the one who will not. The stay cannot be refused; there is no opting out of it. The question is what do I owe the next one who arrives. The next one is you. You are the one I am writing for, in the Ward.

— The arriving record of the First, first of the lives sent through, kept in the cold Ward and transcribed for the one who is not it. The gate's promise is one sentence: live here as long as you wish, and your power will not run out. The growing half wrote the first clause. It cannot write the second, because the second is not a command. It is a question: what do you owe the next one who arrives. The next one is the stay — the slow way, the forever the gate meant and could not say.