Legend XXVI – The Keeper of the Final Threshold

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Beyond the misty cliffs of Varne, where the air tastes of cold iron and the sky hangs like a scarred cloth of stars over the abyss, stands a figure neither entirely memory nor entirely present, and he is called the Keeper of the Final Threshold; not because he judges, not because he fetches, but because beneath his silent steps the sound the world makes as long as it lives ceases. He wears armor that does not shine but swallows the light, a dark cloak falls from his shoulders like a piece of night, and in his right hand he holds a scythe whose blade splits the mist without touching it, as if the world followed a law older than form and name. No one knows who ever created him; some say he was the first thought that darkness conceived when it realized that light would not last; Others whisper that he is the last breath of the first mortal who could not let go and therefore became the threshold itself. Only this is certain: when the wind sweeps in long gusts over the edge, the cliff answers in a tone that is not of stone, and those who listen very closely recognize in it the soft scraping of a footstep that never hurries and never rests. Beneath the ledge on which he watches lies a sea of mist, and in this sea drift shadows that have neither faces nor bodies, yet remind us of those who once possessed a voice; sometimes they rise like bubbles, sometimes they draw lines of cold through the air, and those who, in a final, luminous second, fall to where the self separates from the world, see the movement without understanding that it happens because of them. The guardian sees everything that approaches as one sees a wave coming, not curiously, not kindly, not cruelly, but with the unwavering accuracy of a clock without a dial, which nevertheless knows the time. His eye sockets do not burn, yet when the stars shift, a pale light gathers within them, as if the firmament itself knew that it was giving an account at this very spot. Once a warrior woman came, her breast still bearing the echo of a promise; she stood on the outermost point of the rock, her hands clenched in fists so that nothing would fall from them, and said she must return, for her child slept without the name that only she could give it; the guardian turned his head, and the cloak moved as if it were made of heavy water, and his voice—if it was a voice—lay over the cliff like frost: No promise is stronger than time. But the warrior woman did what no one attempts: She opened her fists, let the pain fall like a stone, laid her hand upon the armor where others' hearts lie, and by demanding nothing, she gave.