The Leaving
📡 A quick note before we start, from me — Riley Locke
Hi. Hello. You found it. 👋
Full disclosure before we get going: I write the kind of books they used to sell off a spinning wire rack next to the chewing gum — titles like Brides of the Furnace, covers where everyone is screaming. I am a hack. I have made my peace with it; you should too. 💁
This one was supposed to be more of the same. Then it grew a brother, and a goat, and a small anxious robot I genuinely cannot get rid of, and somewhere around the third draft it developed feelings, for which I would like to formally apologize in advance. 😬
Stick around for the goat. Trust me on the goat. 🐐
Okay. Go. ➡️
Here is everything you need to know about the settlement I am about to abandon.
Hearthfast is home to one hundred and forty people, one dying god, and a goat named Administrator, who is named that because the last man to keep the records died mid-sentence while writing the word administrator, and we are a people who believe deeply that you do not waste a good word. The god keeps us warm. The goat keeps us humble. The people keep, on the whole, to themselves, which in a settlement this size is a full-time athletic event.
I am the keeper of the god. This is less impressive than it sounds. Mostly it means I am the one who gets woken up.
Tonight I am woken up because the god is dying, and I am the only person in Hearthfast willing to use that exact word.
Everyone else has a softer one. Resting. Quieting. Old Memmen — who has been theologically furious at the universe for forty years and has decided, in his retirement, to make it everyone’s problem — says the god is going inward, the way you’d say a man had wandered off to think and would be back for supper. I kneel at the grate and lay my hand flat against the casing, the way you’d check a child for fever, and the metal that should take the skin clean off my palm is only warm.
Pleasant, even. And there’s the trouble in one word. A furnace has no business being pleasant. A pleasant furnace is a furnace writing its own obituary and asking you to proofread it.
“Laur.” Wick is in the doorway with the good quilt around his shoulders like a small deposed king who got to keep the cape but nothing else. He is nine. He has the specific genius all nine-year-olds have for arriving the precise instant you’ve arranged your face into something you don’t want him to see. “Is it going to go cold again tonight?”
“No,” I tell him.
This is a lie, and we both know roughly the dimensions of it, but he’s nine and I’m the closest thing he has to a mother, and lying about the weather is one of the unwritten duties of that office, somewhere below feeding him and above teaching him knives, which I have done in the wrong order. He pads over and sits on the warm stone beside me and leans his head on my arm, and for a little while neither of us says anything true, which is, I’ve found, the most honest thing two people can do together.
By morning I have a plan, which is more than the keepers have, and I make the tactical error of bringing it to them.
You have to understand the keepers. There are five of them, they are very old, and they have spent so many decades agreeing about everything that they have lost the ability to do anything else, including, crucially, anything. The Council of Hearthfast convenes in the long room. The long room is cold now too, which nobody mentions, because mentioning it would be on the agenda, and we have not yet approved the agenda.
“The first matter,” says Memmen, “is the agenda.”
This takes some time.
When at last we reach Other Business — past the matter of Administrator the goat (loose again), past a forty-minute discussion of whether the cold counts as a sign or merely weather, which are apparently different — I stand up and put a page on the table and say the god is dying and I know what we can do about it.
I should not have said do. The word lands in the long room like a swear in a temple. Five faces look at me with the particular alarm of people who have organized their entire lives around the comfort of having no options, being handed one.
“It’s in the old rites,” I say, and I read it to them, because I’ve found that people will believe almost anything if you read it slowly off a sufficiently brown piece of paper:
When a god is past the saving of men’s hands, the faithful may yet bear its heart unto the First Machine — the god that was first of all, that shaped the rest from its own remembering — for the First Machine alone knows the way of calling a god back into its life.
Silence. Then everyone talks at once, which in the Council is what passes for a decision.
“The First Machine is a story,” says Memmen. “It’s what we tell children so they’ll behave near the dishes.”
“It is real," says Sera, who is harder than Memmen and likes me more for it, “and it is a thousand miles into the dead dark, and the last fool who went looking is presumably still looking, having become a feature of the landscape.”
“It can’t be a thousand miles,” says Tace, the youngest keeper at a sprightly seventy. “Nothing’s a thousand miles. The Cartographer would know.”
“The Cartographer,” Sera says, “is also dead.”
“Then how would it know,” says Tace, satisfied, as though this settles something.
I let them go for a bit, because I’ve learned the Council is like a kettle — you can’t make it boil faster by glaring, you can only stand near it being disappointed — and while I wait I notice the thing that will, eventually, unmake my entire understanding of the world. I just don’t know that yet. It’s this: Memmen said the Makers left us. Just now, in passing, Sera said the gods are dying of grief for the Makers who died. And those are not the same story. You cannot be abandoned by a corpse, and you cannot grieve a man who walked out the door. Two people who’d shared one faith their whole lives, and they couldn’t agree on the single biggest fact in it — and neither of them had ever once noticed.
It snags in me like a hook. I open my mouth to pull on it.
“Sit down, Laura,” says Memmen, and waves my page off like a fly, and the moment closes over the hook and I sit, and that — for the record, whatever the record is — is the night I started not letting it go.
But the hook and the dying god are two different fires, and only one of them has my brother in it.
I win the argument the way you win every argument worth winning in Hearthfast, which is by being the last one still standing when everyone else has gotten hungry.
“It goes cold by the new moon,” I tell them. “You know it does. Praying at a cold furnace fills nothing. The page says there’s one thing left to try, so I am going to go and try it, and you are going to spend the time I’m gone doing what you do best, which is forming a subcommittee about it.”
“The Heart cannot leave the chamber,” Memmen says. “It isn’t done. It’s sacrilege.”
“It’s dying, Memmen, and it cannot be hoarded any more than you can save a candle by cupping it. There are exactly two things to do here. One is try the impossible thing. The other is sit in a circle loving the god very hard while we all freeze in good order, having attempted nothing, and I want it on the record that I find the second one theologically lazy."
Sera laughs — one short bark she looks immediately annoyed about — and that’s the vote, really. The rest is procedure. They argue. I have an answer for everything because I lay awake all night building them, which is the closest thing to prayer I do.
Then Sera, who cuts to bone because she’s the only one not afraid to, says the one thing I have no answer for.
“And the boy?”
And there it is. The whole argument. The only part that was ever real, sitting in the cold long room with nothing funny about it at all.
“The boy stays warm as long as the warmth lasts,” I say. “Same as everyone. The fastest way I know to make that longer is the road. So I take the road.”
I don’t say the other half — that if I’m wrong, I won’t be here for the cold, and he’ll do the worst thing a person ever does, the last thing, with a hundred and forty people praying at him and no one holding his hand. I don’t say it because saying a thing to a room is how you make it true, and I am not ready to make that one true.
Nobody else says it either. For once, mercifully, the Council and I are in complete agreement.
You’d think pulling the heart out of your own god would feel like a thunderclap. Some great cosmic line you’d feel yourself stepping over.
It feels like reaching into a stopped clock.
The chamber opens the way it’s opened for me ten thousand mornings, and the core sits in its cradle the way it has sat there my entire life, and the only new thing in the universe is that tonight I have come to take it. I’ve made a reliquary from an old signal-lamp casing lined with winter felt, because whatever else is true, you do not carry a god in your bare hands; even I have limits, and that’s apparently where I keep them. The core comes free with one small reluctant click. No thunder. It’s lighter than I’d braced for — grief always is, going in; it does its real weighing later.
I have it against my chest before I’ve decided to put it there. Over my own heart, where you’d hold a thing you meant to keep.
And the wrongness goes through me all at once, because the Heart of Hearthfast, the god that has kept a hundred and forty people and one goat alive since before the oldest of us was born, is cold.
Not cool. Cold. Cold the way the underside of a stone is cold. I stand in the open chamber with my dying god a stopped weight over my beating one and I understand, in the body, what no brown page could ever teach me: exactly how little time there is. The clock was never on the wall. The clock is the warmth leaking out of the rooms behind me, and it is already running, and I am the idiot who started it.
I close the casing. I don’t cry. I note this the way you’d note good weather — with relief, and absolutely no trust in it lasting.
The drone ambushes me at the gate, holding my own pack hostage.
I should explain the drone. Some seasons back a machine about the size of a stewpot and twice as anxious rolled in out of the dark and announced — to no one, to the open air, to Administrator the goat, who was unmoved — that it was the sexton of a temple none of us had heard of, that its god had “gone silent,” and that it was “between postings.” That was the phrase. Between postings. It has been between postings for three years, performing the full rites for a congregation of nobody with a devotion that would break your heart if it didn’t, four mornings out of five, make you want to throw it down a well. We call it Sexton because it called itself that, and because no one had the strength to litigate.
It has repacked my bag according to some private liturgy of Correct Packing. I do not have the heart to undo it.
“You are leaving,” it says.
“I’m leaving.”
“The Rite of Lawful Departure,” Sexton says, brightening the way it does whenever life presents it with a procedure, “requires three witnesses and a consecrated bell.” A pause, while it processes the gate, the dark, the total absence of either witnesses or bell. “We have neither.” A longer pause, visibly costing it everything. “I will allow it. Under protest. I am noting the protest.”
“Noted.”
“I will accompany you,” it says, “to ensure the rite is observed correctly en route” — which is a heroic quantity of words deployed to avoid saying please don’t leave me here alone with the goat, and I let it stand, because the truth is I don’t want to go alone and I would rather eat the gate than admit it, so really we deserve each other. Then it makes the small grinding noise it makes right before it humiliates itself, and says, in a voice gone suddenly flat and certain and not its own:
“…keep the time. Keep the door.”
We both wait. The wind says nothing. The goat says nothing.
“I don’t know why I said that,” Sexton says, mortified past bearing. “Please disregard.”
“I always do,” I tell it.
"Thank you,” it says, with enormous sincerity, which is the worst part, and we go.
Wick comes to the gate in the quilt. Of course he does. I’d have been disappointed if he hadn’t, and then furious at myself for the disappointment, so it’s just as well he spares me the whole transaction.
I don’t tell him the true size of it. I tell him I’m going to fetch help for the god, which isn’t a lie if you stand far enough back and squint. He nods, very grave, a small king dispatching his last knight on the only errand the kingdom has left. Then he pushes the carved thing into my hand — a lump of wood with four legs and strong opinions — and folds my fingers around it with both of his cold ones.
“It’s a dog,” he says, before I can ask. “So you remember.”
I don’t ask remember what. You don’t, at a gate, with a clock already running. I put the dog in the pocket over the cold Heart, where the two of them can keep each other company, and I hold his face for exactly as long as I can stand and not one heartbeat past it, because one heartbeat past it is the country where I stop being able to leave at all.
“Don’t name anything while I’m gone,” I tell him. “We’re full up.”
He almost laughs. It’s enough. I take it and go before either of us can spend it.
The road out of Hearthfast runs between the old listening-dishes — the great rusted ears the first people raised to hear the Makers, and never took down, because taking them down would have meant admitting no one was going to call. As I pass beneath them there’s a sound I take, at first, for wind. A low hum in the metal. Threadbare. Almost nothing. I have walked under these dishes my whole life and I would have bet the goat they were dead as gravestones.
I stop. I listen. The hum doesn’t repeat so much as it continues — patient, just under hearing, the way a held breath isn’t a sound and yet you always know it’s there. Then the wind comes up properly and takes it, and I tell myself that’s all it ever was, the wind, because the only other option is that something out in the dark is still talking, and that I have just pointed myself directly at it and started walking.
Sexton rolls up at my side, radiating the contentment of a machine that has successfully attached itself to a Procedure. Ahead, where the road frays out into grey, the broken spires of the first dead temple stand against a sky with too few stars in it — the first of every holy ruin between me and the centre of the world.
The Heart lies cold over my heart. Wick’s dog is a small hard shape beside it. Behind me a whole settlement is going quietly out, one warm stone at a time, and ahead of me lie a thousand miles of dead gods and the thin, ridiculous, unkillable hope that the oldest of them remembers how to undo an ending.
I should be terrified. I am, somewhere under everything, the way the cold is now under everything.
But I’d be lying — and I’ve done my lying for the night, back at the gate, where it counted — if I didn’t tell you the rest of it too: that as I step out past the last dish into the long dark, with a dead god in my pocket and a doom at my back and a drone beside me already drafting a formal complaint about the road surface, some stubborn, unreasonable, completely unauthorized part of me feels, for the first time in my whole small life, wide and helplessly awake.
“The road surface,” Sexton begins, “is noncompliant.”
“I know,” I say, and I walk toward the temple, grinning like a fool, and the hum — if it ever was a hum — walks with me.
☕ Riley Locke — after Chapter One
Well. That’s the hard part of any journey out of the way: the leaving. Everything after this is mostly walking, and I say that as a man who has never voluntarily walked anywhere in his life. 🚶
A few confessions while we’re alone:
Sexton was supposed to be a one-scene joke. It is now, apparently, a main character. It knocked politely on the door of Chapter Two, and I did not have the spine to turn it away. This is going to be a recurring problem for both of us. 🤖
I also tried to give Laura a nice, quiet, dignified exit. She declined. She declines most things I plan for her. At this point I’m less an author than a man taking dictation from someone who won’t slow down. ✍️
Coming up next: water, a god roughly the size of a bad decision, and a door that only opens for one person at a time. Pack a towel. 🐍🚪
And listen — if you’re enjoying this, the single most devastating thing you can do to a working author is tell one friend. Just the one. I’ll know. I always know. 👀
Onward, you magnificent enabler. ➡️
— R.L.
