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In the soft brown of early morning, my brother’s penmanship was always sharp against the rising sky. Other scribes handled their quill-spears with more grace, perhaps. My brother looked as though he was warring with the horizon, the ribbons of ink rising like jagged smoke from the tip of his quill-spear. But what he wrote was clear.
Now he has gone.
They say that from the cities of the Brittle Terrain, a full day’s journey behind us and away from the horizon, it is difficult to see our writing at all, impossible to make out the names of God we scribe onto the sky’s parchment. Yet from where we work, at the edge of the eastern horizon, where the sky rises up from below in a continuous wave, the vertical columns of script do not begin to fade until they’ve reached the level of the lowest clouds. At that height, the curling loops and slanting lines of our worship finally blur to become a rising braid of ink. I try to imagine how it looks from the cities, the ink o