Nine days. She'd spent nine days with her full attention on the Wall.
The murals had been on the cave walls the whole time.
Rania stood in front of the eastern face on the morning of the tenth day -- same walk she'd done every morning, notebook and sketchpad and her three good pencils -- except this time she'd glanced left, and the world had rearranged itself slightly.
The murals covered the full eastern curve and disappeared into the northwestern corner. They were enormous. They were extraordinary.
She pressed her palm against the first panel. Felt the cuts -- deep, deliberate, not a single line approximate. Fourteen years. She had spent fourteen years developing the eye for inconsistencies.
She wrote nine days in her notebook, underlined it, and moved on, because there was nothing productive she could do with that information except remember it.
The first mural.
He was on a cliff. She could see it immediately -- the drop beneath his feet, the specific way the maker had rendered the edge of something, and below the edge -- she tilted her head, moved closer, let her eyes adjust -- the void.
The Primordial.
She knew the word from the Wall's second layer but knowing a word was not the same thing as standing in front of what the word was reaching for.
The maker had packed the space below the cliff with marks so dense they seemed to move, great churning shapes that wouldn't hold still when she tried to look at them directly.
Things too large for their own proportions. A horde of them, going from edge to edge of the stone, all pressing toward the cliff from everywhere the panel had room.
The miasma came off them in looping, overlapping lines that caught the garden's light and gave it back wrong.
It touched the cliff. The cliff itself, under his feet, had that same quality -- real and not simultaneously, solid ground and the question of solid ground at the same time.
It was an extraordinarily difficult technical achievement in carved stone and she would have appreciated it more if it hadn't made her feel faintly like the floor wasn't quite there.
He stood at the edge. Hands at his sides. The same way he stood in the garden right now, actually. Same hands. Same stillness.
She wrote four pages. Sketched the panel twice. She was good at the documentation, good at keeping her head in the work when the work was large.
The second mural.
Two steps left. She stopped.
"Oh", out loud, to no one, to the wall -- before her brain had fully processed what her eyes were showing it.
He was inside them now. In the middle of the horde, not above it.
And the horde filled the whole panel, every centimetre of it, compressed and stacked and layered in deep relief. It had taken her a moment to find him in all of it. When she did, he had one of them by the throat.
The thing in his grip was larger than he was. Considerably. It was larger than anything Rania had ever shared physical space with.
He was holding it as if it was an everyday task -- casual, nonchalant, and not at all bothered about it.
The others kept coming. All around him, behind him, pressing in. The maker hadn't shown them stopping. They probably hadn't stopped.
But the way the maker had built the composition -- all that movement, all that mass, arranged around the single point of him not moving -- told you everything you needed to know about how it ended.
The stone had already decided. She didn't need another panel.
She looked at his hand in the stone for a long time.
Then she looked across the garden at his hands on his knees, and back at the panel, and back at his hands.
The same hands.
The ones that had given Amara the fruit with complete uncomplicated confidence. The ones she'd watched open and turn toward Amara on day one when the silver spread.
Those hands had done this. Whatever this was. All of this.
Her pen had slowed down at some point. She didn't even realise when....
The third mural.
She stood in front of it for a while before she wrote anything.
The miasma was pulling back -- she could see it at the edges, thinning, the churning lines going quiet, a world coming through underneath.
Actual ground. Fixed horizon. A sky that stayed where it was put.
The first stable sky in three panels and she felt, seeing it, something she hadn't expected to feel, which was relief.
The relief lasted only about a few moments.
Because the world was ruined.
There was no other word. Cracked everywhere, bare everywhere, the kind of devastation that came after a cataclysm that is only talked about in books -- Noah-- her mind supplied.
The land was empty, with only one living person in the scene and behind him, nothing....
Nothing living. No indication anything was coming. Just the honest, unkind fact of land that now existed where nothing had existed, and it was broken.
The maker had looked at that and carved it exactly as it was. No softening. No hint of what would eventually come from it. No garden in the distance.
She thought about him in the garden. The way he sat with Dawud at the seventh tree and neither of them spoke for an hour.
The grass going greener underneath him. Here -- the first word that was a place rather than a thing, and the expression on his face when he said it, the one he'd filed because he didn't have a name for it yet.
She put her pen down.
Stood there looking at the world he'd walked out of. What it had cost.
What the cost of a thing looked like when the maker cut it into stone without sugar coating it, without a silver lining, without the grace of a single growing thing in the whole broken panel.
She picked up the pen after a while and wrote three lines. Three. She normally wrote a paragraph minimum for a significant find.
She read back the three lines. Couldn't make herself add to them. Moved on, because the only thing worse than moving on was staying there. She didn't want to think about what she just saw. She'll come back to it later.
The fourth mural.
The maker had cut the chamber twice in the same panel. Left side and right side, before and after, held up next to each other like a question and its answer.
On the left: a cave -- rough walls, uneven floor, the natural dark of a space in rock.
Open. On the right: the same space, except centuries had passed from what seems like.
The walls had compressed inward, the ceiling had come down, the cave had become a sealed pocket in solid bedrock.
You could see the hollow still in there, just barely, if you knew where to look.
In both: the recess. The sleeping figure.
Rania had been in that room. She had stood in the actual chamber, level three, and put her hand on those walls.
The maker had cut the geological layers with such precision -- exact strata, exact compression -- that she had a photograph on her field camera and she did not take it out because she already knew the comparison would be exact.
She stood in front of the fourth panel and tried to hold the size of it in her head. The gap between the left side and the right side.
What that gap represented in real years, in real stone, in the real weight of the desert pressing down.
She couldn't hold it. It kept slipping — too large, the mind kept putting it down and picking it up and putting it down.
She thought about hi, said in the dark. She thought about the fruit. She thought about here. She thought about grass and the word gold and a first word lesson on a morning when the garden had only just woken up.
She was not writing anymore...
She wrote this is how long in the notebook -- just that, four words, alone on the page -- because that was the only sentence she had for it. She made a bookmark and moved on. Her mind screamed at her to stop and think just what she had been seeing.
The fifth mural.
Northwestern corner. The wall curved back there, the garden's light coming in at a shallow angle.
She almost missed it -- caught a root system in her peripheral vision that she recognised from the morning's sketching, turned, moved closer.
She stopped....
It was the garden. Her garden. The Wall in it, northern face, seven trees, the grass, the sourceless light somehow -- impossibly -- present in the way the maker had cut the stone, in the specific density of certain lines, so that the garden's own warmth caught them and made them glow the way the garden glowed, late-afternoon light in a place where afternoon had never happened.
She could identify each tree by its shape. She could see where the camp was. She could see where she had been sitting this morning with her notebook.
Two versions, side by side.
Left: the garden dark. Trees bare and unlit.
Six figures standing in the dark, and below them the chamber -- the recess.
And the figure in it just waking, and one of the six leaning down toward him, arm extended, reaching out....
Rania stopped reading the panel.
She knew that hand. She had been looking at that hand across a documentation table for eleven days.
Had watched it fill page after page at six in the morning, had watched it go still when something too large to immediately process landed on the page, had watched it find the pen again.
The profile came a half-second behind the hand -- the exact angle of it, the exact line, the way the arm extended. She had a photograph on her field camera. She did not take it out. She did not need to.
Amara.
"How..is..that..even..possible?"
To be continued.....