The unrelieved
The Wardens
The old gods set watches before they left. Nobody ever came to take them off.
Before they went
What the gods set down
The old gods did not simply walk out of Ambryx and leave it empty. They left the magic, and the resting places, and the gates standing open — and before any of that, they left instructions. Someone was told to hold a spring. Someone was set at a door. Someone was put over the thing that sleeps under a mountain and told, in whatever language gods use for it: stay.
Then the new gods took the heavens and the old ones went wherever gods go. No one claimed the inheritance. No one closed the gates. No one demanded the place back.
And no one relieved the wardens.
They are still at their posts. Not out of loyalty, which would be a kind of comfort, and not out of spite, which would at least be a feeling — but because nothing ever arrived to say the watch was finished, and there is no longer anyone, living or otherwise, with the standing to say it. A watch does not lapse on its own. That is the whole of what makes it a watch.
Ambryx is not guarded. Ambryx is merely still being guarded, which is a different and much lonelier thing.
The difference
A duty, and a bearer
Ambryx already knows what happens when a duty outlives the person carrying it. This is the other way round.
The old magic does not raise the dead — it forgets to put them out, and the shape goes on doing the last thing it was doing. The guard keeps guarding. The column keeps marching. That is a revenant: a duty that outlived its bearer, still walking the roads looking for somewhere to hand itself in.
A warden is that sentence turned over. A bearer that outlived its duty. It was not left behind by accident and nobody raised it. It was put there, deliberately, by something that fully intended to come back — and then the thing it was set over ended, or emptied, or was carried off, or simply stopped mattering, and the warden was never told. So it goes on keeping an appointment that no longer has anything on the other side of it.
What they are made of is not a question this world has settled. Some of them were never people. One or two were, and are not any more. Nobody has ever got close enough to ask twice.
What it guarded is long gone. The guarding remains. — Printed on an old card, in a warband nobody remembers mustering
The grounds
Seven, and far apart
Seven watches are still being kept — seven vigils, if you use the older word for it — and they stand the whole width of the continent. They were never laid out as a road. Nobody set them in an order; the order is the walker's, and whichever way you take the six, you come to the same seventh at the end, because the deep of the Elderwood is where all six grounds meet.
Their keepers are named on the map, and not here. The places are left as the charts leave them: the same mark, and the same note in the margin — a place with no name yet.
The oldest story
Ambryx opens with a list of everything nobody did. No one took the inheritance. No one closed the gates. No one demanded the place back. There is one more clause, and it is the one that never gets said out loud — and no one relieved the wardens.
What they are
None of them hunts
It would be easy to call them monsters, and easier still to call them evil, and both would be wrong about this world. Nothing in Ambryx is evil by nature. Cruelty is a human invention. The old power is dangerous the way deep water is dangerous — not because it wishes you harm, but because nobody any longer knows where it ends.
A warden is not hungry and it is not cruel. It does not come down out of its place looking for you. It has one instruction and one piece of ground to carry it out on, and in all the centuries since the instruction it has done nothing else and been nowhere else. Most of them were made for the work and have never known anything but it. One or two were people once, and by every account not good ones, and keep a watch now the way a sentence is served — but even those are only doing the job. The job was never you.
They are also, most of them, courteous. That is the part travellers find hardest to repeat afterwards. A thing that has stood in one place since before your people had a word for your people will usually ask what you want before it stops you having it — and some of them will tell you to go home, and mean it kindly.
So be clear about the arrangement before you stand in front of one. It was here first. It was told to stay. And you came a very long way to take something out from behind it.
The old question of this world is which of you was in the right, and this world has never once answered it on anybody's behalf. It keeps the light on. It lets you decide afterwards.
They guard. Not one of them hunts. Whatever else turns out to be true, you were the one who came.
The Glade is lit tonight.
Start where the world is warmest. Ambryx is wider than one clearing, and it was thoroughly attended to before it was abandoned.
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