Weight of Witness

The earlier, angry pauses were not like the silence that followed Zen's bold suggestion that her constant scream would serve as a light and her suffering as a shield for others. It seemed heavier and deeper, as though the Hill's very stones were listening and holding their breath. The figure of Weeping Stone stood still, her hollow, glowing eyes staring at Zen. The icy light inside her eyes was inscrutable, holding both a glimmer of something new—an unwanted, excruciating thought—and an eternity of misery.

With the sound of ancient rock dust sifting through crevices, she finally muttered, "A beacon." "A warning... a broken self... paid for with a desecrated sanctuary." Her stone body shook, not with anger but with a deep, bone-deep fatigue. And what about the sanctuary's justice? For the self that was taken before it had a chance to develop? Cartographer, is it possible for your "vigilance" to repair what was destroyed?

Without flinching, Zen looked into her eyes, his own heart throbbing at the inability to answer her query and the inexplicable depth of her loss. "No," he answered quietly, his voice bare of a truth that provided neither solace nor anything but frankness. "That cannot be restored by anything. There are still some gaps. Certain destructions are irreversible. It would be dishonest to say otherwise, adding insult to injury.

In order to give her room and acknowledge that she was solely responsible for her own irreducible suffering, he stepped aside. "It is impossible to undo the past, so that is the only justice I can think of for such a wound," he went on. It is the tenacious, unrelenting quest for a time when such transgressions are unimaginable. Where the remembrance of what was done to this Hill and to you turns into a sacred ban. My understanding, my map—it aims to support that future. to make sure your scream is a living testimonial that influences the conscience of those who dare to hear it, rather than merely a reverberation of anguish that has been forgotten."

For a long time, the Weeping Stone figure was silent, and the only sound was the keening wind, which now seemed to have a sense of unfathomable anguish rather than savage rage. There was a slight softening of the shadows surrounding her. The blazing coldness in her eyes persisted, but it seemed as though a more profound, age-old sadness was peering through them, past Zen and the Hill itself.

Then her hard, stone-like body moved with a great trembling effort that must have cost her terribly. Slowly, one of her thin hands, composed of what appeared to be tear-stained obsidian, unfolded. Its palm contained a single, tiny, incredibly delicate flower made from the same glowing, weeping stone as her own, rather than a weapon or a fragment of her rage. Each of its tiny, nearly translucent petals was patterned like a frozen tear, and a faint, melancholy light the color of a winter dawn radiated from its center.

Her voice was a frail echo as she muttered, "They tried to take everything." They thought they had. However, they were unable to locate this one tiny, intact remnant of what formerly was. They were unable to pollute what they were unable to perceive. She reached out and gave Zen the stone blossom. "Cartographer, your map must mention the extinguished light if it is to convey a truth. And of the destroyed beauty. It broke not only the scream but also the silence.

Zen experienced a powerful surge of emotion, including grief, humility, and a great, nearly intolerable reverence. This served as the "memorial item." Slowly, with his own palm trembling a little, he extended his hand and took the stone flower. It was frigid to the touch, but throbbed with a subtle, tenacious warmth, like a heart that was still beating but covered in grief.

"I will," Zen said in a husky voice. "I will bear witness to both."

He then took an unexpected action that came from the depths of his own shattered, sympathetic core rather than from Icor's lessons. He placed his notebooks and the flower next to him as he knelt on the plateau's crying stone. He closed his eyes and held out his hands, palms up, in a gesture of unadulterated, pure acknowledgment rather than supplication. He didn't employ symbols or chant. He merely directed all of his energy, empathy, and hard-won knowledge of her particular, unimaginable anguish into a silent stream of deep respect, an unspoken blessing that aimed only to validate her presence, her pain, and the intolerable veracity of her tale. As a witness to her shattered purity, he offered the full weight of his own conscious presence without holding anything back.

He was there for eternal times. The Weeping Stone image was still in front of him when he opened his eyes, but the terrible tension in her body had subsided. Around her, the shadows were calmer. Even while the icy, old light was still present in the hollows of her eyes, the raging rage inside of them had banked, leaving behind a huge, bleak landscape of grief that was no longer actively and violently rejecting him. Although she had not been healed—that was impossible—she had, possibly for the first time, been given a voice that did not try to minimize, classify, or take advantage of her suffering.

A quiet, melancholy sigh that reverberated through the stones themselves appeared to resolve the Hill's sharp keening. Instead of going away, the unbearable psychic pressure subsided to a tolerable hum.

The figure of the Weeping Stone dropped her hand slowly. She nodded once, barely noticeable, with a finality and tiredness that struck Zen deep in the gut. Then, slowly, reluctantly, as if she were a statue giving way to millennia of rain, her stone-like shape started to dissolve like mist into mist, her substance returning to the crying, resentful earth of the Hill from which she had been made, rather than abruptly like the paper sentinel. Before long, there was nothing left but the chilly wind and the subtle, coppery smell of old grief.

For a long time, Zen remained on his knees, holding the chilly stone flower tenderly. In some tiny, insufficient way, he had responded to the most profound trauma in this forest in a way that was not a violation. Perhaps now, the echo of the Hill of Lingering Screams contained a new, minuscule note: the resonance of having been genuinely, respectfully, witnessed.