You asleep yet?
Didn’t think so. Too loud tonight. But that’s for the best, since I forgot to give you this earlier. Pretty, right? Red like your eyes. Snuck it out you don’t want to know how.
Clang clank clang. Sounds like they’ll be digging ‘till dawn, hang the cost of the lights and the night-pumps. Foreman must be behind quota. Wonder how many people’ll pay for that.
But not us, for now. For now we sleep, so later we dig.
But we can’t sleep.
So.
Have you ever heard of the midnight wind?
Didn’t think so. Every year fewer are left to speak of it than the last, and the ones remaining don’t care, don’t listen. Can’t blame them for it, for not having a thought beyond the next scute, the next cartload, the next sleep. Doing that takes energy, and you know foremen have eyes in the back of their skulls for any effort spent on anything that isn’t the shale, and if those eyes don’t like what they see.
Well.
Anyways.
The midnight wind.
It arrives at midnight – no, hey, c’mon! You stop laughing! You’ve spent weeks giving me the stoneface and now you throw it all away that easily, at the first chance you get to make me feel silly? Ugh! Ugh ugh ugh! I’m going to sleep! That’ll show you.
Fine, fine. Ah, I’m lying. You better show me respect, you hear? Just because they don’t let us grow our antlers down here doesn’t mean mine aren’t longer than yours. Half-spans at BEST.
So the wind comes at midnight. All midnights. Everywhere. You stand up half-asleep and you step outside and you stretch your back all the way and you inhale and you’ll feel it brush the inside of your lungs before you see it in the blowing leaves, in the moving branches.
Nobody else is with you, everything is moving around you.
That’s the midnight wind.
And when you exhale, it takes you with it.
It takes you away. Far away. Farther than that. It’s always midnight somewhere. It’s always midnight somewhen.
It takes you to any of them.
Remember when you were a yearling and you hadn’t left your father’s fell yet? Remember when you’d jolt under the timber and the moss and the needles at the sound of the footfalls outside, wide-eyed, and he’d come in with a pouchful of old blood-red berries all shrunken from the frost? Your first food of the winter?
That was midnight.
Remember your first running? The tents on the isthmus? The sea shining with scales under the moonlight? The others your own size, your own shape – but not quite? Fighting and dancing and roiling in the waves with the nets and the mailed-eels and the blood and the lymph on you, in you, belly and soul, as the cloudless sky shone near-bright-as-midday?
That was midnight too.
Remember the last day before the foremen came? Remember what you felt when you went abed on needles, or stones, or timber, or love? Remember your last meal sitting in your bellies? Remember what you were thinking of? Remember what you weren’t thinking of?
That was midnight, whether you were awake for it or not.
Do you remember when you will be old and verdigris-ridden from talon to bone? Do you remember when your days’ll run short and your nights’ll run long and your dreams will creep up to become your entire being? Do you remember when these times and this shale and these scutes and these pumps, these picks, these lights, these nights all will be little things, small pieces of sand scattered in a past vaster than any beach?
That’s midnight. It can be, it will be, it is.
There’s more to it than you, and you can be more to it. There are midnights you’ve never seen, where you went to dream too soon to see them pass. There are midnights you’ve never imagined, in places too far for you to have been.
In the wide flat stone unending of the Devastation of Gizikk- where the dunes walked away and left the sea to its lonesomeness – there is a sky of stars so bright and sad it hurts your soul even with eyes wide shut, and there is midnight there.
Between the borders of the Widenedlands midnight must stretch itself as everything else does, from folk to flesh to fields to the Oth!Onn!, broad-banked, two-thousand miles, and yet it does so without effort or distortion, alone oif
In the vast and unsated Silence that stretches from sea to shore to Stone there is no sky and no land and no sound and no one and no thing, and even here the grey mist billows a little differently for a single minute out of nigh-one-and-a-half-thousand, and that is still midnight, undeniably and indisputably.
At the margins of the Creature Crater, where the air is still clean, the Sfolls forage electric ferns while their predators sleep, wary and tense, heads and limbs thicketed in horns, mouths grinding through acid and base alike to tease out vegetable flesh. Though they will not calm themselves, though they are hunted, though their own meals poison them, they are as close to peace as anything can be when it is midnight there.
At the top of the world where the sun shines for one long day and hides for one long night, where a palace rots in chains unbreakable, buried in the ice. In brightness, in darkness, there is midnight.
There is no midnight in the Terramac, but there is no midday either, or anything else between them, and so it is understandable.
In the scant few hundreds of the once-ten-thousand-strong Spawn of Gant archipelago that are not yet swallowed by the Silent mist dwell the mad and the hopeless remnants of swallowed Matagan, clinging to life in the abandoned ruin of what were once the mansions and retreats of the most-esteemed and over-titled, but even as their days are filled with a terror too great to abide, midnight whispers through the pines and water and returns their breath to their bodies for another while longer.
Atop the highest peak in the world – which rises from the depths of a sea-trench so vast that nothing lives at its very base bigger than a speck – is a little island, and upon that island is a single tree with a thousand running-shoot bodies, and midnight lies among them and between them and soothes them in their slumber until their tendril-leaves unfurl to greet the dawn.
Under the hills your mother sleeps. Above her, midnight wheels and winds throughout the clouds.
In the webs that run underground where there are too many legs and too few thoughts motion never ceases and jaws never quiet and yet even in that place under all places there is a pause and a lull and a shift for an instant when midnight is there, which it is.
There are lands Afar. I cannot describe them. I cannot imagine them. They are unwatchable, and they watch too closely. But they too are part of midnight, and midnight is part of them.
In the ruins of empire, in the waterways of marshes, in the long grasses of the fields, in the sleeping lumps of giant beasts, in the branches of the trees, in the clutches of slumbering eggs, even at the bottom of the sea where the sun does not exist save for specially-manufactured globes smelted from furnaces that drawn their heat from the depths of the continents, there is midnight.
Midnight is all of this. It’s all of that. It’s all of us. It’s all of you.
And then, once the first red of the dawn comes, it isn’t there anymore. And you’re back where the midnight wind found you, waiting.
It always leaves you, waiting. So they say. They also say if you do the right thing, speak the right word, or have the right gift, it’ll take you with it. Take you anywhere midnight is. Everywhere midnight is.
Even fewer of us left that talk about that.
Hey, are you sleeping? Don’t sleep. Listen. This is important. Wake up. Do you know what time it is? Don’t you know what you have to do?
Feel that draught? I’ve been working on this ceiling here for a good few months. Go on, get up. Put your eye to the crack there. Squint against the dust.
You see that sky?
You smell that air?
Good. Now you keep holding that red stone for me.
And if you ever come back from wherever it takes you? You bring me one too.