The God-Era Character 「空」

During the examination someone lifted the old king's tongue and saw that there was a character on the surface of it.

The character had grown up out of the flesh, its strokes sunk into the tissue, its edges continuous with the membrane around them, as though it had always belonged there. Wipe it with a cloth and it does not wipe away; scrape at it lightly with a knife and what comes away is flesh. It has five strokes, beginning on the side towards the tip of the tongue and finishing in the direction of the throat.

It is God-Era script, read as 空. The man who recognised it went through a copy of the Tomb Rites that no one had touched in 300 years — a copy that was in the keeping of the third house, and passed into the care of House Greypen once the third house was gone, its pages so brittle that they have to be turned with a strip of wood. Set down in it is one entry from the last years of the Era of the Gods:

The first word appears upon the tongue of man, grows within the bone; the king dies.

How many characters the old script has altogether, no one knows. The rites text gives no list and no annotation, and every place in the copy where a number of characters was mentioned has been blotted out by an earlier hand — blotted so cleanly that not the shadow of a stroke is left.

But if this is the first word, then there is a second word and a third. On whose body they will grow and on what day they will show, the old scroll does not say — or it said, and someone has torn that page out. Turn to the place and the edge is even, as though it had been cut with a knife.

House Greypen made a duplicate of the entry as the rules require. A duplicate is to be made in two copies, one kept in the store and one submitted to the Pontificate. This time only one was made, and it stayed in the store. As for the copy that should have gone to the Pontificate, the man doing the copying laid down his pen and waited for word from above; no word ever came.