Maerel walked up to her temple by the goat path on the south face of the cliff in the spring of her thirty-first birthday and did not, in any season since, find a reason to walk back down. The temple had been hewn into the cliff itself: half chamber, half hollow, with a door of grey wood, a single arched window, and a feature its keepers had grown used to without ever fully understanding — rain stopped at the threshold, three paces and a hand's breadth from the door. Wind died. Ash refused the sill. Snow met the same line. Someone, in another age, had set the protection there. Kryor.
On a clear morning in her nineteenth year, the lamp behind her dimmed by half a degree. The doorway softened. A figure stood at the threshold — tall, in a long coat the colour of riverstones, with an unstrung bow across his back. The bow was, on the painted plates of the lower monastery she had seen as a girl, slightly translucent. She had remembered the painting only because the painters had got it right.
Dremenus did not enter. He explained, in the small careful courtesy of a guest who had stopped at her doorway to do a piece of work, that he wanted her to see what he was about to do. He said it would not be an attack. The threshold gathered — slower, more careful, exact in a way the small shooing of a fly never is — and the field at her doorway, which had held weather for an age, stepped aside. Leaves blew in. Rain landed on a dry stone. The lamp's flame leaned and righted.
The ward took four minutes to reassemble itself. It did, on its own. Dremenus stayed at the threshold the whole time. When she asked him why, he gave her one sentence: the difference between cannot and will not is the only difference, on certain mornings, that the universe is keeping track of. Then he was gone.
The single drop of rain that landed inside the threshold dried slowly, in its own time, but the stone did not, in the nineteen years she had remaining, ever entirely forget it. Neither did she. She wrote the morning down and put it on her shelf with the unsent letter she had been keeping for her vanished order.
