Some hundreds of worlds are set on the chart that fronts this record, and the names on most of them outlived the people who answered to them, which is the ordinary way of things. The short-lived burn fast and bright, and do not believe, until the end, that they will not be remembered. Then they are gone, the believing goes with them, and only the record stands where they stood.
The chart is older than any hand now living, and far from complete. It holds the bright and crowded center, where the great powers keep their seats and call their order permanent; the long lit roads that bind one world to the next; the thinning reaches beyond, where the roads run out and the cold between worlds is crossed slowly or not at all; and at the ragged rim, the names of places charted once and gone quiet since, with a wider dark past them that was never charted at all. Whole empires have risen across that map and called themselves the end of the story, and the chart has outlived every one of them. That is the manner of large things here: each is certain it is the whole, and each is a season.
This is one age of that map, not the largest and not the last, only the one set down first. It was a time when the lights began to go out, world by world, a tide running the wrong way up the dark toward the bright center that believed itself safe; and those who kept the roads wrote each darkness down as an accident, regrettable and isolated, and would not print the word the frontier used for it. The accounts kept here say otherwise.
A thing this large cannot be taken in whole; it can only be entered somewhere small. So the record begins close to the ground, in single lives and single hours, because that is where something vast enough to swallow a hundred worlds first becomes a thing one person can feel. The accounts tell of a pull in the emptied places that took the living and left no wound, and of the rare few who felt it come where the many felt nothing at all; what that pull was, and why it took the hours it took, and what woke in the few who turned from it and lived, is nowhere felt in these pages. There is only what those who felt it set down before they were gone. The answers are not lost; they are simply not the keeper’s to give.
What follows has been restored from what survived, and the restoration is marked wherever it was made; a record that hides its seams is no record worth keeping. The events come from the accounts, the inner life only from the witnesses who left it, each of them named, and all of it carried into a single voice. Where the accounts will not agree, they are left unreconciled; where the record falls silent, the silence is left to stand.