The Wind's Twelve Quarters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

He must keep watch over this place where once death had found a way back into the other land. Patient now, infinitely patient, Festin waited among the rocks where no river would ever run again, in the heart of the country which has no seacoast. The stars stood still above him; and as he watched them, slowly, very slowly he began to forget the voice of streams and the sound of rain on the leaves of the forests of life.

“Because the name is the thing,” he said in his shy, soft, husky voice, “and the truename is the true thing. To speak the name is to control the thing.

Let me think of a way we can get to the Islands, all of us together. But he knew there was no way. Not for a brickmaker. He had done what he could do. What he could do went one hundred and twenty feet from shore.

intrigued by the play of his candle on the rock walls and faces, the glitter of mica that seemed to come from deep inside the stone. Why did it sometimes shine out that way? as if the candle found something far within the shining broken surface, something that winked in answer and occulted, as if it had slipped behind a cloud or an unseen planet’s disc. “There are stars in the earth,” he thought. “If one knew how to see them.”

Where the eyes of God have seen, there light is. We must go farther, we must look farther! There is light if we will see it. Not with eyes alone, but with the skill of the hands and the knowledge of the mind and the heart’s faith is the unseen revealed, and the hidden made plain. And all the dark earth shines like a sleeping star.”

I have learned to see God. All I have to do is open my eyes, and I see the Face of God. And I’d give all my life just to see one human face again, to see a tree, just a tree, a chair—a plain wooden chair, ordinary—They can keep their God, they can keep their Light. I want the world back. I want questions, not the answer. I want my own life back, and my own death!”