Please Stop Spreading Rumors About Me — They Keep Coming True

I want to tell you that I let go easily, the next morning, having seen the sense of it. I did not. I fought it the way you fight the one lesson you’ve taught everyone else and never once believed applied to you.

"If I set the floor down, it drops," I said. We were at the edge of the great descent, the whole family there, and the whole watching world behind them, because there was no hiding this either and no reason to hide it. "You don’t understand. I’m not being stubborn. I’m the only one who’s unerasable. The floor has to be the one thing the dark can’t take, or the dark takes the floor and everything on it goes down at once. It has to be me. There’s no one else it can be. If I let go, even for an hour, and a homecoming’s reaching when it happens, or the dam’s being defended, or—"

"Lin Bo," Mu Chen said, gently, and he had that healer’s steadiness that I had watched him carry into the bottom of the dam’s own fear, and I recognized, with a lurch, that he was using on me the exact voice he used on the most frightened patients, the ones certain that letting go would kill everyone. "Listen to yourself. Whose words are those."

And I heard them. If I let go, everyone drowns. It has to be me. There’s no one else who can hold it.

They were the dam’s words. They were the words of the tired thing at the bottom of the world that had held the ocean alone for ten thousand ages because it was certain, absolutely certain, that it was the only thing that could, that letting go meant drowning everyone, that the holding had to be it and no one else. I had gone down into the dark every day for a season and told it, patiently, lovingly, that it was wrong. That it didn’t have to trust itself to let go — it could trust the world that had been building beside it. That it didn’t have to hold the deciding alone. That we would catch what it set down.

And I had come back up every one of those days and lived the exact opposite, and never once heard myself doing it.

"You are the dam," Bai Qing said softly. "You’ve been the dam this whole time. The one who holds alone because they’re sure they’re the only one who can, too afraid of the drop to ever test whether anyone would catch it. And we told the dam the truth, and now I’m going to tell it to you, and you are going to do me the courtesy of believing it about yourself as easily as you believed it about the oldest thing in creation." She stepped forward. "You don’t have to trust yourself to let go. You can trust us. You’ve spent five years making us strong enough for exactly this and never once let yourself find out. Let go. We’ll catch it. That’s not a hope. That’s arithmetic, and Xue Ningzhi did it, and it holds."

— • —

Here is what they had worked out, and it was so obvious that I had spent five years being too load-bearing to see it.

The floor didn’t have to be one unerasable soul. It never had. That was the same error we’d beaten a dozen times in a dozen forms — the single point, the candle in the empty room, the one throat for the dark to reach. A floor made of one thing the dark can’t take is strong until that one thing gets tired. But a floor made of everyone, woven, shared, rotated — a cloth floor — has no single point to fail, and no one soul who can’t be relieved, and it does not get tired, because when one part of it flags the rest hold, the way the fleet pulls a drifting voice true.

They had all climbed for this. That was the thing that undid me, kneeling there. Ji Lan to Mythic, Yun Shu and Tao Tao to Legendary, Mu Chen to Mythic, and Bai Qing — Bai Qing had been Legendary for years and holding continents, and everyone had wondered, quietly, when she’d cross the last rung. And it turned out the answer was: the day she took the floor off the one man who’d never let anyone take anything off him.

Because holding is Bai Qing’s whole craft. The doorkeeper. The gate-keeper of the overlooked. The woman whose entire life’s purpose is to hold so completely that there is nothing left to take. She stepped into the place where I had stood alone for five years, and she took the floor — not all of it, none of them took all of it, that was the whole point — she took the center of it and became the ground, and around her Mu Chen took a share and Tao Tao took a share and Ji Lan and the First Author and Nai’s singers and the whole woven world took the rest, a floor of everyone, a cloth with no candle in it, and it held.

It held.

I felt the weight I had been under for five years lift off me and not fall, caught by a hundred million hands that had been strong enough to catch it for a long time now, that I had simply never let. And Bai Qing, at the center of it, holding the room the way I had held it but not alone, never alone, blazed — and the Scroll dinged, and it did not ask permission, because some things don’t need to be asked.

DING. TIER ASCENSION LOGGED. Bai Qing — [LEGENDARY → MYTHIC].New title: [She Who Held the One Who Held Everyone]. New title: [The Floor Beneath the Floor]. New title: [Gate-Keeper of the Last Overlooked Soul].Talent. She has spent her whole life holding the people no one else could see. And the very last overlooked soul in all creation — the one every single person missed, because he was so busy being the ground under us that we forgot he was standing in the room — was you. She crossed the last rung not by becoming brighter than you, but by becoming the floor so that the floor could finally, for the first time in five years, rest. Her light will always be a step below yours. She would not have it any other way, and neither, I think, would you. Belief: total. And, talent — for the first time since I met you — you are being held. Was this ascension helpful? It is the most helpful thing I have ever logged. 👍

I set it down.

For the first time in five years, I set the whole thing down, and I did not hold anything, and the world did not fall, and I sat in the room I had been holding up instead of standing under it, and it was so strange and so enormous that I could not speak.

— • —

And down at the bottom of the world, the dam felt it.

I hadn’t gone down — I couldn’t, I wasn’t holding anything, that was the whole point — but I felt it through the floor the others were being, felt the dam feel the exact moment I set my weight down, and I felt it recognize the shape, because it was its own shape, the shape it had worn for ten thousand ages.

"You were holding alone," it said, wondering, from very far below. "All this time. You. The one who kept telling me I did not have to. You were doing the thing. The whole time you were telling me to stop, you were doing it."

"I was," I admitted. "I’m sorry. I didn’t hear myself. It’s easier to see it in someone else. It’s always easier to see it in someone else."

And then the tired thing at the bottom of the world did something it had never done in the span of everything, something that I will carry to whatever end this story has: it reached up. Not to take. To give. It offered — carefully, unsure it was allowed — to be part of the floor. To help hold the room. The dark, sung to sleep every night by a world that had learned to love it, offered to help carry the ground under the man who had taught it that it didn’t have to carry alone.

"Let me," it said. "You held the world so it could hold me. Let me be part of what holds you. I have been strong for ten thousand ages. I have never once been allowed to be strong for someone instead of against them. Please. Let me help hold the floor. I would like to be a thing that holds instead of a thing that is feared. Just once. Let me."

And I said yes. And the oldest, most feared thing in creation became, for one night, part of the floor that held me up — which is, I think, the most hope I have ever felt in this entire book, because if the dark can go from the thing everyone stands away from to a thing that helps hold up the tired, then there is nothing in creation that cannot come home.

A thousand miles up, the Homelight blazed — brighter than it had been at any point I could remember — because Su Yue, who had drowned holding everything alone, who had given their light away precisely so that one day no one would ever have to, had just watched the match finally, finally stop doing the one thing that had drowned them. Su Yue had spent a thousand years afraid we’d win the way they’d lost — one bright soul carrying it all alone until it went under. And they’d just watched that soul set it down and be caught. I think it was the safest they’d felt in a thousand years. I think it was the first time they truly believed the shore would hold them, because they’d watched it hold me.

— • —

The warm — late.

I did not make the soup.

I want that on the record, because it has never once happened in this whole book. Yun Shu made the soup. She made it badly — worse than mine, genuinely, aggressively bad, a thin sad broth with one heartbroken vegetable in it — and she set it in front of me with enormous ceremony and said, "There. Now you know how it feels to be handed something terrible by someone who loves you. Eat every bite. I’m told it’s the thought that counts, which is fortunate, because it is not the soup."

I ate every bite. It was the best thing I have ever eaten.

The family sat around me — around me, holding me, which was so backward it kept making me laugh in a slightly broken way — and they took shifts on the floor all night, Bai Qing at the center and everyone rotating the way Nai had taught them years ago, nobody past their share, nobody alone, and the world’s homecomings went on humming without me, and nothing dropped, and I did not hold a single thing.

Tao Tao sat with her head on my shoulder — reversed, she usually puts it there to comfort me, and tonight she put it there so I’d have something warm against my side, and she informed me that as a Founder of the Homecoming she was ordering me to rest for no fewer than three days and that this was Legendary business and not up for debate. Ji Lan told the fire a story about a floor that forgot it was allowed to be a person, and made it funny, and made it true, and did not once make it about herself, because she’s arrived now and she knows the trick is to keep the story and not be it. Mu Chen checked me over with his healer’s hands and pronounced me exhausted, which he said like a diagnosis of something finally, blessedly ordinary. The First Author hummed the dark’s lullaby and looked at me with a face that had, a thousand years ago, watched someone she loved hold everything alone until they drowned, and was watching, tonight, the opposite thing happen, and letting herself believe it.

And Yun Shu sat with my head in her lap and her hand in my hair and did not say anything smug, which is how I knew she loved me most of all, because Yun Shu passing up a chance to say I told you so is the single greatest sacrifice she is capable of.

"You’re allowed to be in the room," she said finally, quiet, just for me. "Not just under it. That’s the whole thing I’ve been trying to tell you for five years. You taught the entire world to be held. You taught the dark. You were the only one you left out. And you don’t get to leave yourself out anymore, because I’m in this small loud life too, and I would like, occasionally, to hold you." She smoothed my hair. "Now sleep. The floor’s got it. The floor’s got it, my love. For once in your life, let the floor have it."

And I did.

We have, after all, a whole world to bring home. But not tonight, and not by me alone, not ever again by me alone — because the last overlooked soul in creation finally got seen, and held, and fed a genuinely terrible soup, and the floor held without him, the way a floor is supposed to.

The way it was always supposed to.

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