The Cast-Palm Reliquary

In the beginning of the counting there were ten spheres, and each sphere kept a single law, and the laws did not agree. The immortals named this disagreement music. The mortals, who arrived later and stayed shorter, named it weather, and learned to build against it. Between the two namings walked the one who carried the reliquary — neither immortal nor mortal, but a third thing the spheres had not planned for and could not unmake. What follows is the record of that walking. It has been set down here in the order it was given, which is not the order in which it happened, because the spheres do not keep time the way a shelf keeps books: one after another, spine to spine, waiting to be taken down.