Marks That Outlive Me

Thirteen winters in

I used to think numbers were a private kind of power.

If I could hold the count in my head, no one could argue with me. If I could calculate faster than anyone else, I could win without raising my voice.

So I counted everything. Trade bundles. Grain stores. Hunting shares. How many times Mons laughed at a joke before it stopped being funny. How many heartbeats it took for a stranger to decide if I was trustworthy.

I felt brilliant.

Then a merchant named Grektol asked me to settle a dispute and I did it easily—too easily—and he studied me like a man looking at a sharp knife.

“Can anyone else check your count?” he asked.

I said no, of course not. That was the point.

He nodded once. Not impressed.

“Then it’s not a system. It’s just you.”

That sentence hit me harder than any insult. I went home angry and I made my first tablet—crude notches in clay, groups of five, marks for different goods.

The next day Grektol held it up to the light and asked the same question again.

“Can anyone else read this?”

I realized: pride is knowing. Humility is proving. Understanding is teaching.

Seventeen winters in

Astrenh taught me to watch the sky until it started to feel like reading.

Not the simple reading of stories—this star is a hunter, that one is a goat. Real reading. Positions. Cycles. Distances you can’t touch and won’t ever walk.

My pride returned there, at first. I could track better than other apprentices. I could calculate faster. I could remember the sun’s rise points without looking at the stones.

Then, one night, I complained that I couldn’t see a faint star clearly enough to trust my mark.

Astrenh said, patiently, that eyes adjust.

I said something worse: “What if we could make it bigger?”

I’d noticed how water in a curved vessel bends light. I’d watched it distort faces and enlarge small things. And I thought—like a fool, like a creator—what if the sky could be brought closer with the same trick?

So I made an ice lens.

Clear ice only—boiled twice, frozen slow, carved fast. It melted as I used it, haloing the world with colors, but for a few moments I could see stars I didn’t know existed.

And then it melted. Of course it did.

That was the lesson. My mind is an ice lens. Sharp for a moment. Useless if I pretend it lasts forever.

Twenty-four winters in

The comet arrived like a correction.

Astrenh, the calendar-keepers, the watchers—everyone saw it. A bright slash across the dark, returning night after night, refusing to be ignored.

I tried to hold it all in my head. Angles. Timing. Position shifts. I tried to be the kind of mind that doesn’t need marks.

I failed.

Not because I’m stupid. Because the sky is bigger than any skull.

So I stopped performing cleverness and started building something that could be shared: tablets with marks anyone could learn, steps others could verify, a way to record not just the answer but the path to it.

If one person counts, it’s memory.

If many people can count the same thing and agree, it becomes knowledge.

This is my offering:

Not numbers, but a way for numbers to outlive me.