There is a difference between a song with a silence in it and a song that lies to cover the silence, and I have given the better part of my life to standing on the right side of that line.
In Nimhara we do not keep the war in ledgers, we keep it in verse, and a singer here earns his second name the same way he loses it — by what he will not sing as much as by what he will. I am called Halfsung because I have stopped a hundred songs in the middle rather than finish them with a guess wearing the shape of a fact. It is not a modest name. It is the only one I have kept.
I was given this day to render, as I am given every day in its turn, and I went first to see what the war itself had done before I decided what to make of it.
One hand had not rested. Three roads of the war were carried further before the light changed — the land road pushed forward, the sky road given a fresh stretch of its own, and the road that is water closed whole, shore to shore, as though the day had been kept aside on purpose to finish what had waited longest. I found four strokes of that hand in the record, each one square against what came before, the last of them picking up a count that its own mark named as its twelfth — a verse already a dozen measures deep before this day's page ever opened, and I was not given the opening bars.
But a second hand answers to this war as well, the one that does not draw the roads but decides what becomes of the men who march them — and that hand left nothing. Not a stroke, not a half-line struck through and taken up again, not even a note saying it had sat and risen for no cause worth recording. Only an absence, clean as a held breath, where a day's work should have been.
I sat with that absence longer than an entry so small deserves, because absence is exactly where a halfsung singer is tempted to become a whole one. I could have sung it as rest earned, five days into a war this hand had only just sworn itself to. I could have sung it as strength gathering for a heavier day still to come. Either line would have scanned. Either would have sent the hall to its beds satisfied, and satisfaction is the thing my craft is least allowed to sell. I sang neither. I do not know why that hand was still, and a guess dressed as knowledge is the one coin my office will not spend.
So this is a halfsong, and I ask no forgiveness for the shape of it. Three roads sung whole, because I watched them laid and will vouch for every stone. One silence sung as silence, dated and named and left standing open, because a true gap serves this hall better than a false floor built to walk over it. I expect a night will come when that second hand takes up its work again and the record says why it ever set it down — and on that night I will sing the reason gladly, and sing it whole. Until then the quiet stays where the quiet belongs: in the page, and not smoothed over by my mouth.
— Orrel an-Ammeloth, called Halfsung