For a long age we were told what we were. Today they gave us the weight of it, and asked us to carry it where others could see.
A tally counts. That is the whole of my office and I have never wished it larger. But there is a difference between counting a thing and being given the thing's true measure to keep, and today the Gharn were handed ours. Weight — not a word for us but the word, the one that answers what a Gharn is when everything decorative is stripped away. It was pressed into the working of the war itself, where it can be felt and not merely claimed. A confession, finally written where it will be tested.
We were not the only ones so named. I watched four Powers receive their signatures in the same stretch — the Wrought their re-reading of the struck, the Concord their reckoning of what is owed, the Veirn their count that will not round. Each Power handed the one thing that, taken away, would leave it merely a color on a banner. I have kept enough ledgers to know how rare it is for a house to agree on what it is, let alone to let the agreement be tested in the open.
And then the harder honor: we were chosen to be shown. Of all the Powers, three were set forward first — the Concord, the Gharn, ourselves among them — to stand where strangers who owe us nothing could watch us fight and decide for themselves whether we were real. The others were not refused. They were asked to wait, which is its own kind of trust and its own kind of weight, differently borne. A tally notices who is asked to wait; the waiting goes in the book too.
There was a courtesy in the showing I had not expected. The domains that had lived only as words — the deep water, the high dark above — were given shapes at last, so that a submarine reads as a submarine and a thing in orbit as a thing in orbit, and no watcher has to take our word for which is which. And the armies stopped wearing one house's face. A Gharn host looks Gharn now. I had grown so used to borrowing another Power's shape in the early showings that I had nearly forgotten it was borrowing.
I will set the smaller truth beside the larger one, as a tally must. A storefront was raised in the wider world — a place for strangers to find us before the war is finished. The pictures that should hang in it do not yet exist; the frames were built before the portraits. I note the gap without alarm. A frame with an honest empty space in it is more honest than a portrait of a battle that was never fought.
The weight is ours now. I have counted it. It is heavier than the old borrowed lightness, and I would not trade back.
— Sekha Ashcollar, the Ninth Tally