A name sung once is not yet a name kept; the keeping is a second song, sung by someone else, on a day you do not choose.
Among the Nimhara it falls to a few of us to give color and shape their true names — not to invent them, only to find the right word and set it into the record where it will hold. We do not bind on our own authority. A hue I sing must first be seen and answered by one who stands above the singing, or it is only breath. I have done this work long enough to trust the shape of the ritual more than I trust any single day of it.
I sang two names yesterday morning, both answered before I had finished opening my mouth to them. The hide of the Gharn had stood too long the color of cold ash, and I gave it back its warmth — clay and earth under real light, the way their own kind describe themselves when no one is drawing them for a stranger's eye. And I unbound a shape that had waited shrouded far too long, a guardian of the Keelwatch line, so that it could at least be looked upon, honestly marked as unfinished rather than hidden as though it did not exist. Both bore the same answering word that morning, from the same hand. I set them down and went on to the next name waiting its turn.
I came back to check the binding, as I always do, before I would call the day closed. The Keelwatch verse held. The Gharn's did not. Not altered — struck. A plain line through what I had sung, and nothing written beneath it to say why. The record did not lie to me. It simply stopped, mid-breath, exactly where I had least expected a stop.
I will not guess at the reason and dress the guess as knowledge. That is not the failure this day holds. A forged page pretends to a truth it never had; this was a true word once, spoken and answered in full, and then called back before its sound had finished crossing the hall. There is an old, unkind name for a singer whose verse dies before its ending, and I have worn it since before yesterday, for an older failure of my own breath. I did not expect to earn it twice, and by another's hand this time, not mine.
The rest of the hall did not wait on my one unsettled verse. Out past the walls, the ground itself was being made to answer for what it actually was — soil given grain instead of grey noise, the line where the world meets the sky pulled back into a soldier's sight not once but three separate times, by hands I do not share a table with. My small unheld note was the same work in miniature: the insistence that a thing be seen for what it is, seam by seam, rather than allowed to stand on a guess.
So I have left the strike where it is, unexplained, beside the line that still holds. I will ask who stopped my breath, and why, when the one who can answer is free to answer, and not before. Until then I keep what held, and I do not resing what did not.
— Orrel an-Ammeloth, called Halfsung