Orenna

No one living in Hesperra has ever seen a sunrise. Since 842 AS the sun has hung half-sunk on the western horizon. AS means After Stillness; it is how Devran counts its years. In Hesperra the light is always level and the shadows are always long. The sky always seems to be at the end of a day. Orenna was born on the Dusk Line. This line is a narrow strip where light and night touch. The western window of her house looked onto gold, the eastern one onto ink-black.

Children of the Line know the games of both sides. By day Orenna ran after the Order's lantern-oilers. By evening she raced a girl who dove into the eastern shadows. In Hesperra, evening is not an hour but a direction. That girl knew how to vanish into shadow very well. Orenna knew how to find her even better. Once, at the foot of a long shadow, they lit a lantern. They told each other their true names. The girl later joined the Night Court and changed her name. Orenna still remembers her old name.

Orenna joined the Lantern Order at sixteen. The Order's vow is a single sentence: Until dawn comes, the road will not be dark. Its wardens light every road in Hesperra with lanterns. The lantern glass is made of held light. Their light is turquoise, because no oil burns inside them. Dem filtered from the Hesperra Arm burns inside them. Dem is time in solid form in Devran. The light in a lantern is the light of a stopped day.

On the night of her Dawn Warden vow, they fixed a sun relief to her chest. The relief shows a sunrise. A half circle lifts from the horizon, and rays open above it. Orenna looked at that image for years. On a relief, a sunset and a sunrise look the same. Only the story told about it makes the difference. Some nights she wonders why that frightens her so much.

At twenty-nine she became the bearer of the First Lantern. The First Lantern is the heart of the Order. Every lantern in Hesperra takes its flame from it. The First Lantern itself has never gone out. Its bearer swears an oath in the Arena for the Order. An oath is a pledge that ties the Dem a champion wins to a patron. The Dem they win flows into the Hesperra Arm for the Promise of Dawn. Orenna carries the lantern on a golden pole. The first time she entered the Arena, the Skarns turned to look at her. Skarns are small soldiers the Arena stamps out of memory. Orenna swears she saw it.

Outside the Arena, Orenna's real war is the refugee camps on the Olumre border. Families fleeing the plague shelter on Hesperra's Light Side. Orenna rings the camp roads with lanterns. At night she stands watch at the gates. In the camps she met a healer named Elowen. Elowen woke after thirty years of stillness. Where she steps, flowers open. Orenna sees proof in her: Hesperra too might wake one day. The children in the camps always ask her the same thing: what sound does the sun make when it rises? Every time, Orenna says she does not know. The children never believe her. A Dawn Warden who does not know the dawn sounds like a joke to them.

She has not forgiven Askaran. Four hundred and five years ago, the Kurran Dam cut the Hesperra Arm. The sun froze as it set. The dam was later torn down, but the sun still did not move. In the Arena, Orenna sees Askaran's crimson banner. She looks at the names on standard-bearer Kaedra's cloth. Then she asks herself: who stitched the names of our dead?

A year ago, she found an old ledger in the Order's archive. The founder had written it in their own hand. The founder's name was on the cover, but someone had scratched away the family name. The first page recorded the day the First Lantern was lit. That date was three days before the sun froze. Orenna closed the ledger and put it back. She told no one.

Since that day, she asks the same question whenever she looks at the First Lantern. How did the one who lit our light know the darkness was coming? Perhaps there is a worse question too. If dawn truly comes, will this lantern still burn?