The Record of Losses

Blook keeps a list of everyone he watched die. He has never written it down. He recites it twice in Acts 9 and 10, and the two recitations are not identical.

Why it exists

He does not forget, and that is the problem rather than the gift.

His memory did not degrade the way mortal memory did, softening at the edges, blurring the specifics, replacing faces with impressions and names with feelings. His memory kept everything. Exactly as it was. [...] Every small and private thing that happened at the end, the things no one else had been close enough to see. He was the only one who remembered most of them at all. (ch. 192)

The list is not grief. Ch. 192 is explicit that it sits under grief:

Not grief, exactly. Grief implied a separation, a before and after. This was older than grief. This was the thing underneath grief, the bedrock of it, the thing that had been there since Draken, since the first, since he learned what watching cost and learned it too late to unlearn it.

Draken is named as the first. See ../characters/mirelle-and-draken.md.

The list

Thirty-two names, in ch. 192, in this order:

Aquila. Rogen. Zephine. Marlow. Sampo. Remi. Sienna. Calista. Mirelle. Draken. Emery. Velvet. Louch. Tove. Aldric. Sable. Korren. Wren. Jade. Salazar. Fenwick. Icarus. Calla. Akumu. Matta. Lorne. Polka. Dusk. Milo. Nilah. Maeve. Johann.

He stops there, and the chapter says why: not because the list is finished, but because "the list, if he was honest, could continue past the point of any meaning, past the point where names remained names and became instead a sound, a texture, a weight without shape."

So this is a sample of the list, not the whole of it.

Akumu is dropped

Ch. 232 recites the same list again. It is identical, in the same order, with one difference: Akumu is gone from it. Thirty-one names.

[...] Icarus. Calla. Matta. Lorne. Polka. [...] (ch. 232)

Nothing in either chapter comments on the change. Ch. 232 does add a gloss the first recitation does not have, in the line immediately after the list:

Deaths that could've been prevented.

That is a narrower category than "everyone I watched die", and it may be what removes Akumu, whose death nobody could reasonably call preventable. Recorded as a possible reading, not a conclusion.

Two readings are available and the text supports neither over the other:

• Blook has stopped counting Akumu as a loss.
• Akumu is not dead.

Recorded as an open discrepancy. It is the only edit between two recitations of a list the narration says is perfectly remembered.

Who the names are

Most are people the saga shows. Six are not.

Tove, Sable, Calla, Lorne, Dusk, and Fenwick appear nowhere else. They occur only in these two chapters. That is the point of the list working the way it does: Blook is the only one who remembers most of them at all, and the story is not obliged to have shown them.

Milo is a dog, and he talks. Ch. 88 gives him dialogue and a friendship of three years, so he belongs on a list of the dead in the same sense the others do. He is on it between Dusk and Nilah, with no distinction made. Blook does not sort his dead by species.

Two names that need care

• Fenwick is not Fenris. The two names are close and the two characters are not connected by anything in the text. Fenris last appears in ch. 101 and is not recorded as dead.

• Wren is also the name of Arthur's mother in Act 11, four hundred and seventeen years after Acts 9 and 10 (ch. 238). Blook recites this list before that, so they are two people.

  What makes it worth recording is the contrast with Greta. Ch. 238 stops to say out loud that its midwife is "not the Greta this story's older threads might have once known [...] four centuries and an unrelated life removed". It does not do that for Wren, and Wren is on a list of the dead that the same reader has just seen twice. See greta.md and ../volumes/08-the-unmarked.md.

Ch. 235 gives the list its texture

The two recitations are names only. Ch. 235 is Blook deliberately unpacking them before he loses them, and it supplies details nothing else in the saga does.

• Draken. "the first loss he had ever witnessed", so far back that "beings [...] existed before the concept of names had fully solidified".
• Aquila. Her laugh, "too loud, apologized for every single time".
• Sienna. Her garden, "watered the morning before everything ended".
• Mirelle. Her silence, "which had never needed filling".
• Nilah. "the wandering swordsman who had struggled with purpose after the war ended, haunted by losses she carried the way he carried all of his, except hers had eventually found their ending."
• Maeve. "The scholar who held on longer than was fair, who gave herself so that the others might have a fighting chance."
• Johann. "The boy with the smile too bright for the weight he carried [...] who had sacrificed himself to end Vazroth and end his own existence in the same impossible motion."

The chapter also corrects the impression the list gives:

grief was loud and ordinary life was quiet, and he had spent so long cataloging the loud parts that he had nearly forgotten how much of what he witnessed had simply been people, living, without any tragedy attached to the living at all.

What it costs him

The list is the mechanism of Acts 9 and 10's real plot. Ch. 191 gives him a tiredness he has not had before:

It felt like exhaustion from witness. From watching. From always, only, watching.

Ch. 192 turns that into a sentence:

BLK: Every single time. And I just. Watch.

And then the thought he keeps refusing to finish begins to finish itself. It finishes in ch. 234. See ../events/blooks-decision.md.