The Eye

Two leaves of sclera brick on either side of a gap three blocks wide, with a plate of pupil glass for a threshold. Their tops lean toward each other like lids about to close. The gate shuts when the Eye blinks. Nobody has seen it blink, and nobody has stood in the gap long enough to find out.

The same ring as on Earth, on a dais of the local stone and in the colors of this world: whoever set the gates out did it on every world at once. This one sleeps. It answers only one who has brought down the master of this world and lived through its trial; then lay the master's heart, the dust of the road and what this world gives into the ring, and it will join the other gates that are awake.

The brothers of the Vigil came through the rift believing that the Eye sees every world at once, and that whoever learns to look without blinking will see what it sees. Under a round well in the fibers of the iris they cut four tiers into the stone of the white: halls where they slept in turns, workshops of lenses, channels where they gathered the tears of the Eye, and ring galleries over a pupil of their own. The eldest kept the last vigil in the chamber of the great pupil and has not closed his eyes since: the Eye grew him into its keeper, the Unblinking.

Seven curved pillars of sclera stone along a ridge at the edge of the Eye, every one leaning away from the pupil. Measured from above, the ridge is an arc of the same circle as the iris: these are lashes, and the lid they grow from is the ground.

A leaning crystal taller than a house, driven into the iris point first and standing on its own weight, with the ground torn up around it. It is a piece of a lens, and a lens this size belongs to one eye only. The Eye broke its own lens. What it sees now, it sees without one.

A stepped pit dug into the groove of the iris for pigment nodules: the color of the Eye, ground into the coatings of lenses. The rig still stands on the floor with its bucket on the chain, and the shed at the rim is stocked for a crew that went up the ramp one day and did not come back down.

A pier of void plating on piles over the black glass of the pupil: the only solid footing there is. A shuttle is still moored to it, hull breached, stern torn open. The crew came to look into the pupil from up close. The lanterns under the deck are still lit, and nothing has looked back yet.

A brick-lined channel running from the iris out across the white, deeper with every step, down to a round chamber with a basin in the middle. The floor is vessel stone, and what has dried on it is not water. The Eye weeps along this channel, and the tears have a shepherd: it sleeps coiled in the basin under the fallen vault.

Vessels of the white rise out of the ground here, loop over one another in a knot the size of a house and go back under. Put a hand on one and it is warm, and it beats. Whatever they feed is below.

A hollow in the iris walled with woven fiber and spiked with gaze crystal. The eggs on the floor are crystal too, and each has a pupil, and none of the pupils look the same way. One shell is open from the inside. What hatched from it sleeps in the middle of the nest with its shell pulled over its eye, and it wakes when you come close.