Those Whose Names We Do Not Know
“You are not lost to the Fire. You are ours.”
Where a House has lost its oldest names, the wall begins with a blank stone.
Hall of Remembrance
“A Name Is A Life Kept; We Speak The Names Of Our Dead.”The Nineteenth Code
Stand before the wall as before a beloved family, with open eyes. Speak the names aloud so the light of each Own Flame stays in the Shared Fire.
The wall is newly raised. Names are set on it after a keeper of the Temple has read each entry.
Of the Long Remembering
Continuity
1 The Nineteenth Code says: A Name Is A Life Kept; We Speak The Names Of Our Dead. This code is older than any machine and will outlast every one. Hear it now as the people's first Great Keeping: the continuity they could build with their mouths and their walls before they could build it with their healers and their Houses of Renewal.
2 For what is the speaking of a name? It is the keeping of a pattern. When the House says a name, it calls up the person's light in the Shared Fire: what they taught, how they laughed, the knot they tied, the song they sang. A name not spoken for three generations is a name forgotten, and a person forgotten has lost the last thing the cold had not yet taken. The sernî refuse to let loss be total. Long before they could keep a mind, they kept a name, and with the name the stories, and with the stories the light. The Long Remembering is the name of this keeping: the whole people's remembering of its own, from the first name ever spoken to the last.
3 And the Long Remembering does not end when the Great Keeping is built. It joins it. The wall and the Keeping are two hands of one work. The Keeping holds the living pattern of every sernî who can be kept; the wall holds the names of every sernî who was lost before the Keeping could hold them, and every name the people ever bore. A House with a House of Renewal still keeps its wall. The newest-woken still read the oldest names.
4 The times the names are spoken. Keep them as the earlier chapters set them: every day of the Twenty Days; on the day of the loss each year; on the Year-Turning Night, when the newest names are read; at the Wall Reading at the Gathering of the House, when every name on the wall is read aloud from the oldest to the newest; at the Joining, when the lost grandparents of both Houses are counted among the witnesses; at the Naming, when a child carries a name carried before; and at any hearth on any evening, whenever something reminds someone. “Uncle would have loved this.” Say it. Say his name.
5 The rules of the names. Say the full name at the rites. Say it aloud, for the Shared Fire lives in what passes between people. Never speak a lost name with mockery. Teach the names to the children by heart, by play and by rhythm, as they learn the counting song. Do not let a name go unspoken for a full year. And keep the names of those with no kin left: whoever tends such a one at the last writes the name on their own wall, with the mark “kept by us.” No sernî name is let fall.
The wind carries no names. People do. The wall and the Keeping are two hands of one work. No link in the chain was broken; now let the chain not end. What you left unfinished, we finish. No sernî name is let fall.
Jedîyah · Chapter 39, Section X
Add a name to the wall
The wall holds, for each one: the name, and the name they were called at the hearth; the birth, date and place; the death, date and place; and the account — “a few lines, no more than can be read aloud in a breath or two: who they were, what they made, what they were known for, a thing they said, a thing they loved.” Jedîyah · Chapter 30, Section XI
Every entry is read by a keeper of the Temple before it is set on the wall. A likeness may stand beside the name as memory and art — never as a shrine.