Placed on the lower step of the western passage, facing inward

What falls in the dark does not cease to be.

The city above maintains its counts, its registers, its rolls of the living and the named-dead, its schedules of tenure, its quarterly assessments. We do not dispute these. We note only that the stone here is older than the first line ever written in this city, older than the tongue the first line was written in, older than the practice of writing down what one wishes to preserve.

The Pale King does not preserve. The Pale King remains.

There is a difference. To preserve is to resist time's passage by effort of will or institution. To remain is to be what one is through all of it, unchanged in nature if not in surface. The stone is not preserved. It has not been maintained. It has not been sealed or repointed or recorded in a registry of significant materials. It remains because it is what it is and always was, under all the weight above it.

We have sat in this passage since before the first of the city's current arrangements. We will sit here after the last of them concludes.

What is here remains.

On the day the lamp in the lower west passage burned without being lit, in the month the deep stones give no name to.