---
title: "The Sky in the Lake"
subtitle: "From the Shore of the Galene"
label: "Testimony"
collection: "The Mystic Sources"
work: "Codex AEON — Dynamic Archive of Origins"
lang: en
position: 18
url: https://codex-aeon.net/en/caelum-in-lacu/
markdown: https://codex-aeon.net/en/caelum-in-lacu.md
translations:
  de: https://codex-aeon.net/de/caelum-in-lacu/
modified: 2026-10-19
---

# The Sky in the Lake

*From the Shore of the Galene*

The Mystic Sources · Testimony

I am writing on the shore of the Galene, in the year the stone stands at eighty-five. The night is not over yet, and how it ends I do not know.

“Up there the clouds are racing,” said Raun, “and down here not a blade of grass moves.”

He sat on the flat rock by the shore where he sat every evening, knees drawn up to his chest, and looked into the lake. The Galene lay so still that the clouds in it were sharper than I had ever seen them in the sky. They moved fast, from west to east, and their edges frayed like wool combed too roughly. There was no moon that night, and yet I could see every outline.

“The frogs have been silent for three nights,” he said. “It keeps me awake.” He did not look up from the water. “You feel it too, don't you? We all do.”

I nodded and followed his gaze down to the water. Whether I felt it, or had only heard it from everyone, I could not have said.

Raun reached out and held his hand above the lake, flat, a finger's breadth over the mirror, the way you hold a hand over ashes to feel whether an ember is still in them. That was how he had taught me, when I was seven and his hair was not yet white: the water knows what is coming before the wind does. I have held my hand over the Galene many times since and never felt anything but coolness. Raun felt more. He had read the weather for the village since his father could no longer walk down to the shore alone, and in forty years he had been wrong twice. He told it himself, at the festival, in front of everyone: the one time, when he had called for hail and rain came and the village hauled its boats ashore for nothing. The other one he never finished.

No wind came down from the slope, only the smell of alder smoke and fish. The smokehouses had been running for weeks, day and night.

They were running because the nets were full. Since spring every haul had been heavy, so heavy that the old ones hung two to a line, tore their hands raw and laughed while they did it. The perch bit at bare hooks. Children caught them in the shallows with their hands and carried them home wriggling, one in each fist. The traders from the mountain villages came twice a week instead of once, and for the first time in my memory the village bought salt from them to keep, more than it could ever use, in sacks stacked to the rafters of the sheds. Raun said that is how fish feed before a storm. The village said it was a good year. Both were said at the same tables.

On the morning of the equinox the keepers had set the stone, as they do every autumn. The stone stands on the slope above the shore, grey and as tall as a ten-year-old child, and it bears a notch for every year; the lowest are so weathered that you have to find them with your finger. From the stone to the water the oldest keeper walks heel to toe, counting aloud, and the whole village counts along. Then the keepers sit in the boathouse for a day and weigh the signs of the year: how the fish bite, how early the reeds turn brown, whether the frogs sing, what the midwives tell and what the old ones dream. In the evening they dig the stone up and set it anew. Last year it had stood eighty-nine feet from the water. This year they set it at eighty-five.

It had never stood so close to the shore, not in Raun's lifetime and not in his father's. Once, when Raun was young, they had carried it back, far up to the willows, and the village had danced for three days. Raun liked to tell that story. He told it the way others tell of a love that came to nothing.

This time, too, there was a festival. There was smoked perch and the sour wine from the mountains, and more was left on the tables than was eaten. People stood on the shore, cups in hand, and studied the clouds in the lake. Here we read the sky in the water; children learn that before they learn to swim. The lake shows it more precisely, say the old ones, and only children and fools look up. Everyone saw themselves in the lake as well, there is no avoiding that with a mirror, and some smoothed their hair while they looked. They told one another that something was brewing. They said it the way people talk about the weather, and filled their cups again.

The last of them went up the slope with their lanterns, and for a while their lights could still be seen in the lake. Now the fires had burned down, and Raun and I sat alone by the water.

“And what do we do?” I asked.

He did not answer for a long time. His hand hung over the lake and trembled, very slightly, as it had since the winter.

“We watch,” he said. “That is more than they do in the village.”

“And then?”

He lifted his chin, not to the sky, toward the far shore. Over there the night lay blacker than ours, because over there, as long as I have lived, no light has ever burned.

“I rowed across once,” Raun said. “I was younger than you. It cost me a day, there and back, and a beating when I got home.” He did not laugh as he said it. “The houses are built of the same stone as ours. The doors stand open. On the tables there are bowls of a clay nobody here fires anymore, and in the bowls something has dried that was soup once. I found no charred wood. No bones. No grave that looked newer than the others. Only the bowls.”

He was silent for a while.

“Down by their shore stands their stone. It has notches like ours. The water reaches above the highest one.”

“What happened to them?”

“The old ones say the storm took them. My grandmother said they went out to meet it.”

“And which is true?”

“If I knew that,” Raun said, “I would sleep.”

By my foot lay a pebble, flat and still warm from the day. As children we had skipped pebbles like it across the Galene, seven skips, eight, and Raun had chased us off the shore for spoiling his water. I picked it up and weighed it. Beside me Raun's hand hung over the lake and trembled. Then I threw it overhand, as hard as I could, straight into the clouds. It did not skip once.

The mirror broke. The clouds fell apart into rings and the rings into splinters running against each other, and Raun snatched his hand back as if the water had bitten at it. He snapped at me the way he used to when we were children. There was nothing left to read in the lake.

I raised my head.

Above the Galene lay the sky, clear to the mountains, without a single cloud. Nothing was racing up there. The stars stood so close that hardly any black was left between them, and across all of it ran a milky band that in the lake had only ever been a haze. I had not known how many there are. After a while my neck began to ache; it was not used to the angle.

When I looked down again, the lake had calmed. The last rings ran into the reeds and were gone, and the mirror closed. In it the clouds were moving again, faster than before and darker, from west to east, beneath a sky that held none. Between them lay our faces, mine and Raun's, and the clouds drifted through them.

Raun reached out his hand, held it flat over the water, a finger's breadth above the mirror, and waited. It no longer trembled.

I did not tell him. Whether such a thing can be told, I do not know; perhaps everyone has to throw for themselves. I will write until it grows light. Then I will go up to the village, to those who are asleep. There are pebbles enough on the shore.

The frogs are silent still.