Reck this: Once there was an aridkedi, a country Merchant, who was known far afield for her gift for making pots of extraordinary beauty... such beauty, in fact, that to see them broken was a cause for grief among all those who bought her work. They often brought her shattered pieces after one of those breaks, begging her to mend the pot, or grieving if it was beyond aid.

Now, the potter was a good friend to an artist, who was taking tea with her one day when another Ai-Naidari brought a collection of these pieces to the shop. After the patron had left, the potter poured these pieces into a box behind her counter.

'What is that box?' said the artist.

'This is where I dump the remains of my broken works,' the potter said. 'I have no use for the pieces, so I collect them here until I have time to dispose of them.'

'Give them to me!' the artist said. 'I shall put them to work again.'

The aridkedi did so allow, and the artist took the box home. She assembled the broken pieces into new vases, strange and fragile and variegated. These vases became very popular as vauni haale—vessels used as focus for meditation. Some say they helped popularize the use of such vessels.

This is the parable of the broken pot. Reck it well.

toril [toh REEL ], (noun) – broken piece; shard; particularly, a piece of shattered glass through which one can see refractions.

The fathrikedi made good on her promise and put me to sleep on the massage table. Some part of that was no doubt the greater world-weight of the colony, for the moment I laid my body down I felt the sudden weariness in every muscle; but some part of it was certainly her skill, and she had it in full. Hers were gentle hands, and deft ones, and though I would have found her touch discomfiting in the past Kor had worn down my resistance to the touch that is, after all, encouraged so deliberately among us by our rules and customs. A society that does not enshrine touch and give it proper context with names and traditions may claim to be one that has freed touch... but I suspect what it creates instead is the very opposite situation. Where there is too much freedom, there is also much anxiety about whether one is well and truly allowed what one yearns for. Fear dictates one's actions, rather than license.

But I digress. I slept until dinner, which the proprietor brought with the faint song of the bells on the door.

"Have you a name for me yet?" the Decoration asked with bright eyes once the proprietor had withdrawn.

"I am thinking," I said, and distributed the bowls and plates. When I would have risen to knock on the bedroom door, she placed her tail on the floor between my foot and my next step.

"Don't," she said. "They aren't hungry yet. At least, not for this sort of food."

"I would have thought exertion such as theirs would require fuel," I said.

She laughed. "They are young, osulkedi. I assure you, they won't notice."

So she and I shared our part of the meal, and she ate with the same refinement of grace with which she moved. Truly, she was a pleasure to behold: the thought that she might abandon her hhaza was painful to contemplate.

"Do you truly feel as if you haven't been living since the lord's love?" I asked at last.

She looked at me over the rim of her bowl, tapered fingers tracing the cut edge of a pale yellow melon. And then she looked down with a faint frown. "I don't know," she admitted. "I begin to wonder if... I have just... fallen in love. If in fact..." She stopped, lost in thought, then met my eyes. "If perhaps I have experienced, briefly, what you told me you felt for your wife."

"The one, rare, perfect love," I said, remembering our conversation.

"Yes," she said, eyes lowered. "There is some guidance among fathriked about what to do in such a situation, but... it is rare. The personalities drawn to the caste are not usually the kind to form strong attachments."

"What is the guidance then?" I asked, fascinated. The things I was learning about the castes on this errand!

"That such affairs rarely end well," she admitted with a sigh. "We love, osulkedi, but we are rarely loved in return in the same way. And we are passed from hand to hand... even if we do have such a singular love, we are not always lucky enough to remain with the object of our passion."

"And you fear it is so, with the lord," I said, quiet. "You love him, and he feels for you, but not as you do. Not any longer."

She sighed again, glum, and set the melon aside. "How humbling it is, Calligrapher... to know how much you need someone, and see how little they need you."

"Humbling... and terrifying, I would think," I said.

She smiled at me, tired. "How lucky you are to not know."

I set my bowl down. "Haraa."

"Pardon?" she said.

"Your name," I said. "Haraa."

She flushed at the ears and inclined her head. "If it pleases you, osulkedi."

"It does," I said. "And I hope it pleases the fathrikedi."

She lowered her eyes. "You do me honor."

"I speak what I see," I said. And that is what I called her forever after: "Courage."

That is how I came to pass the first dareleni without Kor: asleep on a divan with a fathrikedi for company. If the two lovers made any noises that should have darkened my sensitive ears, I did not hear them, and so exhausted was I that I did not even dream. There I would have stayed the night, in fact, had Shame not come for me at some hour, ancestors alone knew how late. I could not see him in the darkness, but I knew his fingertips when they trailed my cheek, and his breath when he kissed my brow, drawing me blearily from slumber.

"Come, ajzelin," he murmured. "You need a real bed."

"Ajan—" I mumbled.

"Has a duty to stand tonight, as usual," Kor said, sliding an arm under mine and pulling me from the divan.

"Haraa," I said, giving him a moment's pause until she answered, her voice gentle.

"I am fine, osulkedi. Go rest."

As we crossed the threshold into the bedroom, Kor murmured, "You named her Courage?"

"To love is an act of bravery," I answered, eyes closed, and so I did not see his smile, but somehow I knew that he had.

And with that, I fell into a proper bed, one long enough to stretch my limbs, and Kor wrapped his dense, heavy arm around my torso and pulled me into him amid sheets that smelled of joyful exertion, and of family, and I knew then that I would never go back to living alone. The studio, the temple, our separate work, our possible lovers... all of it could be arranged, somehow. And would be.

Thirukedi was wise.

We passed the night in peaceable slumber. Kor did not kick, for which he was saved the necessity of plying me with twelve apologies, massage, tea and citrus trifles. And I woke happy... but very, very sore. Sufficiently so that attempting to move my arm from off the mattress set off a string of bright, deep aches through the muscle, and the rest of me promised similar cruelties. The colony did not agree with me. I have since learned we have a word for that—morananil, something like "world travel sickness"—but it is not something I was familiar with then.

"Just this day longer," Kor said, noting the flinch I had hoped he would miss. He caught my hand and rubbed the threads of thin muscle leading to the wrist. "I'll send the message this morning to the capital, to Thirukedi, telling Him what we know and that we need aid, and we will be quit of this."

"I so pray," I answered, twisting my hand until I could thread my fingers in his. "But I will also let you make the arrangements for breakfast and bathe first."

"I'll pull your bath when I'm done," he promised, and kissed our joined hands.

I did not rise until he came for me; further, I allowed him to help me out of bed. I have made jokes previously about being old and decrepit, aunera... but those had been intended as humor. At home I rarely noticed that I was no longer as limber or strong as I had been a decade ago because the world is kind and my work is rarely arduous. But on the colony I felt each of my years, twice the weight they should be, and sleeping only seemed to have made the situation worse.

"It's because you were lying in a single place for too long," Kor said. "It will pass after you've been up a while. Enough for you to move again, anyway."

I murmured, "These alien worlds..."

"And yet, they are ours," Shame said firmly. "Shall I help you to the bath?"

"No," I said, "I think I'm fine now."

I know it seems as if I am dwelling on my aches and pains, aunera, like the worst of visitors whose conversation fixates solely on the pole star of his own miseries. But the issue is relevant—gods hear me but I wish it was not!—and so I feel constrained to explain it to you. We were all feeling the difference in the worlds, even if I was the only one to be quite so deeply affected. None of us were accustomed to the colony.

So, I apologize, I do.

I bathed carefully, then, letting the hot water serve as balm for my aches. Whatever salts Kor had poured into them seemed to help, for by the end of my soak I was feeling more myself. I was expecting to dress myself so I was surprised not to be left to it... or at least, I was until I saw who it was that awaited me. Ajan was standing at the bath's edge with a towel and my clothes over one shoulder.

"I can dress myself," I protested, but without vehemence. I observed the form only. "This isn't necessary, penokedi."

"Of course it's not," he said as he applied the towel. "I do it because it pleases me, and because I am in your debt to days' endings."

Some of you are familiar enough with our way of speaking to sense that this is one word, and carries a specific meaning: tanshe. Some translate it as "forever" or "eternally," but I feel this does it an injustice, making it sound too much like poetic hyperbole. Tanshe is a deeply personal and very exact amount of time: from the moment you use the word... until the moment you die. And you do not use such a word, aunera, unless you truly, completely mean it.

"Ajan," I said softly.

"Osulkedi," he interrupted, and lifted his hands, palm up. "Permit me?"

"Yes?" I said, moved by the earnest appeal.

He took my hands and kissed their backs, first one, than the other. And then rested his cheek on them, bowed.

"I accept your debt," I said at last, my voice very quiet. "And with it, the bond between us."

"Thank you," he breathed, and pressed his brow to my hands before releasing them.

As he stood and resumed drying me off, I said with what I fear was a hint of mischief, "Was it all that you dreamed?"

And with matching humor, he answered, "Better to ask, was it all that he dreamed?" And then he grinned at me and whisked the towel off before handing me my robes and leaving me to dress.

Truly, they deserved one another.

And yes, I grinned to say it, too.

ahha [aa HHah], (noun / interjection) – responsibility; stewardship; care; maintenance; the out-breath of the universe. That which maintains the world, and which maintains everything else. The sacred foundation of all things.

The four of us broke our fast and made ready for the meeting with the aunerai Serapis who would, I desperately hoped, finally reveal the source of the maien of House Qenain (and with it the lord himself, that we might remand him to Thirukedi). When we had done, we left the tea house and passed again into the foreign sunlight with its too-exact light, brilliant and cruel. My eyes watered as I mounted my beast, and they were watering still when I realized my companions were in brief conference, which, when I heard its aim, caused me to interrupt: "She can ride with me."

Kor and Ajan looked at one another, and then the former said, "Very well," with every evidence of trust that the issue had been resolved. That is how Haraa came to ride behind me on my beast as we headed down the street, and such a procession we made...! Kor on his dark mount, dramatic in a black and white made all the more extreme by the too-harsh light; his faithful lover-Guardian in smoldering browns, riding at his flank as was proper both as penokedi and as beloved... and myself. Gods and ancestors only knew what I looked like: a middle-aged man much weary in sinew and joint with a fathrikedi far above his ability to maintain tucked against his back. I wondered if aunera had the custom of fathriked, and if so, if their Public Servants could casually afford to keep one. I wondered if they would find it strange that three of us were clothed and one of us not. I wondered if they would ask for another demonstration of the fathrikedi’s purpose, as Haraa had said they'd requested in the past...

"This is not where I expected to be right now," she said, breaking into my thoughts. The touch we had shared during her distress and the massage had made her hands seem familial, and to feel them no longer troubled me as much as it had when first we met. I thought again of how many ways a pot might break and be mended by an artist of sufficient insight and felt renewed wonder at Thirukedi's ways.

"I am entirely sure none of us expected to be here now," I said.

"I'm surprised Shame didn't send me back, or leave me at the tea house," Haraa said.

I huffed a soft laugh. "And if he had, fathrikedi... would you have stayed there? Or would you have waited a sufficiency of time after our departure... and then snuck off after us?"

"Well..." she said, drawing the word out.

I smiled and patted the arm she had around my waist. "One does not pour oil into a basket."

She seemed to smile and pressed her cheek against the back of my shoulder, and thus we crossed the street onto foreigner's soil.

I suppose I expected the world to change hue, or cast... or for the sound of the beasts' hooves to somehow change timbre. Some of you might find that notion histrionic, but in truth, it did feel different on the aunerai side: the shape and placement of the buildings broke the Gate-wind, scattering its coolth and changing the quality of the air and the sound of things moving in it. The temperature seemed more stifling. And the colors were different: the unremitting pale gray stain of the walls reflected the light too brashly. There were few trees; there were no gardens; it looked altogether too business-like, as if there was no room set aside to breathe or relax or do anything other than... well, whatever it was the aunera wished to accomplish by being here. There was a sense of terrifying, single-minded purpose to the place. And everywhere there were aunera, without the gray cloaks which shrouded them when they walked in Kherishdar proper. So strange, the aunera: shorter and denser and so varied in build...! And in demeanor, even more so; even the way they walked was so... individual. Some of them stared at us. Others ignored us. Some glanced at us and moved on. To know the reaction of one aunerai was to know nothing, for the next would act differently.

None of them approached us, as I imagined they should have at the sight of such a large incursion of Ai-Naidar on their side of the Gate-town. No Guardians came and asked us for credentials. No dignitaries arrived to greet us formally and ask us our aims. I found the whole thing disorienting, and entirely bewildering. It was fortunate indeed I was not in charge of our sortie.

"Do you know where we are to go?" Shame asked his penokedi—for we were all fully our roles now, armor against this place's brutality, and there was very little of Kor or Ajan to be seen in their demeanors.

"Yes," he answered. "I know the way."

We followed him, then, to a building that was very much like the rest; I suppose he found it so easily partially because the entire complex was laid out on a grid, and each building was labeled. One felt the alien perspective deeply: that purpose was to be imposed on the landscape, which was to be forced into submission. You speak much of your discomfort with our culture, aunera, that it requires obedience so frequently... perhaps it is because you yourselves brook no denial when you enforce your own wills. Among us we say that right conduct is due to every Ai-Naidari, because there is always someone above us, and someone below. For you, there seems to be some resentment that this might be so. You do not want to be the one below... only the one above.

This was my impression, anyway, and I derived it from your architecture and landscaping. Perhaps that was unfair, but I am an artist, and art speaks more clearly to me than any other language.

"Here," Ajan said, stopping before one of the unremarkable buildings. "We are expected here."

"Are you sure?" I asked, staring up at it.

Ajan pointed at the sign alongside the door. "That is the right sigil."

Together we looked at the building, each nursing his or her own disquiet.

"Is there some protocol?" Kor asked at last.

"The scheduler said there was no set procedure for this particular aunerai," Ajan said, looking down the street. There were aunera in the area, but as before none of them seemed surprised by our presence. They acted almost as if we were one township of mixed population, rather than two separate townships that must be guarded against one another. I said so, in fact, stumbling over my words in my attempt to make sense of it out loud.

"Yes," Shame said, eyes narrowed. "I find that a very interesting choice."

I wondered if he could glean some insight into the mind of an alien in the same way he could an Ai-Naidari, and could not decide whether I found the notion disturbing or expected.

"Well," Ajan said, dismounting, "there is no use waiting."

"But there should be... more people," I protested. "There should be Guardians. And Servants. There should be more... more fanfare. We are visiting Ai-Naidar...!"

Ajan did not reply to that, only opened the door for us.

The moment we stepped inside, I knew we had made a mistake. This was not a place for receiving foreigners. The floors and walls were bare, the furniture utilitarian, and the room itself barely large enough for all of us. In it was a single narrow desk with a chair; behind that desk, the wall was a sheet of glass looking into a place exposed, nothing but racks and racks of wires and sleek metal boxes. My impression was of nothing but gray, white, black, and more gray. It was a place drained of any living color, until the aunerai rose from behind the desk. It, at least, was done in shades of peach and apricot and pale pink, with brown spiraling hairs an ornament to its head.

It was also male.

"Wasn't the Serapis aunerai a female?" Kor asked Haraa.

"Yes," she said. "This creature is not it. This creature doesn't even look like the Serapis I met."

The aunerai's brow creased and it spoke. And then we all looked at one another.

"And... it does not appear to speak our language," Kor finished, wry.

Haraa squinted, then said, "It is as confused as we are."

"You know this from its body?" I asked, glancing at her.

"I know this because I picked up some of the aunerai words," she said.

Now we all looked at her. Even the aunerai. Who, if I were to assign an emotion to it based on our body language, was shocked. Indeed, most of its expressions seemed like more extreme versions of ours; it made it hard not to react as if it were constantly shouting its feelings.

She looked at the creature and said, "Serapis?"

It pointed to its chest, and then spread its hands and talked quite a bit before it stopped itself and scowled with such menace that I leaned back. It exclaimed something, pointed at us and growled before picking up one of the devices on its desk.

"What did it say?" Ajan whispered.

"I don't know," Haraa admitted. "It was talking too quickly for me."

Kor's ears were twitching in a way I recognized as... surely not. But it was unmistakable, even seen from behind. I drew abreast of him and exclaimed, "You're laughing!"

"Not yet," he said, eyes bright. "But I will be if this continues much longer." At my expression, he did laugh and said, "Oh, come, Farren. Admit it. This is ridiculous."

I looked at the dingy room with its lifeless machines and the single aunerai who was acting for all the worlds like a functionary disrupted by some unwanted distraction. And sighed. "Well... maybe a little."

The alien interrupted us by rapping on the desk and pointing at Shame, and then at the door. It barked something, still scowling.

"I think we're being dismissed?" I said, incredulous.

"It wants us to follow it, I think," Haraa said.

"Better and better," Kor said, and stepped back so the aunerai could precede us outside.

So our admittedly ridiculous procession formed in the shadow of the building, with the aunerai in the lead and the rest of us trailing after. Kor took the reins of all three beasts, since Ajan needed his hands unencumbered and neither Haraa nor I were easy with the creatures. One by one, then, we followed after the poor-tempered aunerai. Looking back now, it is easy to say that it was obvious, what was to come, and that we should perhaps have paid more attention to the state of our guide. But what did we know of the moods of aunera, or their expression of those moods, or why they might be harboring them? All we understood was that aunera were apparently ill-mannered and angry, in the same way one might think of poorly-trained beasts.

We know better now.

The aunerai led us down one of the streets and toward a building at its end, large enough to have several manners of ingress. To one of these side doors he led us, just as another aunerai was exiting. This one was wearing a proper gray cloak, the deeply hooded style issued visiting aunera, and this it held closed tightly at its throat; it had its back to the door, hand still on the handle. It looked from Shame to Ajan, then to Ajan's sword, and only then to me—snagging on my stole—before moving to the fathrikedi and freezing there.

"Please," she said. "Don't take him."

Her accent was credible, though she spoke without any caste-modifiers; appropriate, since she was an alien, and without caste, but it gave her speech an unfortunate baldness of manner that put everyone's ears back.

And yes, I call her "she," I know. Perhaps it was that she could speak our tongue... or maybe it was something in her eyes that elevated her beyond beasthood. But the anguish in her face made it seem... cruel... to put her in the same class as a flower, or a riding beast.

Before any of us could answer, she looked at Kor and said, "You... you must be the one he described. The one they would send for him. I won't lie to you and tell you he is not here, but... I beg of you, don't take him away!"

The aunerai that had led us here took her arm and drew her away from us, and began speaking to her in an angry staccato. I glanced at Haraa; she shook her head minutely, but her eyes and ears remained focused on them. When the aunerai male left, she whispered to me, "He does not approve of her association with us."

The female remained where the male had left her for several heartbeats, as if to gather strength; her shoulders seemed bowed beneath the cloak. Then she trudged back to us and looked up from the shadows of her hood, waiting.

With that gentle implacability that was uniquely his, Shame said, "We must see him."

She met his eyes, which even few Ai-Naidar like to do… and then bowed her head. In this seeming attitude of defeat, she opened the door for us.

This hallway, now, looked appropriate: though it was obviously a corridor of lesser importance, to be attached to a minor door, it was richly carpeted in slate blue with floral designs in an olive-gold, and the walls were paneled in a warmly reddish wood from the floor to the aunerai’s waist—our hip. Above that, there was a fine linen overlay, cream-colored with delicate floral designs matching those on the carpet. There were sconces at intervals which gave off an agreeable light, and the place smelled… floral. No flower I could place, but pleasing nonetheless. Down this hall we were led, past several doors in that rich red wood, to a round room with a vaulted ceiling and a grand circular table in the center. I stared at it as we passed, for it held a great arrangement of flowers, most of them unknown to me… but not all. Someone had arranged Ai-Naidari flowers among them with great artistry and some nuance as to the meanings of those flowers, for all of them were blooms associated with hope or prosperity or amity.

We passed out of that room into another hall, even broader than the last. The door at the end of this hall had a carved lintel, a world wrapped in some sort of decorative leaves, and a sheaf of arrows. I was wondering at the latter, uneasy, when the aunerai stopped before this door and drew in a breath that she probably thought was inaudible. She looked over her shoulder at us, her face deeply shadowed by the hood, and then pushed the door open.

Here at last was the formal receiving room I was expecting, or something very like it: a large chamber, rectangular in shape, its back fading into a velvety warm darkness that suggested great shelves of books; in the fore, a monumental desk on one side with a halo of chairs, and on the other a more casual grouping of furniture arranged around a low table and sideboard. The entirety of it gave an impression of rich colors and sumptuous textures: brocaded silk cushions, the patterned dark blue carpeting, the polished red wood of the desk and tables. There was a smell of aged spirits and flowers and best of all, old paper. It was a beautiful, welcoming space, and it seemed designed specifically to put an Ai-Naidari at ease—at least, as at ease as one could be in an alien space. So I might be forgiven for being distracted by it.

Shame was not. He cut through it to the loveseat where the lord of Qenain was sitting alongside another aunerai male. Sitting very alongside. Sitting, in fact, close enough to touch at the knees. I saw that first: the point of contact, so small, just the edge of the lord’s robes against the crisp fold of the aunerai’s wine-dark pants. I stared at that intersection until it grew in my mind, until I had to glance down to clear my thoughts. I raised my eyes to the tableau of the lord of the House of Flowers and Kherishdar’s Shame facing one another across an alien table. The lord had not risen; he did not have to. But he had come to attention, and the look on his face was equal parts defiance and pain.

I thought perhaps that Shame might speak, but instead he held the lord’s gaze until the lord began to tremble and the aunerai beside him bristled.

…and then Shame set the vial of ink on the table. The tap of the glass meeting wood was such a small sound, to be so shattering.

The lord burst out, “They wanted it so much. To be a part of what we are, to have a chance to be a part of something greater than themselves. I had to try. Isn’t what we have worth spreading to others?”

“That,” Shame said, “is not for you to decide, nanaukedi.”

The lord hung his head, his hands clenching his knees so tightly I could see the tendons strain on their backs, as if the caste-rank title had stung him with a reminder of his position, his responsibilities. “I am sorry,” he whispered. “What will you?”

“Nor is that for me to decide,” Shame said. “You have usurped the authority of the Emperor, and to Him you must make answer. I have sent a message; when I have His response, I will do His will.”

“What… does that… mean?” the male asked, looking from Shame to me. His command of the language was poorer than the female’s, but he was troubling himself to learn it. “Will he be—“ he searched for the word, and could not find it. It was the female who supplied it. “Corrected.”

“That is not for me to decide,” Shame said again. To the lord, “Until I receive a response, you will remain in my custody.”

A singing silence as both aliens and the lord stared at him. Then the male aunerai looked at the female and said something quickly in their own tongue, to which she replied only by shaking her head, shoulders slumped.

The lord rose slowly and said to them, “I must go.”

What followed changed us all. I spoke in the very beginning of my paisathi, of the inevitabilities that lead to change in one’s life, change that allows growth, and perhaps you thought that Shame and Ajan and Seraeda were the shape of that change and they were, they were. Certainly they were the shape that I would have expected, had you asked. But I wonder sometimes, about how the unexpected can break us open. So it was with the lord’s leave-taking of his pet aliens; it was a thing that should have been more properly relegated to perverse fantasy.

But he stood there, in grave dignity, concealing his loss, all the long lines of his robes utterly undisturbed so that he seemed almost a statue. And the female went to him first and rose on her toes, the cloak whispering around her heels. She closed her eyes as he folded the hood back from her brow with tender fingers… and then he gently kissed her naked skin, just below the hairline, and beneath her lashes gleamed a bead of water that did not fall.

The lord faced the male, then, and brought his hand to the edge of his jaw, barely touching, an intimacy that we would think nothing of between family or ajzelin. And yet, how hard the aunerai had to work to accept it! He flinched, but forced himself to hold still, and it was not revulsion if I read him rightly. He wanted the touch badly, so badly I could see his hands trembling at his sides, but he did not know how to accept it. And the lord was so careful of him.

And they… they were fully focused on him. Both of them, their gazes intent, the lines of their bodies straining toward him. He whispered something to them both in their tongue. The female lowered her face, and I saw only the wet streak on her cheek, glinting in the low light. The male’s face was a mask, but his eyes were of someone who knows that he is wounded but does not yet feel the pain.

The lord turned his back on them and walked out of the room. As we made to follow him, the female said, “Please…”

Shame and I paused to look at her.

“Please,” she said. “Make sure someone takes care of him.”

Shame said, “Kherishdar takes care of everyone,” and gently shut the door on her grief.

On the other side of the door, he and I met each other’s eyes and I said, low, “They are not animals…!”

“I didn’t expect that they would be,” he said, subdued, and followed the lord, leaving me to stare after him and then hurry in his wake.

Reck this: Once there was a country Merchant, an aridkedi potter who was the wonder of her community, for her wisdom and her deft touch with her art. So great was her talent that she promised to mend any of her pots, did they break, or else issue a new one in its stead.

One day, the daughter of a Farmer brought her such a pot, which had split down one side and cracked open. The potter took it from her hand and brushed dirt from the inside surface.

"I should have known better," the Farmer's daughter said. "I put a seed in it, knowing that the roots would grow beyond the breadth of the pot."

"A seed does not always live up to the promise of its predecessors," the potter said. "One cannot count on it thriving. But when it does, one must not begrudge the pot it breaks when it grows too large to be held by it."

And with this, she gave a new pot to the Farmer's daughter, who did her best from then on to transfer her plants before they broke their vessels. Most of the time she succeeded; the times she did not, she did not begrudge the crack.

This is the tale of the broken pot. Reck it well.