Thomas told the Disciples the following week, gathering the five of them in the undercroft the way he had the night the Codex first began — Wat, Elias, Diccon, Aldith, and Victoria, who already knew, sitting quietly at his side rather than beside the others this time.
"I should have told all of you sooner," he said, once the fragment of warning had been laid out plainly, the falling numbers explained as best he understood them himself. "I kept it from Victoria for months, and I've kept it from the rest of you longer still, because some part of me kept believing that saying it aloud would make it more real than it already was. I understand now that was a mistake. Whatever happens to me, this valley deserves to be prepared for it, the same way we prepared for the siege, the same way Aldith's preparing us now for the fever."
Wat's reaction was the first, and the least surprising — a long, grim silence, followed by the particular practical question he brought to every crisis he'd ever faced. "What do you need from us."
"Nothing, yet. Maybe nothing ever, if this threshold turns out to be less final than it sounds. I need you to know, in case it isn't." Thomas looked around at the four faces watching him, each absorbing the news in their own particular fashion — Elias already, visibly, trying to calculate probabilities from insufficient data; Diccon pale and young and clearly frightened in a way he was trying hard not to show; Aldith's expression the careful, professional stillness she wore whenever a patient's prognosis had just turned considerably worse than hoped.
"The Codex," Aldith said finally. "You've been writing into it. I found new pages in the back quire, in your hand, though you never said what they were for."
"A letter. To Victoria, to my mother, in case there's no other way for either of them to hear from me once whatever's coming actually arrives." Thomas felt the admission cost him less than he'd expected, said aloud in front of people who had already earned, through three years of shared struggle, the right to hear it plainly. "I'd like all of you to do the same, eventually, if you're willing. Not because I expect any of you to vanish the way I might. Because I think this valley deserves a record of what its founders actually believed and felt, not just what we built, and because I've learned, this past year, that a fear written down honestly is considerably easier to carry than one left to grow in silence."
Elias was the first to agree, with characteristic flat practicality. "I've mapped every road and tower in this March. It seems only reasonable I should map my own thoughts as thoroughly, before I run out of pages to fill them on."
Wat grumbled something about not being a man of letters, and then, three days later, was found by Diccon quietly dictating a page to Hamo in the scriptorium, refusing, gruffly, to explain what it contained.
It was Diccon himself who struggled longest with the idea, and it was Victoria, watching him hesitate at the tally-bench one evening, who finally drew the trouble out of him properly.
"I don't know what to write," he admitted. "Everyone else has years of wisdom to put down. I've been alive long enough to fall in love with Elsbeth and demonstrate a bathtub full of buoyancy for a delegation of scholars. That doesn't feel like enough to leave behind."
"It's more than you think," Victoria said gently. "You watched this valley grow from a handful of frightened weavers into a chartered town, Diccon. You were named a Disciple at an age most boys are still being scolded for tracking mud through their mother's kitchen. Whatever you write, write it honestly, and let the honesty be enough. That's the only standard any of us are actually holding each other to."
He wrote his page that same night, and refused, like Wat, to share its contents with anyone, though Aldith reported, with some amusement, catching him smiling faintly to himself over it before he sealed the quire closed.
Thomas found himself, watching his five Disciples each quietly grapple with their own small, private reckonings, thinking that whatever the threshold ultimately cost him, he had at least succeeded in building something that would carry its own honest memory forward, page by careful page, long after any single falling number had finally run its course.