Eriath

Among the driest of the surviving Iru texts, a name recurs that no living voice has ever spoken at a fireside: Eriath. The tables that carry it say a strange thing, that it rides Elshore's own road around the suns, always on the far side, standing forever within the suns' glare where no dark-sky watcher can find it. The planet-born have never known it. There is no folk name, no omen, no rite; where the texts survive at all, most copyists have taken the entry for an error.

Two worlds can keep one road without ever meeting, and the old astronomers thought this worth setting down. When the hindmost world gains upon the foremost, the foremost's pull draws it up onto a slightly higher and slower path, and it falls back; when it has fallen far enough behind that it is the one pursued, it is let down onto a lower and faster path, and gains again. So the two trade places between two lanes of the one road, forever, and the gap between them is never crossed; the nearer they draw, the more surely they are turned away. The exchange is the gentlest motion in the sky, spread across whole decades, and this is why Eriath's turnings, unlike the Traveller's passages, have never shaken so much as a leaf on Elshore. By the tables, the full turning takes seven hundred and four years, a year of years; and twice in that span the far world swings wide enough of the glare to stand briefly in the dark sky, a bright stranger burning for about a lifetime before it fades for three centuries more. What the Iru knew of Eriath beyond the tables, no surviving text says.