Calil's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

Calil woke on cold stone. The falls roared behind him. Al sat close, her white eyes fixed on nothing, her staff across her knees. The oracle had spoken his prophecy the day he was born, and now she trailed him like a shadow. Below, the armed men still searched the wrong slope. Their voices carried up the rocks. Calil pushed himself up. His hands shook. "Tell me plainly," he said. "What is this power for? Why me?" Al did not turn. "To see," she said. "I know it lets me see far. You've said that." Calil's voice cracked. "But see what? Every riddle you give, I break my head on it." "You break your head because you look for a weapon." Al tapped the stone. "It is not a weapon." Calil clenched his fists. He was tired of half-answers. He grabbed a fallen apricot from the ground, one shaken loose from the great trees above. He threw it. It burst on the wet rock. "Then what do I do with it? Point at flowers while men hunt me?" Al finally faced him. "Look at me and tell me what you find." Calil hesitated. Then he let the fire rise. Pain burned behind his eyes. Gold bled through the yellow. Light poured out. He fixed on Al's face and held the beam narrow, the way he had learned. He did not look at her robes or her staff. He looked deeper. And he saw. Not distance this time. He saw a line running out from Al, faint and gold, threading down through the earth. It ran to the ruins. It ran past them, toward something buried and dark far below the hills. A place where a light had gone out. "There's a thread," Calil said. His breath shook. "It goes into the ground. To a dead place." "A shrine." Al's voice stayed flat. "Seventeen have gone silent. Something is cutting the gods from their houses. I have hunted the one who does it for three years." She leaned close. "Your eyes do not find enemies. They find the broken thread. You are meant to follow it back to the source." The light died. Calil dropped to one knee, spent again, but his head was clear for the first time. The power was not made to burn men. It was made to track what someone was killing. The riddle broke open in his hands. Boots scraped closer below. The men had circled back. The glow from his eyes, brief as it was, had marked the ruins again. Al stood and pointed her staff at a mound of earth beyond the trees, where a wooden trap door sat flush in the grass. "Down," she said. "They found you. We follow the thread from underground." Calil ran for the burrow. He knew what his eyes were for now. He also knew the men would not stop hunting the boy who could find the killer.