Glimmer Havocbringer's Arc

Chapter 2 of 8

The words were safe now, but the day after the fire, Glimmer could not stop worrying. Aurora had said it plainly. Three chaos gods carried the whole Library in their heads. That made them worth stealing. So Glimmer made a new rule for himself, and it felt like the answer. He would not just hoard the scrolls. He would collect the first stories ever told. The oldest tales, at their very source, before anyone wrote them down. Fill his mind with so many that no thief could ever empty it. He started at the beginning. He sneezed himself back to a cold plain, long before cities. A small fire burned inside a ring of stones. The flames shifted the same as any campfire, old as the world itself. Around it sat a crowd of hunters. One man stood, waving his arms, a rock held high. He was trying to convince the rest that he had killed a mammoth with it. The others laughed. Glimmer grinned. This was the first story. A lie told well. He listened hard and locked every word inside. Then his sparks slipped. A glint fell off his sleeve. It landed in the dirt beside the fire. Where it struck, the ground shivered. A tiny woolly mammoth pulled itself up out of the dust, no bigger than a hand. It had a shaggy brown coat and small curved tusks. It shook itself and trotted straight to the boasting man's feet. The hunters went silent. The man looked down at the little mammoth. Then he pointed at it and shouted, like it proved his kill was true. The crowd roared. The story changed in front of Glimmer's eyes. "You touched it," said Liora. She stood beside him, every color loud against the gray plain. She did not raise her voice. "You made a thing that wasn't there." "I didn't mean to," Glimmer said. Aurora arrived next, gold on the cold ground. She looked at the tiny mammoth, then at the laughing hunters. "You wanted the first story," she said. "Now the first story has a mammoth in it. It always will." Glimmer's stomach dropped. He reached for the little creature to undo it. Liora caught his wrist. "Leave it," she said. "You can't find the piece to take back. I've tried that before." She let go. Her face stayed flat. "It stays." Glimmer stood over the fire and knew she was right. He had broken his one rule at the very source of stories. Not by watching too little. By collecting too hard. The lie about the mammoth was true now, forever, because of him. He looked at the two of them. "I can't collect them," he said slowly. "Every time I reach for a story, I leave a spark in it." Aurora nodded once. "So the thief isn't the danger," she said. "You are."