Glimmer Havocbringer's Arc

Chapter 5 of 8

The songline still hummed in Glimmer's head when he sneezed the three of them onto packed river mud. Reeds hissed. A city of mud brick baked under the sun. This was Uruk, thousands of years old, and Glimmer wanted the next story before the thieves could reach the ones already in his mind. He needed something old and fragile. Around a fire near the wall, men argued about a man named Gilgamesh. Half boast. Half warning. The words were spoken, not yet carved. "There," Glimmer said. "That one. Nobody's written it down yet." Aurora studied the fire. Its stone ring looked older and newer at once, as if it had burned through every age. She did not open a shell. "You don't know that," she said. "Grab wrong and you corrupt a story that was already safe. One that survives on its own." Liora crouched by the flames and listened. The tiny mammoth trotted at her heels. "Some of this is going onto clay soon," she said. "Clay lives. The old singing dies with the singers." She pointed at one hoarse voice, an old man half in shadow. "His version. That's the one leaving no trace." Glimmer reached for the whole fire at once. His hands went hot. Sparks lifted off his knuckles. Aurora caught his wrist. "Careless," she said, flat. "You'd take the version headed for clay too. Change what survives. That's the wreck I promised to let you make." Her hand stayed on him. "Choose. The dying one, or nothing." Glimmer's breath went thin. He watched the old man's mouth. He pulled his reach in tight, aiming only at that one hoarse voice, the boast that would die at dawn. He let the rest of the fire go. A spark broke loose anyway. It drifted toward the clay-bound singers. Aurora watched it fall. She did not move. Glimmer saw her choice in her stillness. She would let it land. He lunged and clapped his own hands over the spark. It burned his palms shut. He held it against his chest until it died. His hands smoked. The clay-bound story stayed clean. The old man's boast lifted into Glimmer's mind, whole and safe. He had taken only the dying one. The version headed for clay went on untouched. Aurora lowered her arm. "You caught your own," she said. "First time." "You were going to let it land," Glimmer said. "Yes." She almost smiled. "You didn't need me to catch it. Worse for you. Now you know you can." Liora picked up the mammoth. "That changes the deal," she said. "She stops being your judge the day you stop needing one." Glimmer looked at his blistered hands. He had the oldest boast of Uruk and had spared what would outlive it. But he had done it by burning himself, not by control. He could not hold his hands over every spark forever. He needed a way to aim before he reached.