Skarn, the Unburied

He was called Erik then. An orphan out of the western Evenfields, where the Iron River runs shallow over coloured gravel — raised by his sister Livia, four years older, who was barely more than a child herself when it fell to her. The village decided early that the boy was strange: quiet, watchful, no use at gatherings. None of it was true, with her. With her he never stopped talking.

Livia was kind in the plain, unremarkable way that people forget to write down. Kind to animals, kind to the half-blood girl nobody else in the village would have as a friend — a girl who grew up to be Eidara, and who has not forgotten. The two children picked stones out of the river shallows, small garnets and coloured grains, and kept them in a tin box on a shelf.

There were two men on the road the year he turned twenty-four, and it was evening. Erik went first — the only time in his life — and put his knife in one of their backs. It was not enough. They bound him, and they let him watch. What was done to her is not written here. When they were finished they took his own knife, drove it through his heart, and ran.

Nobody released him. There is no one left in Ambryx to do it: the gods who used to receive the finished are gone, and the dead with an errand unsettled are simply not put out. He got up. He had no heart to get up with, and he got up anyway.

He tracked both men down first, and took his time about it. He had expected something to let go when the last one stopped breathing. Nothing let go. That was when he understood, without ever saying it out loud, that the errand had never been revenge. So he stopped paying in that currency and started paying in stones.

What was left of him gathered. Small stones, mostly: out of barrows and roadside cairns, out of the spoil the mines throw away, out of hearths in houses much like the one he grew up in. The great stones of Ambryx choose their bearers and refuse the rest. Small stones cannot say no. He will tell you that this is not cruelty. It is arithmetic.

Somewhere on that long road he found a way to melt them into one another — not invented, he insists, only found. What came out was near-black, and shot through with green and blue and violet the way a storm is shot through with light. It gave him back a human form. Not life. Form. He named the new man Skarn, after the rock a mountain throws away when the fire in it melts something else.

The first thing he melted was the tin box. Those river pebbles are the only part of the Spectrolite that was never stolen, and they are the reason the shape holds at all — the stones remember, and those particular stones remember him, and her, and warm hands. One facet of the stone is still empty.

Nearly whole, he carried the last piece across the coast country: a great ruby, something red, something warm, something the shape of the hole a knife leaves. At Tidewatch it left him. The sack came loose on the quay, and the man who never drops anything walked on without noticing. A stone that great does not fall — it refuses. It had decided what it would not become, and a blacksmith picked it out of the dirt and kept it. Skarn has never once accepted any of that. He calls it theft, and he says the word to anyone who will stand still long enough to hear it.

He finished the melting without it. The stone stayed unfinished, and so did he. He never went back to Tidewatch — he followed the smith who had left it, down the years, the way only a dead man can, and found him at last in a clearing on no map, where the Law of Stones draws everything awakened. Four more burn there, across the ring. He has an opinion about each of them.