“Was three last week,” complained Aleman, leaning up against the house next to Draysky’s. “And I can hop down the road two doors. Just about every boy in this village sells lighters, Draysky.”
“And theirs burn the smokes before you can pull a draft,” Draysky responded from his porch steps, his back a little straighter than it needed to be. “Besides, theirs only last a day at best.”
Behind Draysky, his grandmother’s eyes drilled into his back from the shutters. Last week she’d lashed out at him after she’d caught him selling his lighters for only three tin chits, her words sharp as she pulled the hair just beside his ear, making him wince.
“I didn’t teach you to make quality lighters for you to sell yourself short!” she had scolded. “No, those lighters are a family secret, and they will pay if they want them. Know your worth, Draysky. They will try to convince you that you’re worth less than you are. In that moment, you’re in the palm of their hands, because they can always barter you farther down.”
“Three and a half,” countered Aleman from the porch. “If I raise my own price too high, no one will buy them.”
“Everyone knows my lighters burn vaporweed slower,” claimed Draysky, putting out a finger for each point he made. “Smokes cost more than lighters. If they want to stretch their smokes, they’ll pay. Besides, you had no trouble last month when I sold them for four.”
“Last month was a good month in the mines,” countered Aleman. “They could afford it then.”
“Four. Or I’m keeping them until you come back for five chits,” stated Draysky, and he looked up, his eyes meeting Aleman’s. They changed color with the seasons, just like the rest of the ridgers, sliding toward green in the summer, or blue in the spring months. But this was winter, and winter brought with it the misty grey of cold steel.
The words hung in the air, and Draysky felt himself turn rigid, like a puppet, stuck between his watching grandmother and the pondering Aleman. Of the two, he knew which he feared more. For only one of them told stories of ritebald in the night.
“Four,” grumbled Aleman, reaching for his purse and thrusting Draysky twenty chits, nearly spilling them onto the porch where they could bounce into the snow and rock. The coins were stone, with only a small sliver of metal set into the rock. That metal was the only piece of them that bore worth, but the stone setting kept it from slipping through the fabric of pockets. With a knife, the sliver could be pried out, and many a miner had gone to the gallows for trying to fool the Keepers with hollow chits, no more valuable than the shale underfoot.
In return, Draysky reached inside his coat, pulling out the five lighters he had created that last afternoon. Each was wood, carved down from a dry stick, approximately the size of his ring finger. A single hole drilled into the tip, extending down the center of the shaft, and Aleman inspected one, holding it up to the fading sunlight. Then he held his thumb over the bottom, his forearm muscles flexing as tightened his grip around the cylinder.
As if he were squeezing it out from the center, a tiny flame sparked out of the hole, smaller than the nail on Draysky’s pinky. Aleman ran his finger over the fire, and Draysky knew from experience the warmth he’d feel. Not hot, but warm—just enough to set paper afire, or a pile of leaves, after holding it in place for a few seconds. The flame bud was colored dull red, with no trace of yellow or orange, and held steady despite the mountain’s winter wind.
Coolfire, his grandmother had called it. And as Aleman held a smoke up to the edge of the lighter, the flame slid over to ignite the end, lazily climbing into the smoke. He puffed, and even with sharp inhalation the fire burned slow, refusing to alter its color from the same dull red. The result was a purer drag, with less ash and burn, and one that lasted longer. The same amount of vaporweed would go twice as far, and with twice the effects.
“How’s about a hundred chits right now, if you teach me how you make these?” asked Aleman. “How long did this take you, all afternoon? You could earn five times that much in a moment, boy. Think of the dinner that would fill your belly. I’ll even throw in a dinner from the tavern, eh? Some warm stew, thick and hearty, not that watery soup you’re used to.”
Draysky’s stomach growled, and he sniffed, able to pick out the smell that wafted over from the north side of the outpost. It was meat, he knew, either from the wilderness that only Keepers would risk, or traded. Not the starving rabbits his father showed him to trap at the outpost edge, or the occasional bird that fluttered too close when he had shale in his hands.
“Not for sale,” answered Draysky, his watering mouth betraying him, and Aleman sighed, his fingers stroking the knotted cord around his neck while he thought.
“Suit yourself, suit yourself. But know if you change your mind, I’ll be waiting. Next time you shiver yourself to sleep without a dinner, remember that.”
“And next time you want some lighters, you remember where to find them, Aleman,” said Draysky. “Don’t believe anyone else that says they make them like me. A hint of yellow, and they’re bad. Might as well burn bark instead of vaporgrass.”
“Might as well, eh? Well I’ll pass these along to the Keepers, with your name behind it. May heaven’s hands guide you, Draysky.”
“And you as well,” Draysky answered, then waited for Aleman to leave. Glancing left and right, he took a single chit, then darted to the well at the edge of his family’s house. He dropped it, hearing the satisfying splash as it touched the bottom, then gathered the remaining nineteen into his pouch. His grandmother would be using them for their dinner, and the extra chit per lighter meant she could afford tea as well as providing enough food to go around. Like every budding teenage boy, his appetite grew as rapidly as his size, and he leapt at the chance to make lighters as a means to swell their dinners.
Before sharing with him the secret of coolfire, Draysky’s grandmother had watched him make standard lighters for six months.
“No, you see this?” she would chastise after an afternoon whittling wood into the proper cylindrical shape, holding up a stick with a slight bend, “What’s wrong with this?”
“It isn’t straight?” he asked, as she shook it in front of his face as if she were about to beat him with it.
“No!” she cried, “It has a knot in it, see right here? A knot is going to trap everything up, it is like a river trying to loop uphill. You need good wood, not knotty wood. Go on, try it, see how it works.”
Clasping the lighter in his hand, Draysky had squeezed. At first, nothing appeared at the drilled end - then a spurt of fire leapt out, yellow and orange, before receding back into the hole.
“Unpredictable, poor craftsmanship. Like a bow that shoots a different distance every time. No, no, we shan’t tarnish the family name today. Now, show me again how you make them? The best way to learn is to teach, pretend I know nothing at all. Maybe I’ll teach you a trick if you’ve mastered them.”
Draysky followed his grandmother to the makeshift workbench at the back of the house, a plank of wood straddling two mounds of shale. When he spoke, he regurgitated the lesson she had given him many times before, down to her tone and syllable emphasis, the cadence burned into his memory.
“We must make a home for fire. Somewhere it belongs, somewhere it is safe. For fire to burn, it requires fuel, something to consume. So we seek that for which it is most hungry, the heart of the log, and provide it as offering. This is why we core the center of the wood.”
Draysky selected a log from a small stack near his feet, each about twice as thick as his arm, and cut clean with a saw to show the grain. Turning it up on its side, he exposed the rings, then reached for a tool at the end of the workbench. A hand drill with a circular bit that he placed on the very center of the log and began to turn. It would take him fifteen minutes to drive the bit deep enough to core the log to a fist’s depth, and he spoke as he twisted the tool’s handle, a small pile of sawdust gathering as the serrated edge dug into wood.
“Here, the core of the wood is
the tree’s life force, the essence of what makes it a tree. It is what burns hottest in the hearth, and what we use to lure fire into the world. Anything less means the fire may refuse to come entirely, or that the flame only burns in a smolder.”
Despite the cold, a small trickle of sweat moved down Draysky’s brow, and under his grandmother’s eye he removed the cylinder from the heart of the log. The rest of the wood he cast aside- it would serve as firewood, the majority of it intact, and would not go to waste beneath the shale. Then Draysky took up a smaller bit, one intended to drill a pilot hole in the center, and aligned it atop the fresh cylinder.
“Now, here is where the fire shall live, at the very center of the core. The wood chars from the inside out, as the fire consumes, until all that is left is ash. Here, at the center, is where we direct the focus.”
He twisted until the hole was complete, then set the cylinder aside. Already, it looked much like the lighter he had given Aleman, apart from one small detail. And he pulled out a mortar and pestle from underneath the plank, along with a small pouch hanging from a nail driven into its side. Four flower petals he pulled from the pouch, each red, dropping them into the mortar and starting to grind them. The pestle was old, having belonged to his grandmother before him, and already was stained yellow from countless uses beforehand.
“The petals of the raydrop flower, crushed to a powder and mixed with water. We choose the raydrop because it follows the sun in its arc across the sky, staring longingly into its own fire. From this flower, we pull a piece of the fire, that which gives our rune sustenance.”
Clipped to the side of the plank was a fine-tipped brush, and Draysky wet it with his tongue before dipping the bristles into the paste. He could taste the flower, sweet and light, almost warm, as if he were tasting sunshine itself. Then he marked four runes on the base of the cylinder, all identical, each pointing inward to the center where the fire was to be born.
“Rise,” he said, reading the rune, two vertical lines connected by a horizontal loop across the bottom. Then he closed his eyes, breathing on it, willing a piece of himself into the runes. “The command now infused with the will of heaven.”
Then he squeezed the lighter, feeling the sunshine beneath his palm, and the will of the rune. They tingled with just enough warmth against his skin that he could almost sense their shape, then yellow fire leapt out of the end of the lighter, burning steady, the sides of the hole from where it sprang slowly charring as the wood was consumed.
“Ah, how you have learned, Draysky. You make your grandmother proud. And now, you learn coolfire—a new rune with a new method. A secret I remember from my own grandmother.”
Chapter 4: Draysky
It seemed that the nightmares came on the coldest nights. When the firewood ration wasn’t enough to keep frost from growing around the stove. When Draysky slept in layers, and his shivers racked his very being. He was not unique in these terrors—they seemed shared by his sister, and often seemed to pass on the same nights.
A sign that a ritebald was near, his grandmother claimed.
For Draysky, the only way to cure these nightmares was to sneak outside, even though his grandmother would smack him if she discovered him in the dead of night. But the alternative was fitful sleep, sliding in and out of terror and breathing so rapidly that his lungs threatened to burst. Never had he been able to put the fleeting sensation into words, but when she grew older, his sister captured them.
“Gnashing,” Aila said, after a particularly sleepless night, when both had seen the other’s wide eyes in the darkness. “Chewing, almost—grinding. And hot, so hot.”
Taking two pieces of shale, she started rubbing them together, and Draysky shivered as the rock grated and a stream of dust slithered upward like smoke between them.
“Like this, but more. A torrent of this, more than there are raindrops in the sky.”
For her and the others, the dreams stopped there. None of them seemed to remember what came next—that sinking feeling as the wailing began. The screams that reached out through the darkness, thousands upon thousands of them, fear and desperation etched into the voices. Then there was the heat. A warmth that grew unbearably hot, causing Draysky to sweat through his shirt.
And when he awoke, he embraced the cold, rushing outside without a shirt, but always with at least two layers of socks. Because while the air turned frigid, the shale burned him. Perhaps it was so cold that the soles of his feet could no longer register the difference between extremities. When he tripped and fell, and his hands plummeted to the rock, he heard the screaming rushing through his fingertips and into his bones, as if his soul resonated with it. He’d climb on his workbench then, separating himself from the ground, closing his eyes and spreading his hands wide into the wind.
With deep breaths, the sensation receded, and he welcomed the cold around him. He drew it in, imagining snow that snuffed out everything in existence in one giant blanket. The air bit at his lungs, and his fingers stiffened as he embraced the feeling, clenching his teeth and turning still. In those moments, it was as if he became the cold, all else forgotten. The sensation, while never forgotten, would become as normal as breathing.
While fleeing his home, Draysky sometimes saw his blurred reflection in the ice. His eyes tinted a dark, reddish brown, as if they had meshed with night itself. But always when he returned, they flashed eggshell, as if his irises had lost the battle with their white surroundings. The light grey of winter’s touch.
It was on one of these nights that the ritebald nearly found Draysky. He had stood on his workbench, pulling in so much cold he thought that his lips had turned to ice, his hair forming a helmet of frozen snow. When he opened his eyes the world seemed clear, lit by the twinkling of the stars, each note of the howling wind whispering its tune to him, his shivers long forgotten.
But then he heard the nightmare once again.
The sound of gravel, of gnashing rock. Distant, but approaching. Growing more urgent with each passing second. He stood stock still, like a scarecrow, his muscles tightening. He willed the snow over him, to hide him and blend him into his surroundings, surrendering his ears and toes to the cold as sacrifice to ward off the burning heat.
Gnash, gnash, gnash, sounded the shale, and he quivered. With each moment, it grew louder, approaching from behind him as he dared not turn. He heard the heavy breathing, imagined the jaws lined with rows of teeth widening behind him. His pupils flickered down to see the shadow extending before his feet. They paused for an instant, short horns curling up from the sides of its head.
Then he jumped as a whisper came with breath so hot the speaker should have been chewing coals.
“Don’t move.”
Draysky nearly bolted, his feet twitching just as a rough finger latched onto his forearm. The scream welled within his throat, but the wind only howled louder before he could swallow it down. Those were fingers, not claws, made rough by leather gloves, not the skin of some beast. As slowly as possible, he turned, his spine cracking as if it were made of ice, and met the eyes of the Keeper behind him, large and glaring beneath his hood. A hood with two flaps which had given his shadow the appearance of horns, hastily left up from where they should be around his ears.
“Do you see it?” the Keeper whispered, his hand on an axe at his side, gripping the wood so tight it might break. Draysky squinted, then shook his head, goosebumps leaping across his skin as his connection with the night dissipated. The Keeper pulled a knife from his belt, and pressed it into Draysky’s hand, wrapping his fingers around the hilt.
“Won’t do us much good, if it turns back,” the Keeper said. “But it wouldn’t like that knife’s blade, not one bit. Might buy you a few more seconds.”
More crunching approached from behind, and another Keeper joined them, this one with a long spear. Dark metal was lashed to the tip, the weapon almost primitive, and he held it pointing out past Draysky into the darkness. Toward the shale, his jaw set, mouth locked in a snarl to obsc
ure the fear in his eyes.
“What in all the heavens have we here?” he hissed. “What’re you trying to do, boy? Bait them in? I’ve seen stupid, but even amongst you ridgers, this... this outdoes it. You know how close he passed by? I can still feel it, even, out here somewhere. Like an extra layer of cold on the night.”
In the distance, a chorus of wolves erupted, and Draysky drew in a sharp breath. The cold became unbearable now, no longer his friend and protector. He found himself almost wishing for the heat of the shale to return. Beside him, the Keepers seemed to relax, and the first spoke, his voice still low but more audacious.
“A lucky night—I’m thinking it found another meal.”
“Aye, I’d hate to come by that one after it’s had its fill,” responded the second. “Real nasty feel to it. Now, we’re just going to stand here for another two minutes, until I can’t even catch a whiff of ice magic coming off the damn thing. Got it?”
Draysky nodded, but had started to shake, the shivers coursing through his body. The wind cut through him now. With no shirt to protect him, and his body heat already low, two minutes seemed an eternity. Below, under the workbench, he knew there was a lighter, but with the Keepers staring into his back, he dared not bend down. Instead, he shifted slightly closer to them, where he could feel the heat of their cloaks. The runes glowed dimly across their surface in a dull red, flickering as they fought the cold, but the heat only seemed to bring back enough life to his limbs to strip away the numbness, almost worsening the pain.
“Would have taken at least five of us to fight that one off,” announced the second Keeper, his voice back to normal. He rounded on Draysky. “Now what were you thinking? Out here, luring it in. Do you want to die?”
“Of course not,” stammered Draysky, and he leapt down from the workbench, landing in the shale with a crunch.
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