Chapter 4: A Fire Worth Keeping
Barni kept one paw over his golden eye, as if he could hide from the System by refusing to acknowledge it.
For several seconds, the strange animal did not move. Neither did the translucent window hovering above him.
Mataon leaned forward until his shoulder brushed the curved wall of the root hollow.
Barni removed the paw, stared directly at him, and slapped the empty air.
Paf.
The window vanished.
Mataon blinked.
"That was deliberate."
Barni sat down and began licking the same paw with the slow dignity of someone who had just closed a door in another person’s face.
"You saw it," Mataon said.
"You understood what it showed. You dismissed it."
Barni moved to the next paw.
He considered asking All-Knowing Worlds what sort of creature could dismiss a System window. Then he remembered what had happened when he asked where he was, and received enough information to nearly turn his brain into soup.
Small questions, he reminded himself. Questions that did not invite a planet to introduce itself all at once.
"What does foreign binding mean when applied to a living soul?"
The answer narrowed the possibilities to nearly everything unpleasant that could happen to a person. Or to an animal.
Mataon looked at Barni again. The folded ears were angled toward him, but the rest of the body performed exaggerated disinterest with professional commitment.
"Fine," Mataon said.
"Keep your secrets."
Barni gave a short grunt. It sounded less like gratitude and more like confirmation that Mataon had finally chosen the correct policy.
He rested his head against the root wall.
"I have inherited divine powers, two invisible advisors, and a companion who already knows how to ignore me. It’s reassuring that death has not removed bureaucracy from my life."
Zahr’s voice arrived from the back of his thoughts, quiet and dry.
"You have not yet encountered bureaucracy."
Mataon froze for half a breath. The voice had been absent since the Ravager. Not gone, apparently. Only silent.
"You’re still here."
"In a limited sense."
"Can you tell me what Barni is?"
"No."
The answer came too quickly.
Mataon narrowed his eyes.
"That was the most suspicious no I’ve heard since dying."
"You have been dead for less than a day," Almina said.
"And already my standards are developing."
"We will answer questions concerning the general functions of this world, its known laws, and the Authorities transferred to you," she said.
"We will not identify individuals whose nature would influence your judgment."
"So you do know."
"That is not what I said."
"You are both very talented at answering questions shaped like different questions."
"It is an old discipline," Zahr said, almost pleased.
"It is restraint," Almina corrected.
"Something gods learn too late."
Barni looked from Mataon to the empty air beside him. From his side of it, Mataon had resumed arguing with the inside of his own skull.
"You have opinions?" Mataon asked him.
Barni sneezed.
"Three advisors," Mataon said.
"One of them communicates exclusively through contempt."
Now that nothing was actively trying to eat him, his body found time to submit a complete list of complaints. His palms burned. His shoulders ached from crawling under the roots. His left foot was cold inside a ruined sock. Beneath his ribs, hunger twisted slowly.
He had eaten two ashberries since arriving in Gaiark. Barni had eaten the other four.
"You could at least pretend to feel guilty."
The creature’s eyes closed. Apparently guilt cost more calories than he was willing to spend.
Mataon emptied Astronomic Space onto the dry grass. Crooked branches, grey stones, coils of vine, strips of bark, a handful of berries, the crude spear, and a floating sphere of water that immediately remembered gravity.
Splsh.
He caught some of it. The rest soaked into the bedding, under Barni’s forelegs.
Barni rose very slowly.
"Yes," Mataon said.
"That one was my fault. A container has been added to the list."
Barni relocated to the driest patch of the hollow and sat with his back turned.
Mataon set the priorities the way Almina had. Water. Shelter. Fire. Food. He had water, and a shelter he had not built. That left fire.
Most of the fallen wood was damp. He asked a smaller question — what dry material he could pull from dead branches — and used Druid Extraction to comb thin strips of dry inner bark out from beneath the wet outer layers.
Shrrrk.
They smelled faintly of cedar and pepper.
Then his fingers brushed a living root, and the world inside it opened beneath his awareness. Water moving through channels. Sugars gathering in soft tissue. Mana travelling through a lattice of cells, and something deeper. Slow, and old, and not entirely physical.
For one dangerous instant, the solution seemed obvious. He could take the dry material straight from the root. Strip water from one section, resin from another. No searching. No wasted time.
Mataon pulled his hand away.
"No."
The root did not move. No face appeared in the bark. Nothing accused him. Still, the question had felt uncomfortably close to asking whether he wanted to cut flesh from a sleeping creature because it was convenient.
"Ecological debt," he said.
"Explain."
"Life is not a collection of materials waiting for a user," Almina answered, without irritation this time.
"Extraction changes more than the visible object. Soil. Nutrient movement. The things that feed from a root and the things that feed it."
"And restoration fixes the damage later?"
"No," she said.
"Restoration only determines who pays it."
The forest sounded different after that. The stream was no longer a supply line without an owner. Even the moss under his knee belonged to a structure he could not yet see.
A power that could turn land into inventory would be very easy to call efficient. Efficiency was not innocence.
He took only fallen wood.
He built the fire the way the archive insisted. Fine bark at the center. A ring of thin twigs. A loose cone of thicker branches, with gaps left for air.
That was where his confidence ended.
He struck two pieces of greyshard together.
Tck. Nothing. Tck. Tck. A chip broke free and hit his cheek.
"Progress," Zahr said.
"Toward what?"
"A smaller stone."
After the ninth attempt he changed his grip. After the fifteenth, the angle. After the twentieth, he began to suspect the stones were collaborating against him.
"How many gods does it take to light a fire?" he asked.
"One," Zahr replied.
"Do not answer him," Almina said, at the same time.
"Excellent. Two divine voices, and no fire."
"You also have hands," Almina said.
"One of them is bleeding."
"Then use the other."
Barni returned during the twenty-third attempt. He came out of the ferns carrying something black in his teeth, stopped beside the failed fire, and dropped it.
Tok.
A stone landed by Mataon’s knee. Denser and darker than greyshard, angular on one side, marked with pale metallic veins.
"You knew where this was," Mataon said.
Barni sat.
"You watched me hit rocks together for how long?"
The blue eye moved to the failed fire, then back.
"You wanted to see whether I’d solve it. Or you enjoyed the performance."
Barni scratched behind one folded ear.
Mataon picked up the sparkstone.
"Cruel."
He struck it against the greyshard.
Krrk — tss.
A bright spark jumped between the stones and died on damp soil. The second reached the bark and vanished. The third made a thread of smoke.
He bent over the bundle and blew. Smoke went straight into his face. He coughed, inhaled more, coughed harder. Barni moved two careful steps away and watched with clean lungs.
"Coward."
It took eleven more attempts. Once the resin caught for half a second and went out with a small pffft that felt openly disrespectful.
On the last attempt, a point of orange stayed alive inside the bark. He cupped his hands around it and breathed, slow.
The orange point widened. A thin flame climbed one curled strip, touched the resin, and spread through the smallest twigs with a soft, hungry crackle.
Krrk. Krrk.
Mataon sat back.
The fire was pathetic. Barely big enough to warm his hands. One careless breath could have ended its career.
He felt absurdly proud of it.
Barni lay near the warmth and stretched his front paws toward it, as though he had personally supervised the construction.
"You contributed one stone."
Barni closed his eyes.
"A vital stone," Mataon admitted.
"Your compensation claim will be reviewed."
A smell reached him before the next sound did. Blood.
He looked at Barni’s muzzle. A thin red line marked the white fur beneath his mouth.
"What did you do?"
Barni rose, walked into the ferns, and disappeared. A few moments later came a dragging sound.
Shrr. Shrr. Thmp.
He returned pulling a dead animal by one long rear leg. It looked like a hare, though it was nearly the size of a small dog, with broad copper-coloured ears and two short horn-like growths behind its eyes.
Barni dropped it beside the fire.
"You killed that?"
Barni licked the last of the blood from his muzzle, and looked at Mataon with the patient, faintly insulting expression of a creature who had now provided the shelter, the spark, and the dinner, and was waiting to see whether the human intended to contribute anything at all.
Mataon looked at the fire he had barely made, and the food he had not caught, and the companion he had not asked for and could not explain.
On Earth, he had spent his whole life being told that worth was a number other people assigned to you. A grade. A rank. A seat at a table.
Here, on the first night of his second life, worth was simpler, and heavier, and entirely his to earn. A fire worth keeping. A debt worth paying. A creature that had decided, for reasons it would not share, that he was worth saving.
He drew the crooked spear across his knee, and began, clumsily, to prepare the meal that something braver than him had provided.
"All right,"
he said, to the fire, and the forest, and the two gods in his chest, and the animal that was not a dog.
"First night. Let’s not die."
Above the canopy, the pale-glass sky began, at last, to darken. And somewhere far to the north, past every root and river Mataon could not yet name, a broken world turned in its sleep, entirely unaware that an auditor had arrived to start counting it.