His features are more visible now in the light of the spellfire. The eyes I’d thought were black are actually a dark brown, a pleasing contrast against the lighter shade of his skin. Though his short sleeves reveal no brawny riverstrider, there is definition to the muscle of his arms that gleams bronze in the spellfire. His black hair is of a style I’ve never seen: shaven close on the sides up past his ears, then left to form a mop of curls on the top. Strange, but undeniably compelling.
There is a little twinge I sometimes feel when I meet someone so obviously attractive. A fluttering glimmer of something, deep, instinctual—and then the swift banishment of that same feeling. Only the tiniest pang of loss lingers to remind me of what I can never have.
I bid him hold his arm up to the light. The gash is ragged but shallow. It will likely scar, even were I more skilled at healing magic, but I can at least stop him losing more blood. I retrieve a waxed packet of Mhyr’s Sunrise from my belt and ask him to hold the rent flesh open a little. He looks more dubious by the moment, and when he hesitates, I tell him, “It will seal the wound. It will hurt, but it is better to keep ill humors from festering.”
“You mean it’s a disinfectant? Some kind of antibiotic medicine?” He prods at the wound with his fingertips until its ragged edges come apart, and he hisses in pain.
I move closer and eye him askance. “You use strange words.” I sprinkle the Sunrise powder along the interior of the wound, careful not to spill any on the rest of his skin.
He flinches. “That’s not so bad,” he murmurs before looking back up at me. “You use some pretty strange words yourself. Is this more … magic?” He speaks the word as though he finds it humorous.
I raise my eyebrows at him. “Yes. And that is not the part that will hurt.” I replace the packet and pull out the little vial of thicksweet. Before the boy can ask me what I mean, I pry out its stopper and lean over his arm to pour a thin drizzle of the clear syrup along the wound.
“Ow, that’s—hrm. That’s warm. Hang on, it’s feeling a bit …” His eyes widen. “It’s getting really warm.”
“Hush.” I scoop up a handful of water and close my eyes, waiting until the tangle of energies in my mind calms a little and I can cast the water over the wound.
It bursts into golden healing fire.
The boy shouts in alarm and pain and reels backward, flapping his arm uselessly for a few seconds before dropping to his knees and thrusting it into the salty lake water at our feet.
I would grab him to hold him still if I could, but I have to resort to crying, “Calm yourself—it is only a bit of healing fire!”
The salt water does little to arrest the spell, for it is not a natural flame but a magical one. The fire is quick, however, and by the time he sits up again, it’s done its work. White-faced, the boy looks down at his arm in disbelief, and then back at me.
“S-some sort of chemical reaction,” he mumbles, testing the wound’s edge with his fingertips. The magic has sealed it well. The spellfire in the air has begun to fade, and the water disturbed by the boy’s flailing has dissipated much of what lay on its surface. “You could have warned me you were going to cauterize the thing.”
His reaction could not have been feigned. The alarm coursing through me at his unknown motives has faded, and in its place is curiosity, insistent and sharp. “Who are you that you have never seen a healing spell?”
The boy looks up at me, and then away. “I … I told you. I crashed here.” And then, for just a moment, his eyes lift toward the dark, shadowy hole in the sky that is the cloudlands by night.
The strangeness of his speech, his clothes and hair, his reaction to magic, the fact that he doesn’t know who I am—and most of all, the fact that the structure I saw fall from the heavens contained a place for a human form …
“You are saying … that you fell from the cloudlands?” I whisper, wondering, still skeptical—but when he looks at me, I see the truth in his face.
“I need to get back there,” he blurts, urgency quickening his odd voice. “Can you help me?”
But my ears are roaring with the impossibility of it, my pulse rapid. Light-headed, I can only whisper, “You come from the other side of the sky?”
The boy straightens, eyes me a moment, and then nods. “I need your help to get home. My glider is wrecked, I’m thirsty and hungry … Will you help me?”
The cloudlands are where the gods fled a millennium ago—the only things that have ever come to us from the sky are a few artifacts here and there, relics and spells of great power. Even I have not seen them all, for many have been locked for generations within vaults of stone.
Certainly never a human boy.
I believed I was meant to come here to find the Star, some object fallen from the heavens that would help me prepare for the coming of the Lightbringer—the one to end all prophecy, the one to wipe the world clean so that it can begin afresh. I expected a spellstone or a scroll, an enchanted sword, a spellfire lantern in whose light the Song of the Destroyer would summon the bright god to us at last.
A brand against the darkness …
My mind conjures the memory of seeing him trying to beat back the mist-bent creatures with a burning bit of wreckage, the flames bright against the night.
Like a brand.
Maybe … maybe … could the Star be a human boy? Some descendant of the gods themselves, unaware now of his divinity?
How he came to fall from the sky, I don’t know. How he could be the one to help me find my destiny, I can’t imagine.
Of one thing, however, I am suddenly, utterly, viscerally certain: this boy is what I was meant to find here.
“I know of no magic that can raise a man into the sky,” I say weakly, scanning the boy’s face, trying to find some sign—any sign—that I am looking at something connected to divine destiny. “Come with me to the temple. Our archives hold many secrets and many ancient scrolls. Perhaps they hold the knowledge you seek. Legend even says that the temple was once the home of the Sentinels, who guarded the passage to the sky.”
“Thank you.” His face is solemn, but there’s relief in his eyes, and now he even smiles at me a little. The expression suits his features. “I’m glad you found me.”
He is unscarred, no sign of callouses on his hands or of wear from the elements on his face. His skin beneath his strange outer garment is clean. He is as fresh and new as if he were just formed.
My eyes fall upon the suit he wears, its sleeves tied around his waist. On the arm of one of them, I can just make out the shape of letters, distorted by the folding of the fabric—but unmistakable.
The writing of the ancients. Just like the lettering inside the fallen glider.
“Do you have names, in the sky?” I ask, not sure what I’m expecting him to tell me.
The boy smiles a little more widely. “My name’s North. What’s yours?”
I stare at him, bereft of words. He looks about as divinely significant as the bindle cat. But then, not even a god is born knowing their place in fate’s design. I had to learn about my purpose when I was called to divinity, as any child learns about the world.
If this boy is the Last Star, brand against the darkness, whose light will lead me to the Destroyer and to the end of days …