The scar woke him again.
It began the way it always did: a slow, insidious warmth blooming under his ribs, as though someone had pressed a lit coal into his chest and then forgotten to remove it. He gasped himself awake, sweat slicking his skin, and for a moment the world was fire once more. Smoke in his throat. Splintered beams groaning like dying whales. The frantic shriek of alarms, cut short as the roof came down.
Memory. Dream. He never knew which. The museum fire was a scar of the world as much as on his body, and like all scars it liked to itch at night.
He threw off the blanket and staggered to the window. Outside, the city slumbered badly, as all cities did: half of it drunk, half of it praying the bills would not find them tomorrow. The orange glow of streetlights hummed a constant note, like monks trying to chant a god back into existence. Somewhere in the alley below, a dog barked at nothing and refused to stop.
The scar throbbed harder. He pulled the curtain shut. The reflection caught him anyway. In the glass he saw his chest glowing faintly, lines etched in a language no one could agree upon—Norse, Aztec, Egyptian, Shinto, all and none. He looked down at his bare skin and found only ruined flesh, puckered and ugly.
The glow never appeared where others could see. Only in reflections. Only in dreams.
He pressed his hand against the flesh and muttered a string of curses unfit for any pantheon. The heat did not fade.
"Still fighting it?" a voice asked.
He froze. His apartment was empty. The voice had come from the cracked bathroom mirror, its edges spotted with rust and toothpaste flecks. A pair of yellow eyes gleamed there, not his own.
"You're not real," he whispered.
A grin stretched in the glass, full of teeth the color of cigarette ash. A coyote's grin, sly and knowing.
"Neither is your sanity," said the Whisperer. "But we make do with what survives the fire."
The Seeker staggered back, knocking over a tower of unopened mail. Envelopes scattered across the floor like startled pigeons: rent due, electricity overdue, a letter from the university returned unopened. Ghosts, all of them.
The trickster in the mirror chuckled, tail flicking where there should be no tail. "The gods stir, little scholar. They scratch at the edges. You carry the first ember. Pretend otherwise, and it will still burn you."
He shut his eyes, counted to ten, and when he looked again the mirror showed only his own ruined face. He hated how relieved he was.
The scar was still hot.
He stumbled to his desk, where books lay in disarray: Norse sagas, Egyptian hymns, photocopies of Lakota prayers. Their margins were crammed with his desperate handwriting, arrows leading nowhere, questions with no answers. Knowledge shattered into fragments, like glass that cut his hands each time he tried to gather it.
He reached for his pen. His hand trembled as he wrote in the margin of a fragment from the Voluspa: The fire is awake.
This time, he did not cross it out.
By morning the scar had cooled, but the city had not.
He left the apartment with his collar pulled high, hiding the glyph-burn from the world. Dawn came late, as if the sun had been convinced to sleep in. The streets buzzed with half-truths: a bus driver muttering about birds migrating in the wrong season, a shopkeeper sweeping up shattered bulbs that had all burst at once. Radios carried stranger news: eclipses lasting seconds, statues leaking something that priests refused to call blood.
The Seeker wrote it all down in the battered notebook he kept in his coat pocket. He catalogued omens the way a dying man counts breaths. He had sworn never to fall back into obsession, never to follow the scar again into madness—but obsession was the only coin he had left.
The bookstore sat at the edge of the old quarter, pressed between a laundromat and a noodle stall. Its sign had once read "Xuemei's Antiquarian Texts," but most of the letters had fallen off, leaving only "me's Texts." Somehow the incompleteness suited it.
Inside, the air smelled of ink and dust and frying oil drifting from next door. The owner was perched behind the counter, sharp eyes peering over a pair of reading glasses. Her hair was iron-gray, tied back with ruthless efficiency.
"You look worse," Xuemei said by way of greeting.
"You always say that," he muttered.
"It's always true." She closed her book with a snap. "Eat something."
A plastic container slid across the counter. Dumplings, greasy and steaming, still warm from the stall. He had no appetite, but hunger was not a thing she tolerated as optional. He bit into one. Hot juice burned his tongue. He almost welcomed it.
Xuemei watched him chew. "The scar again?"
He stiffened. "It's nothing."
"It's never nothing." She reached for a bundle of papers and began shuffling them with practiced disdain. "Every time you come in here looking like a ghost, I know it's burned you again. You think I don't notice? I notice. The whole city notices."
"No one notices," he snapped. "That's the point."
Her eyes narrowed. "You want to be invisible? You succeed. Half the world's forgotten your name. The other half whispers it like a curse. But the scar—" She pointed with her chopsticks. "That remembers you, whether you like it or not."
He hated how easily she could unmake him with words. Xuemei was not a god, not a scholar, not even kind most days—but she saw. That was worse.
He shoved the empty dumpling box back toward her. "I need texts. Old ones. Anything on fire gods, on scars as signs. Aztec, Norse, doesn't matter."
Her lips tightened. "That's a dangerous request."
"Everything's dangerous."
"Not everything," she said. "Only the things you can't let go."
For a moment silence pressed between them, heavy with smoke and memory. Then she sighed and reached under the counter. A bundle wrapped in brown paper thumped onto the wood.
"I shouldn't give you this," she said. "I told myself a hundred times I wouldn't. But you'll only dig up worse if I don't."
He unwrapped it with shaking hands. Inside lay a manuscript—pages brittle, ink faded, yet the glyphs burned with a clarity older than any language he knew. The scar on his chest pulsed in recognition.
Xuemei saw his reaction and muttered something in Chinese that was probably a curse. "Careful, boy. The Lantern Keepers watch for texts like that. They'll erase you faster than you can translate a single line."
"The Lantern Keepers don't scare me."
"Then you're a fool." She leaned close. Her breath smelled faintly of tea leaves. "Better a shrouded flame than a world in ashes. That's their motto. They believe it. And if they think you're carrying fire, they'll snuff you out."
He wanted to tell her the fire was already awake, that it burned in his chest every night. Instead, he traced the first line of the manuscript with a trembling finger. The letters twisted under his gaze, seeming to rearrange themselves in different alphabets: Norse runes, Aztec pictographs, Egyptian hieroglyphs. His scar throbbed in time with each shift.
Xuemei noticed, of course. She always noticed. Her hand tightened on the edge of the counter.
"Tell me," she said softly, "what do you see?"
He opened his mouth to answer, but the shop lights flickered violently. Once, twice, then out. For an instant the bookstore was plunged into a dusk too deep for morning, as though the sun itself had flinched.
In the dark, the scar blazed like a lantern.
Xuemei gasped. Somewhere outside, dogs began howling in unison. And in the reflection of the shop's glass door, a coyote grin gleamed, teeth sharp as prophecy.