Silence, when it finally settled, arrived like a cold stone dropped into still water. The ripple it made was visible only in the small hairs along Como's neck and the distant blackened trees that leaned toward the ruined courtyard, as if to see more clearly what might happen next. Darr's hand hung midair after the slap, a bruise blooming on his palm like a sign that discomfort had a taste. He watched Como with an almost tender contempt, the sort of expression someone keeps for a pet that has forgotten its place.
Como did not step back. He did not blink. He simply stood—long hair falling in a greasy curtain, a face washed pale with a bluish tint that made his skin look like moonlight over lake ice—and the world seemed to narrow down onto a single, unmoving point: his features, small and tense, like rock cooling after a long burn.
"Say something," Darr demanded, voice low and thorny. "You always have a mouth, Como. Where is it now?"
There was no answer. Only the soft shift of distant wind through torn banners, the low creak of a broken gate, the mutter of something far off and hungry. Darr's smirk deepened. He stepped closer until his shadow fell across Como's chest.
"You think silence is a trick," he said. "You think it makes you deeper. It just makes you dull."
Como's jaw tightened. He raised his chin by the slightest degree, not enough for any to see but for the air itself. It was a small rebellion, a single muscle protesting. For a breath Darr thought of the boy as fragile as any stray cat and reached to tidy that fragile blankness—then his hand struck.
The slap landed with animal finality. The sound flayed the night like a whip. Como's head snapped to the side; the palate of night split and a thread of red bloomed across his cheek where the impact had set teeth to bone.
"That all you've got?" Darr laughed, but there was a note of something like worry threaded through it now. It was the kind of laughter one reserves for knives that have become too sharp. "I thought you might at least cry."
Suddenly, Como passed a mental command:
(Spectral Gift: Ember Flame)
(Shaping Ember Unlocked)
(Flame Attribute Building... )
An ember of something—anger, perhaps, or a memory of a wrong that was not yet measured—forced Como's mouth into a line. His eyes flicked up, and in them something dormant shifted. Where there had been only a faint gray reflection, now there was a needle of promise: a light like the edge of a blade just before dawn. He began to hum.
No sound traveled to Darr at first, but the hum wrapped the courtyard and the broken stones like a ribbon. The hum thickened, became a deep tone that reverberated in the teeth of the statues and made the rusty chains quiver on their hooks. Darr's smile curled into suspicion.
"Don't," he said.
The word was unnecessary. Como's hum became a voice, not in language but in pressure, in the way air settles into hollows and refuses to leave. The air around him shivered and condensed into a color no eye should have to hold: red, incandescent, the inner glow of a coal whose fires are made from something far older than wood. It rose from the nape of his neck at first, a halo unfinished, and then—like a slow, cruel sunrise—it poured upward, consuming hair and breath and shadow alike.
Light is an honest thing; when it is true it reveals. When Como's light grew, it did not simply show the courtyard. It rewrote it. Stone lost its porosity and took on a glassy sheen that reflected the light back, amplified. The banners—frayed skeins of dark—became films of molten silk that flared and braided into streaks of heat. A breeze entered the courtyard, and the dust upon the flagstones ignited into sparks that chased each other like frightened minnows.
Darr's face went flat as the sky just before thunder. He took two steps backward. "What—" he began, but the word dissolved under the roar Como's rising power made in the bones.
The light was not just outward; it was a hunger that pressed outward. Where it licked across weeds, they blackened and fell away as if reduced to ash memory. Where it struck the cracked surface of a statue, the stone imploded inward and vanished, leaving an empty silhouette as clean as if cut by a divine blade. Even the air tasted of it—metallic and sweet and full of the smell of things that sleep forever.
Darr raised his hands, fingers splayed like a conjurer, and the scar along his palm gleamed white in the red wash. He whispered a charmed syllable, or perhaps only his own name shouted into a mirror. The words fell flat. The courtyard itself seemed to contract, pressing all attention into the bright nucleus that was Como's head.
"Stop it," Darr said, his voice small. The more he tried to wield his tone like a weapon, though, the more the light seemed to understand sarcasm and relish it. With a sound like iron being drawn over glass, the light leapt higher and flung a shiver of warmth so keen that the shadows on the walls peeled away and fell, dead.
People who have never stood beside a growing sun think of light as gentle. They don't know the violence of sudden day. They do not know that light can obliterate by kindness—by giving all things at once, until nothing is left to be given. Como's light did not blast outward in a beam so much as it suffused, a saturation of being that left no foothold for the half-formed or the compromised. A cart two yards away melted into runnels of blackened resin. The metal hinges of a door fused and sagged, letting go of the frame like a tired eyelid.
Darr's smirk was gone. He shaded his eyes with a hand but kept watching. He had done this sort of thing long enough to know that the extraordinary often required two responses: violence and deception. So he did both. He opened his mouth and spoke words that smelled of ancient rot and old libraries, a string of syllables that made the hair on Como's forearms jump.
"By the broken keys," he chanted, voice threaded with a mockery that could bend like a blade. "By what you were given and what you dared not take—"
Something answered the chant. It was not Darr's voice that made the answer but a ripple in the light itself, as if Como's incandescent red had teeth and liked to click them. The glow near Como's temples shivered, and small lines—deep and black as dried blood—sketched themselves across his skin. Wherever they touched, the light shuddered and concentrated and then leapt outward in tendrils that clawed at the heavens like the fingers of drowning men.
Darr laughed then—thin, forced, a sound made to convince himself more than anyone else. "Old charms," he said. "They never—"
He did not finish. The red woke as if insulted. It rose so fast Darr's hair was smudged in the gust like ink. For a fraction of a breath, the courtyard was an altar, and Como the sacrificial fire. Darr's words turned brittle in his mouth and snapped. He sucked oxygen like a drowning animal and stumbled backward, tripping over a stone.
"Stop," he rasped, now truly afraid.
But some things run on after the need to stop is gone. Como's eyes, when they opened, were not the dull gray of someone asleep; they were lit panes of a color that hurt to look at. The pupils were small, burned black, as if darkness were a fixed point inside the star. He lifted a hand slowly, palms outward, as if asking the world for patience. The light responded, obedient as a thing that knew its use: it widened, a flood across the courtyard's cracked stone, and then it crowned itself into a spear of such naked, relentless glare that even the ground seemed to recoil.
This beam did not travel in a straight, noble line. It braided and split and braided again—each thread an argument against the universe. Where one thread struck a wooden beam, the wood exhaled in flame and collapsed; where another struck a face—Darr's bruised cheek—it did not merely burn but peeled the skin back like page paper, revealing muscle that glowed with the same internal fires, a horrid anatomical portrait of burning from the inside. Screams began, thin and distant: a dog yelped, a kestrel crashed against a tower, a woman somewhere upstream dropped her basket and cursed whatever crossroads she had reached.
Darr fell to one knee. His lips foamed with something like prayer. Around him, the men who had come with him backed away until they found the protective shadow of the gate. Old men who had seen certain truths in their time—plagues, kings dying, children born malformed—covered their faces and sobbed, and the young ones screamed and ran.
Como did not move as the light took and took. His brow was sweating, and the veins at his temples throbbed like insistent fingers. Each pulse made the light stutter and grow, and in those beats the courtyard learned new math—how quickly things could be unmade, how little resistance the world offered when faced with something that refused to leave. In the crowd, a boy shouted for his mother and then vanished beneath the light like an animal stepping into dawn and finding itself turned to bone.
Darr's whispering grew louder now, no longer hidden. He waved his hands, inscribed small circles in the air, and his mouth shaped invisible runes. The old magic of his ancestors leaked from him in thin ribbons. "You think," he murmured—part scold, part apology—"that power is all you need. But look: look—"
The beam narrowed and then twisted toward Darr. For the first time since the light had flared, it did not aim with an artist's intention but with a child's furious focus. It cut a clean arc toward him. The red reached his shoulders and peeled the edge of his cloak like a burnt plane of cloth. Darr flinched, but his eyes were unblinking. He smiled in a small way I recognized: the smile of someone who knew their own lines.
"Enough," came a voice from the threshold. It was neither female nor male at first glance; it was the kind of voice that had been hammered on the world and still came out smooth, like a bell from an old forge. The second figure moved into the rim of the courtyard—a tall thing wrapped in layered leathers and stitched shadows. Where light touched him his skin was normal, even pleasant; where shadow clung, it tunneled down into depths that suggested other mouths. He carried no wand, no blade. He carried nothing but a smile pretending not to be a weapon.
Darr's smile faded into a slack ring of worry. "You—"
"Ah," the second figure said, and his voice licked the courtyard like water. "How quaint. A tantrum of luminous ego. Childish dark magic."
The words were soft, and yet they cut like a blade. They had the flavor of someone who'd seen too many seasons and kept a ledger of every small calamity. The second figure stepped forward, and where his boot pressed the flagstone a small frost bloomed that did not belong to the red light and seemed to drink at it.
Como's light flared toward the new speaker and found—surprise—less than it expected. The man did not flee or cry or even flinch. His eyes were calm and then narrow in an almost affectionate way. He reached up with one hand as if to scratch an itch on a distant cheek, and all at once the red light crouched.
It was like watching a caged animal recognize the shape of its owner. The light did not cease; it folded inward, as if embarrassed. Como sagged, exhausted, the energy leaving him like breath escaping a bellows. He fell to his knees and then to his side; the red that had turned the night into day dimmed to smoldering embers, to a dull, ashamed glow, then to nothing at all. The courtyard seemed to exhale.
The second figure's smile widened, small and patient. He walked among the ruined things, and paused with perhaps the smallest hesitation before touching a shard of the statue that had first taken the light. He did not pick it up. He looked at it, and then at Como, who lay curled and breathing shallow. "See?" he murmured. "Fire without discipline is noise."
Darr spat, blood leaking from where the light had shown its warmth into his cheek. He licked his lips in a smooth motion and then laughed, a brittle sound. "You always show up at the worst times," he said to the newcomer. "You always—"
"—arrive when the little shows are over?" the second figure offered, completing Darr's sentence like a seamstress stitching the final hole closed. He squatted to meet Como's face level. He had hands that smelled faintly of spice; his fingers were clean. "I have many names," he went on. "But names, like masks, are small comforts. Tell me—what did he say?"
Darr's grin thinned, "He said nothing. Silent like a stone. Then I slapped him, and he..."
"And he tried to flare." The second figure's voice was mild as tea. He tasted the air, and there was a nuance of amusement like someone watching children misplay a dangerous game. "Delicious. He burns like old paper and thinks he is the book."
"Who are you?" someone—one of the men in Darr's party—asked, voice shaking. "Are you one of you? One of the—"
"Of what?" the man asked, and his amusement shifted, a slight sharpening. He gestured with a hand that had once likely been a soldier's. "Of the fold? The Guild? The church?" He made a small pass across the air as if dismissing labels. "No. I am a friend, when it suits me."
Como's eyes opened at the sound of that voice, but they were glassy, pupil pinprick, ringed with purple. He tried to lift his head and found his limbs slow, all movement unnecessary weight. The second figure watched him like someone who had come to pick fruit: patient, not cruel.
"Childish dark magic," the stranger repeated, louder now, so that the words rang through the empty courtyard and turned into something like a verdict. "Childish and loud. It leaves traces. It leaves wounds for others to patch."
Darr looked at the stranger with something like hope. "Then you can help me—help us," he begged. "He can't be allowed to live like this. You know what he does when he—"
The second figure's smile softened. "The world is no stranger to people who incandescently declare themselves gods," he said. "Some are stopped. Some are caged. Some are coaxed into smaller flames. Which would you prefer, Darr?"
Darr swallowed. "St—stop him," he stammered. "Kill him. Or bind him. Do anything."
The second figure's eyes found Como's and lingered. For a moment the courtyard was a portrait studio, a moment where light and shadow agreed on a single subject. The man breathed out and shook his head with that faint, inevitable disappointment adults lean on when a child fails to mop up a spill.
"No," he said. "Not now."
"Why?" Darr snapped. "He nearly—"
"Yes." The stranger's voice was calm. "He nearly burned everything. But burning things is a kind of honesty. It reveals where things had been rotten. It reveals—"
He knelt and placed his palm on Como's forehead. The heat of the boy's skin met his in a conversation neither felt obliged to translate. The man's hand hovered, then pressed, and the boy moaned. The sound was a kitchen thing—a tired, used thing. "You," the man told Como softly, "stop being dramatic."
Como's eyelids fluttered. His lips moved, shaping words that dissolved before any eardrum could catch them. "Don't..." he whispered. "I didn't mean to—"
"No," the man said. "You meant to be seen. You meant to be loud. Lucky for you, you have not yet learned the difference between exposure and expression."
Darr spat again. "You—who are you?"
The man rose to his feet and dusted his hands like private property reclaimed. "Call me what you like," he said. "But call me often enough and your life will start to make sense. For now, I will take him."
"Take him?" the men behind Darr chorused. "You can't—"
The second figure's chuckle was a small, cruel thing. "There are many things I can," he said. "I can take him because he's yours and yours alone. I can take him because he will make me interesting stories for a while. And," his voice dropped like the last coin in a purse, "I can take him because I want to see if the next time he blazes he'll do it with some clarity."
He bent toward Como once more and closed his hand around the boy's wrist. Como made a sound like a child denied candy, then went limp. In that limpness there was not surrender but a certain economy: as if everything in him had spent itself on one incandescent lie and now had only the quiet left to borrow.
"Wait," Darr said, reaching out. His fingers brushed the stranger's sleeve and stopped, as if touching certain fabrics might reveal the state of the world. "What will you do to him?"
The second figure looked back at Darr with an expression that was almost kind. "Teach him, perhaps. Or cage him. Or set him to strings and let him puppet small towns from a distance." He shrugged. "I might even make him a lesson, depending on how the next years treat him."
Darr's lip twitched. "You'll ransom him."
"I will do nothing of the sort unless it suits me," the stranger said. Then, after a moment, almost as an afterthought: "He will come with me. Do not follow."
A silence hung after that warning like a curtain. Darr stood slowly, head bowed, and the men around him shifted like a school of fish. The second figure turned toward the broken road and the field beyond, then paused. He looked back once more at Como curled on the flagstone like a child asleep after tantrum, and the faintest hint of something—memory, perhaps, or recollection—moved his features.
"Childish dark magic," he murmured again, softer, not quite a condemnation this time, more like a reading from an old book. "Too loud. Too proud. Too early."
He took Como by the arm, and the courtyard held its breath. The boy's body was cool now, the earlier heat dissipated into exhausted bone. The stranger lifted him with practiced ease and tightened his grip in a motion that suggested both protection and ownership.
"Where will you take him?" Darr asked, the question thin as a reed.
"To a room with fewer mirrors," the second figure replied. "To a place that will not mistake heat for compassion." He smiled once, small and private, and then walked away. Behind him, the ruined town receded, the smoldering scent following him like an afterimage.
Darr watched until the figure was little more than a smudge on the horizon—then he turned to the others. "Bury the rest," he ordered. "Do what you must. Burn what cannot be saved."
They moved as commanded, fingers clumsy with fear and the small domesticities of salvage. In the silence that remained, Como lay still, his chest rising and falling like a bellows with a hole in it. The red had gone, and with it the insult of illumination. The night returned to itself, modest and ashamed.
Above, where stars pricked the dark, one star blinked out, perhaps from shock, perhaps from indifference. The second figure had already gone, and the town would speak of the night in which a boy lit the dark and someone older took him away. It would speak of the strange man's smile. It would not, in its stories, ever fully account for what fear looks like when it realizes it does not have a monopoly on power.
Como awoke later, in a room with no mirrors. The light that found him was small, shaded, and polite. The second figure sat by the window, a line of shadow across his face. He did not speak at once. He simply watched, as though gauging where the light had left its scars.
"Childish dark magic," he said again, with a sigh that carried more curiosity than condemnation now. "Let's see what we can make of you".