What Watches Back

The Sun Fly feast is loud tonight. Drums, voices, fat hissing in the coals. I have a bowl of something rich and gamey in my hands and I should eat. Mother always said: eat when there is food, sleep when there is shelter. I will, in a moment. I needed to write this down first while it is fresh.

I have been watching the fire. I have been watching the things in the fire.

There are shapes leaping from log to log. Not figures. Movements. The shape of leaping things, going up with the sparks and down with the embers. They are not separate from the flames; they are of them, the way a wave is of the sea. They have no malice. They have a kind of interest in being fire, the way a cat has interest in being a cat.

I could not have seen this a month ago. I have stared into a thousand campfires in my life and never once seen anything but burning wood. I cannot un-see them now. They have always been there.

Four is on my shoulder. He sees them. He is not startled. I think he has always seen them.

I keep coming back to the trial cave under the mountain. I sent him into the trap that should have aged him, with the cold logic my father drilled into me. The familiar is a tool. Risk it before risking yourself. The trap should have aged him; Fey are long-lived but not exempt. I had braced for grief. He walked through and emerged the same. Untouched. When I crossed after him and our bond pulled tight, I felt for a moment what he had felt in the trap, and it was not what aging feels like. The trap had simply not known where to set its teeth.

Time does not work on what Four is.

I had thought, at the time, that this was just Fey resilience. I had thought it because Gloria told me so when she taught me the ritual. “Most often a Fey or Celestial spirit answers, dear.” Then she had said, with that smile she got when she was telling me something true and only partly true: “But sometimes other things answer. Sometimes the spirit that comes is the one that was already waiting. It takes the shape that suits the one who called it. You’ll see.”

I was twelve. I did not understand. I cast the ritual and a brown rat coalesced in front of me, and I named him One because the name arrived already attached. Like an item ticked off an inventory. He has died three times since. Each time I called him back, I knew with absolute certainty it was the same One, but I called him Two, then Three and now Four. Not a new spirit. The same one returning. Each time the new name felt right, but now I see it was never a new name—it was always the same one. Just my mind trying to wrap a name around a concept, something that needed no name but wanted one all the same.

I never questioned it. I never had to.

In the cave, when the shard’s evil broke and the cleansed silence rushed in, I felt the cave itself. Not Mahja Firehair, whom the orcs venerate. Something underneath her, woven through the rock. The cave’s own spirit, attending the goddess the way a host attends a guest. I tried to make the perception go away and it would not go away. It has not gone away since. Like a new eye I don’t yet understand how to close. The sense plays at the edge of my awareness as it recedes from time to time and then rushes back in.

I can even feel it, now. I can feel that the fire has spirits in it that are of fire that are fire. I can feel the orcs’ feasting has its own spirit, a communal warmth that is more than the people making it. The moonless dark beyond the firelight is attentive in a way I cannot describe. None of it is hostile. It is just being itself.

I have been thinking about Gloria. About the way she touched my shoulder when she taught me the ritual. “You’ll see.” She knew. Of course she knew. I was a boy who slipped away from sword drills to read about herbs, who liked the library’s quiet and the forest’s quiet and had no quiet at home. She named what she could see in me.

Four was never Fey.

The thought arrives with a soft finality I cannot argue with. He was always what he is. I mistook him for Fey because Fey was the framework I understood. The rat-shape was not Four. The rat-shape was what my untrained perception could receive. He has been generous about it. He has let himself be a rat for thirteen years because the boy who called him needed a rat to make sense of him.

I look at him on my shoulder. The same brown fur, the same black eyes, the same small nick in the left ear that has been there since his second incarnation. But the way he sits is not how a rat sits. Rats fidget. Rats nose at the air. Four watches. Four assesses. He has the bearing of a sentry who has been on watch as long as I have known him, and longer, and was on watch before I ever cast the ritual that drew him.

A spirit of vigilance, perhaps. Of preparation. A spirit drawn to those whose hands prepare what others will need, whose eyes scan the dark while others sleep. I have been such a person all my life. First because my mother drilled it into me. Then because Gloria refined it into something gentler. Then because after Golden Bay it was the only honest thing I had left.

Of course he answered. He had probably been waiting since the day I stood my first watch as a boy and refused to let my eyes droop.

For now I will eat. The food is good. I should compliment the cooks. The fire-things leap from log to log. Four watches the fire-things. Somewhere beyond the firelight the moonless dark is attentive, and the cave under the mountain rests in its own slow being, and I am finally beginning to see.