Lightbringer

Somewhere under Northgate
Y216

It wasn’t the first item of power she’d ever created. (The only mention that remained of that disaster was the diagrams in her notebook, the clean lines crossing them out and the note in her crabbed cipher: Base assumps wrong.) It was, however, the first one she’d made that worked, and for that it would always hold a special place in her heart.

The principle was simple, based upon the properties of the ruin stone. Most of them were cracked and dark now, but some portions remained that glowed when certain glyphs were touched, or when another kind of glyph was sung. (That latter property took her the better part of a year to discover, as she had to work out the ritual that allowed her to understand the underlying meaning of any words, and then decipher both the language and the writing system of the Skyfolk.) Those were comforting in the dark ruins, but they had their limits—here were many sections where no such glyphs remained functional, including one of the rooms that had the best setup for experimentation and living both.

So it made sense to try and recreate it in a small object that she could carry.

Most of the prototypes hadn’t worked. First ones largely didn’t. She tried other arrangements, other shapes, scribed different command words, arranged the gold filigree (laboriously melted down from stolen gold coins) in different patterns, sometimes changing the placement by only a fingernail’s width between versions.

Finally, the time came when she laid down her tools, sang the word—ziye—and it flowered into the same clear, blue-white light that the others did.

(It took a few more retoolings to get it to light consistently. But nothing ever compared to that initial moment, except maybe the first time she’d reached into the Stuff and changed reality.)

She made one or two more of them, stationary objects to better light the ruins she called home, but that first one she kept experimenting on, working and retooling and engraving and inlaying until it not only emitted light, but blasted it. The first test left her blind for four hours and seeing spots for a full day. She learned to be more careful after that. Trying to make her way around using Aloysius’ eyes gave her a headache.

It took her only a few more days to perfect it to work consistently, though she could never overcome the limited well of power it had.

As with most of the things she kept around, she named it. Unlike the more complex beings—Aloysius, for one—the simple objects got simple names that described them literally. Thus, she named the piece of rounded, gold-inlaid white stone Lightbringer.

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Lightbringer