The Boy With the Wrong Flame

Chapter 2: The Hourglass

I found the food stall before I found a plan.

The smell of smoked, fatty meat, pulled me two streets in before my brain finished arguing with my instincts about whether stopping was wise. Three days of bad rations and one near-death experience had a way of winning that argument.

The stall was run by an old man crouched behind a bent iron grill, turning skewers with the patience of someone who had done it ten thousand times. Deep lines carved into a face framed by beards the colour of old bone. He had

the look of a man who had been in Duskwall since before it had walls.

"What kind of meat is this?" I asked as I walked up to him.

He looked up and smiled, "Safer not to know. Heh!"

I took the skewer anyway. The meat was hot, salted, and the best thing I'd eaten in three days, but I made sure

none of that showed.

"New face," he said. It was not a question.

"Arrived today."

"Mmm." He turned a skewer. "You would be the one who survived the Sandreaver attack on the eastern road."

I stopped chewing.

"News travels fast."

"Everything travels fast here." He shrugged "By tomorrow your boot size will be common knowledge. A person with no brandmark surviving a full Sandreaver swarm?" He made a sound between a laugh and a wheeze. "That will be the only conversation in Duskwall for a month."

"Then people here have nothing better to talk about."

"They don't. But that is not the part that interests me about you.” He handed me another skewer even though I’d barely gotten through the first one. “Someone arrived without a mining tool, without gear, without a group." He paused. "That is not someone who came to mine."

"I came to earn money."

He repeated it the way the mountain-man had repeated my story. Then he burst out laughing- well, wheezing.

"Son, I have watched a hundred people walk through here saying exactly that. You know what every one of them

had in common?"

I didn't answer.

"They all went into the Hollow eventually." He said it like describing rain. "Money runs out, they sell what they have.

When there is nothing left to sell, down they go." Another shrug. "Every time."

I set the skewer down. "I won't be going into any Hollow."

"No one ever thinks they will." He smiled. "Twenty sols."

He might as well have punched me. It wouldn’t have had less of an effect.

"Twenty sols? For a single skewer?" When he eyed the second skewer in my hand, I immediately handed it back.

"Everything carries a price in Duskwall.” He said, “Food, water, air that is slightly less full of Embershard dust than

the street outside." He spread his hands like man who had never once lost this argument. "Supply and demand."

"I understand you are a thief."

"No, I’m Orvyn. And I understand you ate half the skewer before developing principles. Ten sols. Or… perhaps

something else."

His eyes dropped briefly to my boots.

Around me the market shifted; the vendor two stalls left stopped talking mid-sentence, the man behind me went still.

The quiet was the kind you learned to read in Carath Dun's lower districts the kind that meant a score was about to

be settled.

This old man was the centre of this market, and suddenly he didn’t look as old as fragile anymore.

I was paying, the only question was how.

"I don't have ten sols," I said carefully.

"Of course, but you have something worth more than ten sols." He folded his hands and lifted one brow. "You have

an Embershard fragment."

I felt the air rush out of my lungs.

How did he know?

"Word moves through Duskwall, dear boy," he said pleasantly. "You think you can protect an Embershard fragment

here? Alone, unbrandmarked, no allies, with everyone already knowing your face?"

The fact that it wasn’t even a threat made it worse; he wasn’t lying. Someone else would have gotten to me.

"Give me a fair price," I said.

"I always do." He smiled again, revealing missing teeth and rotting ones.

I reached into my boot. The fragment was barely a centimetre, but even through the cloth the pale amber light bled

between my fingers. His eyes sharpened even while his face stayed pleasant.

"Ninety sols." He said.

"It is worth three hundred in Carath Dun."

"This is not Carath Dun."

There was no version of this negotiation I was going to win.

"Ninety," I said.

He held out the coins and snatched the Embershard.

"Take something from inside," he said. "Goodwill. First transaction."

I walked to the back of the stall to find cracked tools, rotted straps, a coat that had given up on itself seasons ago…

things of value that were most likely gotten like my Embershard.

Without even meaning to, my hand closed around something small and solid. It was an hourglass.

It was palm-sized, and not a single scratch on the glass. The sand inside was dark, nearly black, and when I tilted it

the grains moved too slowly, like… like thick oil.

And it was warm, not on the surface inside of it. I can’t explain it, but the heat was inside and reaching out to me.

And I swear, there was something inside me reaching back. It was just like how I felt when the sand rose in the

Ashlands without me asking.

The Eternal Flame- or whatever the red version was that lived in me- knew this object, and I felt like I had to have it

or I’d die.

I kept my face passive, and just a bit irritated when I went back outside.

"This," I said.

The old man looked up, and a look crossed his face. It was fast but it was there, and gone immediately.

He smiled again. "Nobody has ever wanted it. It’s such a useless trinket, some would even call it ugly"

I pretended to examine it again, and caught his look. He wanted me to drop it. "Then it costs nothing." I said with a

shrug.

"Exactly."

I pocketed the hourglass and walked out without looking back.

"Come back anytime," he called. Entirely too cheerfully.

"I would rather not," I said over my shoulder.

His laughter followed me into the street.

I turned the corner, pressed my back against the wall, and pulled out the hourglass. It snatched me. That was the

only way to describe what happened. It reached into me, and grabbed only something and then it moved. It moved

towards me, pressing against the glass like it could break through. The same inward reach I had used on the dune without meaning to. There was a roaring in my head, and then the feeling of someone reaching out to me. It felt like

I could see the face in the sands, and a hand, I’d seen this before but I just couldn’t remember where.

"I knew it." It was the Lunaris kindler's voice. Her voice snapped me back to reality. "I knew I saw something on your

wrist." He voice was low, and sent chills down my spine. I had to fight to stay in the present because the face in the sand still pulled at my mind. .

"Drop it." she said. "Slowly. And understand that I am Forge rank and you are in a dead-end alley where nobody will

hear you if this goes badly."

She was alone.

I couldn’t remember when, but I had rolled up my sleeve and my mark was in full view. Her eyes moved from my

wrist to the hourglass in my hand, and back to my wrist.

And the look in her eyes was not one of anger or suspicion or even the look of a powerful kindler about to squash a

cockroach like me. It was fear; unfettered, unalloyed, unhidden. I recognized it because it was a look I saw each

time I looked into a mirror. Something I’ve felt all my life.

Until now.

"Where," she started quietly, shakily, "did you get that hourglass."

It was not a question about the hourglass. I don’t know how, but I’d knew, just as I knew that whatever that meant

just changed everything about why she had followed me here alone.

"Talk," she said. Her voice dropped to barely above a whisper. "Right now. Before someone sees us and we both

run out of time."