Chapter 58
As Hoku grew more certain of the resemblance, another part of the matter began to trouble him.
Lunhard had explained much, yet Hoku had still not discerned how to judge any of it for himself.
He glanced down to gauge the distance and raised the candelabrum to shoulder height.
The lines that had only just shown themselves began to blur again at once.
Though as he raised the candelabrum higher, they slowly fell back into the same smoky patterning as before.
He changed places and tried once more, altering nothing except the height of the flame in his own hand.
The result did not differ.
From that, Hoku was able to conclude for himself, 'Changing places only alters the pattern itself. Whether it comes to me as a blur or as distinct lines seems to depend on how close the candles are.'
He might have left the matter there if Lunhard had not earlier called Basilite a thing that swallowed light.
Yet the more Hoku directly studied the basilite, the less that description seemed to account for what he had seen.
If that were true in any plain sense, then bringing the flame nearer ought only to have smothered the effect further, not drawn more from it.
Hoku raised a finger and tapped just beneath his lower lip, resting his solemn gaze on the Basilite.
No, the matter could not be so simple. Nor was it likely to be something as ordinary as a mere transparent layer over the stone.
If that were all, the nearer flame should only have made what lay beneath easier to discern. It should not have altered the manner in which it appeared altogether.
He pressed his nail flat against his skin and thought for a little longer.
It hadn't taken Hoku long to notice that Lunhard rarely gave a direct answer. Still, that hardly made the question worthless. So long as Lunhard answered at all, even by another detour, there would likely be something in it Hoku could attempt to assess on his own.
When Hoku finally looked up, a tinge of strain had settled between his brows, as though the effort of keeping the matter in place had already begun to wear at his patience.
"I still don't understand one thing," he said after pinching it away. "If the light is truly being taken in, then what is it that I am actually seeing?"
He had already put aside the simplest explanation. Earlier, he had stood in that very place and found nothing there but an ordinary stretch of floor. Yet when he came back with the candle in hand, the stone had ceased to appear ordinary at all.
Lunhard did not answer at once. He held one finger above the candle's flame, close enough that the heat wavered around it, and seemed to drift for a brief moment.
Hoku merely watched him in silence, only to start when Lunhard suddenly snapped his fingers.
"Have you ever held a diamond near a flame and tried to look through it?"
Before Hoku could answer, Lunhard shook his own head and went on.
"You can, in a manner of speaking. But nothing remains where it should be. The light goes in, and what comes back to the eye is already broken apart. You no longer see a thing where it stands. You see glitter, fragments, and whatever survives the passage."
Though a mirror would be the opposite, since it does not disturb the form at all and only presents it to the eye under a reversed relation."
As Lunhard explained, he bent and picked up a narrow shard from the scattered glass by his feet. It was a thin sliver of silvered mirror, long enough to catch an eye and little else. He raised it beside his face and turned it toward the candlelight.
Within that narrow strip, Hoku saw Lunhard's hazel eye looking back at him, and beside it the small red flame, both held cleanly in the glass.
"Basilite behaves like neither," Lunhard said. "When light reaches it, the stone takes it in first rather than returning it at once."
"Then what am I seeing?"
Lunhard shrugged and pursed his bottom lip. "Whatever escapes afterward."
He gestured lightly toward the candelabrum in Hoku's hand.
"Bring the flame closer and more enters. When more enters, a little more can slip back out again. That is why the pattern grows clearer."
"So, it isn't reflecting anything."
"No," Lunhard said. "Not in the way a mirror does. What reaches you is only what remains on the outside."
Hoku drew a few steps back from the plaque and looked at it again in silence. The lines were there, then not there, then there again, never fully gone, never willing to hold themselves except under the proper nearness of the flame.
"...But, why a mirror?" Hoku had not meant to say the question aloud.
But, seeing no use in pretending otherwise, he merely continued, "If that has nothing to do with reflection, why bring up mirrors at all?"
Lunhard regarded him thoughtfully for a moment.
"Because the observer is forced into the same difficulty," he said at last. "The eye is no longer allowed to trust the relation before it."
Hoku's mouth parted, then closed again.
The words did not answer the matter so much as rearrange it again.
Yet before he could press further, Lunhard flung the glass over his shoulder.
The motion was so casual that Hoku only realized what had happened when the silvered sliver flashed past his line of sight.
He jerked back just before it scratched his cheek.
Clink!
It struck the stone floor and skidded into the base of the bookshelf behind them.
Hoku's gaze darted toward the shelf before sweeping back in Lunhard's direction.
The older man had already turned his attention back to the Basilite.
Hoku's expression gradually went slack. He raised a hand, pressed his forehead into his palm, and shut his eyes for a moment.
Between the aftereffects of being startled and the strain of trying to keep pace with Lunhard's manner of speaking, the persistent throbbing in Hoku's temples only worsened.
'I only hope it isn't truly possible to go gray from this,' he lamented.
A few seconds passed before he let out a breath through his nose and lowered his hand.
Then again, unless I mean to stop here, I can only take this as part of the circumstance.
He did not ask any more questions.
Whatever Lunhard said after that, Hoku let it pass by without answering, as though his interest had already withdrawn elsewhere.
He merely rested his fingers against the base of the candelabrum and drummed them, once after another, while he went back over the few things that had not been resolved.
'Changing places alters the pattern that appears… but not in the same way as light will…'
Hoku bit his bottom lip with his teeth as his reasoning folded further.
This contrast, at least, had already been confirmed.
Hoku's rhythm slowed against the candelabrum.
Whatever forms lay within the stone could hardly be changing from one moment to the next.
If so, the inconsistency was likely not in the thing itself, but in the way he was perceiving it.
His gaze shifted toward the bookshelf.
The shard lay where it had fallen, a dim silver streak against the dark of the floorboards.
Lunhard had first held it beside the flame and then his eye, before he cast it aside.
Hoku did not believe that it had been done carelessly.
Whatever likeness the man had intended was not one he had cared to explain outright, but neither had he placed the mirror in Hoku's sight for no reason.
Hoku looked back at the Basilite.
The lines upon it still looked at the edge of legibility, never wholly gone, yet never willing to remain as they were.
What changed was not the fact of their being there, but the way they reached him.
That thought was still too incomplete to be of much certainty, yet unlike the others, it did not have any flagrant reservations.
He rose and crossed to the shelf. The candelabrum in his hand washed the row of spines in a low red light as he crouched and picked up the sliver of glass. It was narrow, dusty, and thin enough that it ought to have looked useless, yet the candlelight found it at once when he turned it between his fingers.
He stayed there for a brief moment, then walked towards the wall.
After retrieving the shard Lunhard had tossed aside and returning to his place before the Basilite, there was no comment from Lunhard. He merely stepped to one side, almost in invitation.
Hoku set the candelabrum a little farther back than before and let the flame steady.
Under the weaker fall of yellowish light, the Basilite's surface stirred once more into a single opalescent line.
He lowered himself to the floor and held the shard between his eyes and the stone, tilting it until the lines upon the ground appeared in its reflection.
For the first few moments, nothing came of it.
He tried adjusting the shard by small degrees, first a little to one side, then lower, without turning the angle too abruptly.
A red glimmer swept across the silvering, and as he inched his arm back, one faint portion began, little by little, to draw the illuminated surroundings inward, like grains of sand.
Hoku's hand stilled.
For a moment, Hoku thought more of the same patterning was beginning to appear.
However, as he held his breath and narrowed his eyes, one small shape continued to dilate within the mirror and upon the ground beyond it, broadening until there was no mistaking it.
'An eye?'
Its center was not round, but a tight spiral winding inward.
Four long strokes spread from it in a loose cross, each one slightly curved and narrowing toward a sharpened end.
Smaller hooked marks filled the spaces between them, fitting neatly into the remaining gaps.
At the center of the spiral, where the candlelight rested, a faint amber gleam had gathered.
For a brief instant, it seemed less like light cast back at him than something beneath the surface that had only just been brought into view.
The hand holding the candelabrum slackened before he realized it had done so, and his fingers slowly drew in against his empty palm as though they had forgotten, for a moment, what they were meant to be holding. Then he leaned away a little and let the shard dip, but the figure did not change with it.
It remained there all the same.
A few loose strands of dark hair slipped across Hoku's cheek as his free hand moved to his stomach. The old unease had risen too quickly, and he had to wrap his arm around his torso before it settled.
Without warning, a gray boot entered the edge of his vision.
Hoku swiftly dragged his other arm back and sat upright.
His own foot kicked the candelabrum and tipped it sideways, but Lunhard bowed wordlessly and set it right before the candles could roll.
Hoku followed him as he straightened and folded his arms once more, standing over him without a word.
Lunhard stood over him with the same composure as before, as though none of this had come as any surprise.
Hoku gritted his teeth and asked as evenly as he could, "Did you make this symbol?"