MORTAL POV
It took Arrow three days.
On the first day after the accident with the stones, she carried them both with her through the entire day's movement, striking them together periodically and watching the brief orange-white sparks that resulted.
On the second day, she struck the stones near dry grass. The grass caught. She dropped everything and moved backward very quickly. She watched the small flame eat the handful she'd been holding. It ate it in a few seconds and went out.
She looked at the stones in her hands. Then at the scorch mark.
On the third day, she built a small pile of dry grass and dead leaves and tiny sticks. She struck the stones above it. The spark fell. The pile caught. This time she did not run.
She crouched and watched.
The fire was small. It ate what it was given and it was afraid of the wind and it died if she stopped feeding it. She was beginning to understand that the fire wanted things, that it had rules. If you knew its rules you could keep it.
First found her like that sometime in the late afternoon. He stopped at a distance, and the reaction on his face moved through fear to something else as he recognized that she was not hurt and the fire was small and she had made it deliberately.
By the time the rest of the group gathered, Arrow had fed the fire carefully to the size of a large fruit, and was demonstrating the stones to First.
Stone-Speaker arrived last. He sat down across the fire and watched the flames with his slow, long-looking eyes. After a while he reached into the pile of stones he always carried and held up two in particular the unusual pair that struck together differently.
Arrow looked at them.
Then she made a sound of pure recognition.
They were the same kind of stones she had used.
You noticed, her sound said. How long?
He made a sound that meant: a while.
He had known. He had known and he had not done anything with the knowing.
She looked at him with an expression that contained frustration and curiosity in equal measure.
They were the same. They looked at things for longer than they were supposed to.
-----
Around the fire that first night, the group discovered something that would, in many thousands of years, be called warmth in community the particular quality of safety that exists when there is light in the darkness and others are present and the cold holds back at the edge of the circle.
They sat closer than they usually did.
Someone made sounds that were almost music.
Wren drew patterns in the firelit dirt with a stick.
Stone-Speaker watched the fire and moved his lips without making sounds, as though practicing words that didn't exist yet.
The meat had been dropped in the fire by accident Wren had stumbled, caught it back, burned her fingers, and bitten into the blackened edge before thinking.
Her expression changed.
She held it out to First. He bit. Chewed.
Something happened in his face.
More. More of this. This is better.
Wren placed the remainder in the fire deliberately. They all sat and watched it cook.
They ate that evening with the fire-warmth on their faces and something new in the air between them — the beginning of a meal, the beginning of ritual, the beginning of the ten thousand things that begin when food becomes more than survival.
- - -
ATLAS POV
He had watched Arrow's three-day experiment without intervening. He had not needed to.
She had done it entirely herself.
Fire was the threshold event for primitive civilization. Cooking increased caloric efficiency. Warmth expanded viable habitats. Light after dark extended productive hours and, critically, extended the time for social interaction — for the proto-language, the shared myths, the stories that would become culture.
His people had fire.
Eight people with fire was not a civilization. It was a very promising start.
His second intelligence cycle had flagged several items he was still working through. The southwest neighbor with their martial species concerning but not immediately actionable. Many mortal years before they could pose any threat. Filed.
The territory anchoring deadline was real. He had found the function in the texture of the divine realm itself a complete circuit of his world's surface, a declaration in divine energy that left markers only other gods and the underlying system could read.
He spread it over three days. Felt the anchoring complete like a final stitch pulled tight.
Forty days. Thirty-six days to spare.
He turned his attention back to his tribe, his eight people gathered around their fire in a valley that was slowly learning their weight.
Stone-Speaker was teaching himself to count.
He was placing stones in a line one, another, another and then placing them in patterns: two groups of three, three groups of two, all the arrangements that six stones could make. He was discovering that quantities had relationships. That *two groups of three* and *three groups of two* arrived at the same place.
You won't live long enough to see what you've started, Atlas thought. And then the thought became uncomfortable.
Continuity. Culture is how species remember people who are gone.
He filed this away as something to encourage, though he didn't yet know how.
Arrow was sharpening a stick. Not a spear yet. Not with intention. She was sharpening it because she had noticed that sharp edges cut and wanted to understand how much sharper a stick could become and where the limit was.
Push toward the limit. That's the engineer's instinct.
He spent that evening watching the fire, watching his people, watching the first fragile threads of culture begin to weave between them in the dark.
And somewhere to the southwest, a god he didn't know was building a martial species with intentions he could only guess at.
Pay attention to your foundation. You cannot stop what you cannot see. You can only be strong enough, when you see it, to matter.
The fire burned low.
Arrow added another stick.
It caught, and the light held.
End of Chapter 4