Chapter 58
As Hoku raised the candelabrum, the lambent marks in the basilite became indistinct again.
'It seems like the appearance depends on the distance from the candles,' he thought.
'But shouldn't the effect technically become weaker? According to Luenard, the light is being absorbed, so why does the effect instead appear more distinct?'
If that were truly so, bringing the flame nearer ought only to have obscured the effect further, not made it clearer.
He pressed his nail flat against his skin and said with a puzzled expression, "There's something I still don't understand: if the light is truly being taken in, then what is it that I am actually seeing?"
Even 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.
Luenard 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 Luenard suddenly snapped his fingers.
"Have you ever held a diamond near a flame and tried to look through it?"
Before Hoku could answer, Luenard 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 Luenard 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 Luenard's hazel eye looking back at him, and beside it the small red flame, both held cleanly in the glass.
"Basilite behaves like neither," Luenard said. "When light reaches it, the stone takes it in first rather than returning it at once."
"Then what am I seeing?"
Luenard 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," Luenard 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?"
If that has nothing to do with reflection, why bring up mirrors at all?"
Luenard 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.
Luenard's words did not answer the question so much as move his doubt somewhere else.
However, before he could press further, Luenard 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 Luenard'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 Luenard'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.
After a moment, he lowered his hand and let out a breath through his nose.
Then again, unless I mean to stop here, I can only take this as part of the circumstance.
He went quiet, resting 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 as his reasoning folded further.
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.
Luenard 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 to place that mirror in my line of sight...
Had he intended to direct me somewhere?'
He pondered a while before rising to his feet and crossing the room 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.
Luenard did not comment. 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 seconds, 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.
For a moment, Hoku thought the same patterning was appearing again.
Pinching his brow, he looked again. Yet one small shape continued to emerge within the mirror and upon the ground beyond it.
'An eye?'
Four long strokes wound out from it in a spiral before opening into a loose cross, each one faintly curved and narrowing toward a sharpened end.
Smaller hooked marks settled neatly into the spaces between them.
At the center of the spiral, where the candlelight rested, a dim amber gleam had gathered.
As Hoku leaned back, a gray boot stopped in front of him.
He looked up too quickly and clipped the candelabrum with his foot, sending it over at a tilt, but Luenard bent over without a word and set it upright before the candles could spill.
Before he stood back up, Hoku quietly asked, "Did you make this symbol?"