Peacland sat beneath the great root-tree, its ancient boughs twisting skyward like frozen lightning. Around him lay shards of broken pottery and a dozen slates of bark etched with symbols. The morning sun filtered through a dense fog, casting golden lines across his face as he worked tirelessly, translating dreams into form.
He had seen them in the star-vision: a sequence of loops, dots, and branching lines. Symbols meant to carry knowledge across time. A language. Or maybe a key.
Each day, he scratched new marks into wet clay, left them to harden, then copied them again. He compared, refined, tested. At first, it was meaningless. But slowly, he saw shapes emerge. Ideas. Units of something larger.
It wasn't just about communication—it was instruction.
He began crafting basic tools using the patterns. A sling with enhanced tension. A fire-bowl that used wind more efficiently. Villagers began noticing.
Woro, the blacktooth elder, approached him one morning.
"You stir the dust too much, boy."
Peacland didn't look up. "There's a pattern. Everything follows it. Like the stars."
"Stars don't care about our fires," Woro said. "Neither should you."
But Peacland knew better.
One night, the Fire-Stone glowed red. A new vision surged through his veins—this time not of machines, but of disease. Sickness sweeping a tribe. People falling like stalks before wind.
And a cure—made not from prayer, but compounds, shaped by method. Chemistry.
The next day, Peacland found two elders who had fallen ill from rot-root stew. Using charcoal ash, boiled bark from the bitter pine, and crushed flame beetles—he created a paste. They recovered.
Word spread.
Some began whispering that Peacland walked with spirits.
Others feared him.
And some, like Rina, the sharp-eyed hunter, started to listen.
She approached him with a cracked spear and asked him to make it better.
"Better how?" he asked.
"Lighter. Stronger. So I can strike from farther."
Peacland took the weapon and studied it.
He recalled a diagram from the vision—leverage, tension, trajectory. He carved a groove down the shaft's center, fastened flexible bark with sinew, added a hollow at the tip.
When Rina tested it, the spear flew twice the normal range.
That night, she sat with him by the fire.
"Why do you see these things?" she asked.
"I don't know," he said. "But I think… I was meant to."
She nodded, as if she had known that all along.
But Woro saw the changes and called for a meeting.
"The boy warps our way," Woro growled. "He calls spirits that do not speak our tongue."
"They speak mine," Peacland replied.
"Then you are no longer one of us."
The tribe argued, voices rising like thunder.
In the end, Mother Yara stood.
"If he sees the storm coming before the sky darkens, is he cursed? Or gifted?" she asked.
No one answered.
Peacland knew then: he could no longer wait for the tribe's approval. He had to follow the fire in his mind.
That night, he packed the Fire-Stone, his slates, and the clay etchings. He left Ember Root with a promise whispered to the stars:
I will learn the shape of the world.
And I will reshape it in return.