[Worldbuilding note] The Scarred Child Who Became a Demon, and the First Magic Tools

People could make fire now, and a few of them could call it out of thin air. But fire was also a threat. It was a threat when people turned it on each other, and it was just as much a threat to the people who called it.

Remember, this was the very beginning. Fire had only just come into people’s hands, and magic itself was only starting to appear. Nobody had ever called fire before, so nobody knew how badly it could go wrong, and nobody thought to warn the children.

Too strong, too soon

The strongest fire-caller of his time was a child.

The first time he called fire, it didn’t come as a spark or a flicker. It came all at once, white, hotter than any flame anyone had ever seen, right in front of his face. It took the skin off his cheek and chin before he even understood what he had done.

He lived. But he would carry that face for the rest of his life.

The friend who wouldn’t stop

Children can be cruel, and one boy was crueler than all the rest. He was supposed to be the scarred boy’s friend.

He gave him names: Burnt Face, Melted Mouth. He twisted his own lips to copy the scar until the other children laughed. He spat in his food and told him the fire should have finished the job. He told the little ones that the scarred boy’s face would come off in their hands if they touched him, so they screamed and ran whenever he came near. And he never stopped. Not for a single day.

The scarred boy took it. He took it for months. He kept his eyes down and his hands at his sides, and every time, he swallowed it.

Until the day he couldn’t.

It happened in front of everyone. His friend was doing the face again, the twisted lips, the laugh, and the scarred boy walked straight up to him, grabbed the back of his head with one hand and pressed the other palm flat against his face.

Then he called fire. The white fire.

The scream went on longer than anyone thought a scream could. His friend clawed at his wrist, kicked and thrashed, and the scarred boy did not let go. The stink of burning hair and skin filled the whole village. When he finally pulled his hand away, what was under it was no longer a face anyone could recognize.

He hadn’t meant to kill him. He had only wanted to give him the same face. But his friend died three days later, and he screamed until the very end.

The one who ran

Before anyone could decide what to do with him, the scarred boy was gone.

He grew up in the hills as a wanderer, with no one. His own fire still burned him, so he took a piece of animal hide, punched holes in it for his fingers and wore it over his palm like a glove. The hide kept the fire off his skin, and his bare fingers were free to grab. He fought with it. He grabbed faces with it. He hurt a great many people.

He didn’t stay alone for long. Every village had someone it had driven out, and sooner or later they found their way to him. The wanderer gathered a gang, and a gang drawn from many villages grew into a band of raiders.

They made themselves a flag: a scarred face, and a glove with the fingers poking through.

The story told to children

Back in the villages, people did what people always do with something they fear. They turned it into a warning.

“Don’t play with your fire,” parents told their children, “or you’ll end up like the scarred one. He called fire before he was ready, and it burned his face. Then it burned his heart, and he became a demon.”

And slowly, people began to teach magic differently. Children were no longer left to find their fire on their own. They started with the weakest magic there was: a spark that lasted a single breath, a flame no bigger than a fingernail. Only after that did they try for more.

The first magic tools

It was decades more before anyone could protect the hands that called fire. First people had to learn to work leather properly: to scrape and soften a hide, to cut it to shape and sew it so it held.

When they finally could, they made gloves and neck guards for the people who called fire. Those were the very first magic tools. Not a wand or a staff, but a pair of gloves and a collar of leather.

The gloves were two layers of thick leather lined with fur, and their palms and fingertips were smeared with clay and ash that dried into a hard skin, like the inside of a pot. Before every calling they were dipped in water: wet leather doesn’t catch, and the steam carries the heat away. The neck guard was a tall collar of the same leather, stiffened with clay. It wrapped the throat and rose over the chin and mouth, stopping just below the eyes.

And the gloves covered every finger. By then, everyone knew what a glove with the fingertips poking through meant.

A mark for demons

Generations later, people would forget the boy and remember only his flag. A scarred face and an open-fingered glove came to mean a bandit, or a demon, or both.

But that’s a story for much later.