Tromir

When the sun broke apart, one shard fell near the village where Tromir lived and cut the railway branch in two. At night white light rose from the crater, and children, goats and drunk buyers from the spark market wandered into it. Whoever came back came back overexposed. Tromir was a track worker, the branch was dead anyway, so he took up its rails, cut them into posts and began fencing off the crater: a rail into the ground, three blows of a lead hammer, a step, the next rail. The hammer was lead because iron near a crater soaks up light and starts to glow by itself, and lead does not

Someone has to hold a rail while another strikes it. His partners held for a year or two, got overexposed and left, and at the very rim no one would hold at all. Tromir held with one hand, struck with the other and swore that he had only two. The light heard him. His right shoulder, the one he braced the rails with at the rim, began to glow and swell, and in one winter a third arm grew out of it, white like the bulb of a lamp and stronger than the other two. It is not afraid of the light: with it he held the rail, and with the other two he struck. That is how he got his name. In twenty years the fence closed round the whole crater, six hundred rails, and no one wandered into the light again

Only the light packed into him so thick that it bursts out of every wound. Once a goat butted him, and the light from the bruise blinded the goat for a week. Tromir covers his cuts with lead patches and keeps away from people so as not to overexpose them. He lived at the gate of the fence in a hut of lead sheets, let only spark carriers through to the crater, and every week unlocked the gate for a girl in a lead hood

One night the Haze came over the village, and Haze creatures after it. People ran inside the fence, to the crater: the Haze breaks on the light of a shard. Tromir let everyone in, shut the gate and stood in it himself with his hammer, his rail and a broken length of lightline. The creatures tore at him till morning, and every new wound shone so brightly that they could not come near the gate. The Lanternkeeper Selma waited out that night behind a hill: the second head of her guide Neven smelled the Haze over the village and screamed till dawn. In the morning they came into the village. Tromir still stood in the gate, covered in wounds and empty, and his last light went into the Lantern. The gate has been called Three-Arm ever since

He is big, slow and calm and says little. He is always holding something, a post, a door, someone's sack, just because: the third arm gets bored. He counts in threes and laughs hollow, like into a barrel. He is shy of his light the way others are shy of a smell: one scratch and he slaps on a patch and steps away, “don't stand close, I'll overexpose you.” Of his third arm he says one word: “Spare.” He remembers Zarna as a girl: every week he unlocked the gate for her and waited until she climbed up from the bottom with a full box, and she still calls him Uncle Gate. Neven he knows from that night: it was his head that screamed while Tromir stood in the gate. The head calls him Wardrobe and scolds him for shining on everyone, and Neven politely translates: “She says thank you”