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There was a parable in the Book of the Drought about a demon who came to Bayit to find a wife. He had hands that were pale in the midday sun, and his hair was dark like the new moon. He appeared to the women of the city clothed in twilight. The leatherworker’s daughter thought him beautiful, and being young, she followed him out into the desert until they came upon a clear pool. The leatherworker’s daughter was delighted, thinking she’d found a husband who could bring water to the city. In her joy, she leapt into the pool, which was revealed to be not water but kerosene, for the demon was Keros, who drank the oil and kept his wives and children to produce it for him. The demon held her there until twilight, which was the hour his body faded away into the blue. The leatherworker’s daughter took her chance and ran home.
The leatherworker had searched all day for his child, and he was glad to see her approach. But as she ran, he saw the liquid dripping from her hair and clothes and was afraid she would freeze in the gathering night. As his daughter entered the house, the leatherworker struck a spark, meaning to light a fire in the hearth for her.
The leatherworker’s daughter burned.
Scar did not know whether the resemblance was strategic. Certainly the idea had been as effective as the fire: that Keros had stepped out of the old texts and onto the streets of your town. That any move you made was a match. Three towns emptied for each one that burned, even though there was nowhere to go and no water in the desert.
“Have you heard the story,” he asked, “of Keros and Atera.”
Roy Mustang, in his blue uniform, looked up from where he’d been staring fixedly at the table between them, startled by the question. “Years later,” he said. “But yes.”
They’d been placed in a room together as the conference prepared to receive the Amestrisan delegation, in what was either an attempt at incitement or a grievous oversight. Scar had taken to his chair calmly; the Flame Alchemist with the look of a child about to be beaten. Then they had sat. For hours.
“I wouldn’t have done anything differently,” Mustang said, driven by some bizarre urge to confess himself as bad as he was imagined to be. “I might have tried to use it.”
“You did use it,” Scar said absently. He was examining Mustang’s hands, placed flat and visible on the table. The pale skin was mottled with scarring, which had turned bruise-purple in the chill of the room. There was a section that appeared not just marred, but crossed out.
“Does the array,” he began, and then stopped. He had never wanted to wonder, but he had wondered.
Mustang looked at him steadily across the table for a moment, then reached for his waistband. The gloves were folded neatly in half and tucked into his belt. He pulled them out and considered them, flipping them over like there might be something written on the back. Then he sighed and tossed them onto the table between them.
Scar looked down at the gloves, then back at Mustang. The man had shoved his hands into his pockets and was staring at nothing. Scar reached over and picked up one of the gloves.
The construction was sturdier than he’d expected. The fabric that produced the spark ran in a reinforced vee down the middle finger and thumb, meeting across the heel of the hand. The rest of the glove was lighter, though still tough and with very little stretch. Scar thought it was too small to ever fit him. Everything about Mustang was this way. He still had the urge to lay his hand flat on top of it and compare.
Instead, he turned the glove over and examined the array. From up close, the visible red thread was clearly the reverse side of the embroidery; correctly oriented, the array faced the back of Mustang’s hand. He flipped the body of the glove inside out, Mustang watching intently.
It wasn’t so much what he had been expecting to see as what he hadn’t. Handrails, bottlenecks, cattle guards. Scar’s finger hovered above a throttle point that was nearly entirely closed.
“It’s not the one I used,” Mustang said hoarsely. “Then.”
“No,” Scar agreed. “It doesn’t answer my question.”
Mustang looked pale and determined. Scar imagined he must think this conversation very hard for himself. He was not sure what he was feeling on his part: there was a loud sound in the quiet room, like the ocean.
Mustang reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and withdrew a small notebook. He then frowned and began to pat himself down. Scar watched him go over each of his pockets once, then twice, then pull a comically embarrassed face.
“Might you have a pen?” he asked.
They found a dusty one in the drawer of the abandoned desk in the corner of the room. Mustang uncapped it, neatly appending the top to the end of the pen, and scribbled on a blank page until ink flowed. Then he turned it over and began to draw.
It was the work of moments—though he was careful and precise, there was clearly more muscle memory at play than conscious thought. Mustang put the cap back on the pen and turned his notebook around to face Scar, who looked down at it.
There was barely anything to see. Mustang’s work was clever, but not nearly so clever as it was foolish.
“You should be dead,” he told him.
“Yes,” Mustang agreed. Scar looked over to him—he was looking grimly at the notebook in Scar’s hands, perched forwards in his chair. The whole room began to tilt nauseatingly.
Scar removed the page from the notebook, then the page below it, where the faint impression of the pen remained. The next instant they were destroyed. But what else was there? The pen? The man?
Mustang was taking long, slow breaths. He was made of oxygen and hydrogen and carbon. Scar handed the notebook back to him, and he looked surprised.
As a novice, Scar had given a lecture on Keros and Atera. He covered the obvious sexual overtones, as well as a deeper thread about the futility of trying to fix what you do not understand. But as his master had said, the story was meant to be read in conversation. The Book of the Spring opened with a father in mourning, who was finally convinced to clean the ashes from his face and raze his ruined home in the center of the city, beginning anew. Under his house the people discovered a well.
Scar watched Mustang close the book and tuck it away. “Did you understand?”
“Hm?”
“The parable.”
“Oh. Never trust a pale man in the desert?” Mustang said, and Scar looked at him. “No,” he answered.
Scar nodded, and a woman appeared, who was so very sorry, but they were finally ready for them outside.