Laser Sight
A story of the Eyes trait: Laser Eyes
The red-eyed chick of the Day Hoots learned the cost of her gift before she learned its use, and the order of those lessons mattered.
At her first dawn gathering she had scorched the grass without meaning to, only by looking at the sunrise with all her heart. A week later, quarrelling over a seed as chicks quarrel, she looked at her nestmate in anger, and the beams came with the anger, and a single feather on his wing curled and smoked and fell.
He was not hurt. He cried anyway, and so did she, and from that day she kept her eyes half closed, and walked the plains looking at the world through a red sliver, and told everyone who asked that she preferred it.
An old herald of the gathering, who had led the dawn ritual for sixty years, found her one evening sitting apart, facing the setting sun she did not allow herself to see.
"You believe your eyes are a fire," the herald said. "They are not. Fire is careless. Your eyes are a signal."
She did not answer.
"In the old songs, before any chick was born with light like yours, the fragments dreamed of eyes that could be seen from far away. Green, the rarest, for the far seers, whose gaze reaches the horizon and beyond it. Blue, for seeing through mist and water. Purple, for seeing what is hidden behind words. Yellow, for seeing danger while it is still small and far. And red, the strongest of them all, for cutting through the thickest dark and saying, here, here is the way home."
"The strongest," the chick said bitterly, through her sliver of vision. "That is why I burned his wing."
"No," said the herald. "You burned his wing because you looked in anger. The light does what the heart is doing. That is not a flaw in the gift. That is the gift telling the truth about its keeper. Learn your heart, little one, and your eyes will follow."
The fog came three mornings later, and it was not a plains fog. It came with the new weather, low and grey and wrong, smelling faintly of distant smoke, and it took the dawn gathering in the middle of the rising flight. A hundred Hoots went up through it in good order. The foraging parties, coming home heavy from the far fields, did not find the plain at all. Their calls reached the gathering thin and circling, from everywhere and nowhere, and every answering call the elders sent up was swallowed by the grey.
The chick stood on the gathering mound with her eyes shut, listening to her whole world get lost in a whispering sky.
Then she climbed to the highest stone, and faced the fog, and did the hardest thing she had ever done. She opened her eyes, all the way, and she thought, not of her fear, and not of her shame, but of the foragers, cold and circling and laden, and of nothing else at all.
Two red lines went out into the fog and did not fade.
They did not burn. She understood later that love, like anger, is a way of looking, only steadier. The beams held, bright and patient, twin roads in the air, and first one call changed direction, and then another, and then the lost parties came down out of the grey one by one, steering by her gaze the way sailors steer by a lighthouse, until the last forager landed shaking in the wet grass and the whole gathering erupted around her.
She closed her eyes then, and slept for a day, and woke famous.
The herald's words went with the fame, because the chick insisted on repeating them to every young Hoot who came to stare. Laser sight is not a weapon and it is not a toy. It is a light that others navigate by, and it shows the truth in both directions, the way ahead, and the heart of the one who shines it.
In the years that followed, other chicks opened laser eyes on other plains, green and blue and purple and yellow, and each was sent, by custom now, to spend one dawn with the red-eyed herald of the gathering. She taught them the breathing of the ritual, and the discipline of the gaze, and the first rule, which she never tired of saying.
Open your eyes all the way. But know what you are looking with.
WHAT IT MEANS
Trait: Laser Eyes, Eyes category. Five colors in the collection: Red (114, 4.6%), Yellow (103, 4.1%), Purple (91, 3.6%), Blue (81, 3.2%), and Green (72, 2.9%, the rarest).
Power: a gaze that can be seen from far away and cuts through fog, smoke, and lies. It serves as a lighthouse for others, but it burns if its keeper looks in anger, because the light obeys the heart.
Each color, a temperament: red guides and cuts, yellow warns, purple reveals what is hidden, blue pierces mist and water, green reaches the horizon.
It returns in the main story: its bearer guides the caravan in Chapter 8, The City of Smoke, and her gaze is one of the few that light the moonless zone of Chapter 9.
