Zorn

243 Progenitors. Every Skarn that has ever existed emerged from their hands.

I asked one how many of us he had created.

He didn't answer. Instead, he told me the exact pressure at which my core-crystal formed. The temperature. The two centuries he spent coaxing light from my stone. He told me I almost didn't quicken. Twice. That he carried me to the threshold of the Unquickened Hall before my heart finally sparked.

I had not asked for any of that. He gave it anyway.

Through the viewing crystals, I once watched him work in the Genesis Chambers below Skarneth Prime. The heat there glows white-hot—enough to shatter any other Skarn. He moved through it unburned. Amber formations clustered across his frame. Some ancient and cracked, others still forming and pulsing with molten light. Veins of liquid ore ran beneath translucent skin like slow rivers of fire. Where we radiate cold mineral stillness, they radiate warmth. The kind that coaxes life from stone.

He stopped at a formation no taller than my forearm. Placed his hands against it. Stood motionless for hours. When he stepped back, I saw it: the faintest pulse from within. The first heartbeat of a Skarn that would not emerge for decades.

He noticed me watching. Said nothing. Moved to the next formation.

Always 243. Never more. Never fewer. Every Skarn in living memory emerged from stone they prepared, from heat they sustained, from conditions only they can create. They do not build. They cultivate.

Not every formation quickens. Some they carry to the Unquickened Hall. I have watched Zorns enter that place and not return. I have watched others emerge who were not there before.

The number stays the same. That is all they allow us to know.

Look at an elder Zorn. Count the fractures in their amber.

Each crack is a child who never woke.

Two centuries. His hands against my silent stone. The heat he would not let die. Somewhere in him, there is a fracture for the me that almost didn't wake. The silence I almost was.

I wonder if he carries it still.

243 Progenitors. They carry every silence—even the ones that finally woke.