Why Fire Burns

When the great one grew old and the land withered in empathy with his step, he was eaten.  For the long years that he lived, longer than the forming of the first nations, which had not yet happened, the spirits had been hungry.  They had no need to eat, and no want, at first, but within them grew a feeling of hunger that yearned to be filled with something.  And so, when the great one walked the earth one day, he was eaten.

It was said that the first to bite into his being was wind, staling inside his lungs and in around his footsteps, taking the very sound he made and gobbling it down.  Around the great one there was a cloud of sand, thrown about by wind, and where wind was once silent as it moved through the sky and the trees, now it screamed and whistled like the great one.  You hear the sound of his footfalls in the clouds as they beget lightning, and if you go out on a windy night, wind still hungers enough to nibble on your own voice, adding it to the choir it keeps.  When wind had eaten, not sated, but having taken all it could, it moved on, leaving the sand on which the great one walked still and silent.

In the evening, cold settled down on the great one like a blanket as he slept, and like wind, it swallowed the great one whole.  All through the night, it sat upon him, flakes of snow descending until there was no more than a white pile on the sand.  Cold ate his movement, fixing in place the joints that had carried the great one on his walks and stealing away the very beat of his heart.  As the morning rose, Cold flowed off him, leaving an immobile statue in its wake as the ice-blue of its water snaked off to steal whatever warmth and movement it was able to.

Were this the end of the feasting and the gluttony, he might still sleep there, still and silent but alive.  The great one was not so easy to kill as we have come to see death.  For five days, he lay out on the sand, and then on the sixth day fire walked up.  He had resisted his hunger up until then, but wind and cold found him in a cave.  Wind howled at him, laughed with its new voice.  Cold flowed around him, moving with its energy.  They taunted fire, so little and powerless, just a small glow that sat in that cave.  They told jokes and danced around, trying to get a reaction from fire.

That sixth morning, as wind and cold slept in the cave, fire took a little sound and a little movement from his brothers, so little that they would not wake upon missing it, and he went to the great one.  Fire felt a pity and a sadness as he looked upon the great one, reduced to a mere stone in being.  He could not give back what had been taken from the great one, even if it had been enough to restore a portion of dignity to him.  And so, fire ate him.  Where his brothers had only taken, fire changed in his eating, taking the essence of the great one's being but leaving behind something new in its place.  He burned in his eating, leaving ash in his wake.  He left nothing behind as his brothers had, for that seemed to him shameful.  The ash was not the great one, it was a changed thing.  And that changed ash that spread upon the ground brought about more change, growing up grass and trees.

Fire like his brothers, was insatiable with hunger, for after he started eating he could not stop, feeding on the being of all he touched.  But in his meals, he found the bits of sound and warmth that he had taken from his brothers grow like the grass, fueled by his feast.  Wind and cold woke from their sleep to the fire and the grass, hounding their brother, yelling and running all around him, but he dodged wind and pushed back cold, smiling all the while for the old one was properly buried.

This is why we say that fire is a good spirit, called for his gift of warmth and the laughter he brings.  We call him also to ward off his brothers who mean us ill with their prideful ways.  However, fire can not stop eating, and if he is not fed he leaves for his hunger is so terrible a price.  It would make him even eat me or you if we were not careful.  When we die, we give him our bodies, for we need them no more, but in life his changes are painful and too much for us.

Medium Rare

I call them the phoenix knowing full well its a misnomer that bears only very limited surface truth.  Maybe it makes it easier,somehow to think of it as a transformation and not as the magical virus that it is.  When people are dying left and right and yet their charred corpses are still walking around in some sort of parody of life, you would be mentally fucked if you didn't find some sort of coping rationalization.

The other day, if I hadn't thought felt somehow that there was something left as the twisted, flame scarred body of Len, you knew him, the one with the beanie who liked clam chowder, walked over to my house with a box of stuff he said was mine that Lem had borrowed before. . .you know.  I'm standing there and I think, how did it know?  Did Lem keep notes or something on my lamp, poking out the top between the brown flaps?  Did it sort through all of Lem's stuff to learn about its husk of a host, or did it dig through his brain?  I don't know if I really like either one.  They're dead, so if the phoenix inside ever moved on, all we could do would be bury them.

And its totally fucked that they can get away with this almost-murder that they do.  We can't say no, fuck you guys, because they could take us on and we know it.  Hell, Texas is a giant scorched mess because they knew they were outmatched and tried to start things anyway.  And so they grab people who are teetering on the brink of disappearance anyway, and they push them.  Hospitals are full of the things, wandering around in old bodies, like rabbits or monkeys, waiting for people to pull the plug.  And then there's the notes on coffee tables, signed and dated as suicide.  Half of them might actually be.

And they stick around, waiting here in the same houses or towns, walking right past the best friends that those bodies had once had, not even knowing enough to keep from flashing a grin at them or giving a polite good morning to a stranger.  You look out in the streets at night and you see little orange and red glows walking around, laughing, socializing.  You get used to the grotesque lip-sneers of a particularly gruesome roasting, start to feel anger instead of disgust at first.  The disgust comes later anyway.  You start wearing cool tones to put yourself stylistically apart.

And then you walk down outside one day, this fucking happened man, and you see a guy in the middle of the road, lying there, a car swerved over on rubber tracks to the side of the road in a ditch.  And some dog walks up, burnt black so you know its one of them and it stands over the man, stands there even as you see his chest shaking up and down, and you see the road spark.  It happens so fast, a flash, light and heat everywhere.  You're yelling and the lady in the car is yelling and that fire is roaring you both out.  And there's the dog, lying there, black as the road and black as the guy who's getting up now.  You see him digging around in his pocket for a wallet and trying to wipe off the charred bits to get a name or something.  I don't know, I wasn't going over there.  And later, when I'm cleaning off my vomit from the sidewalk with a hose, I keep hearing the lady in the background, jsut sobbing, full out bawling because she has something in it too, we all do.

Condemned to Death

I, yes, even I have found in the depths of my soul a strange despair.  Even in the darkest trials for my cloak, I saw some light hidden in my future.  I was able to see my rise to power within my grasp, my right to walk the night with ease and stand in elven society with my chin held high.  Were I to know it would lead me here, I might have reconsidered that light, that fleeting hope against the darkness in which I find myself.

Do I blame the dwarves?  No, I do not.  They are vile in their ways and grubby to boot, but I do not blame their greed.  That is what they are, and we have known this.  They have shoved me in this hole, trapped me down here in the dark, but this is their habit, their justice in a way.

Similarly, I can not blame myself.  I did no wrong in my infiltration, silent as the night air.  Coincidence itself aspired to trap me in a set of right choices that led to a wrong end.  Trapped in the shining moonlight and locked away, down deep.  I blame fate itself, though it feels not my hatred.

Blame will not help me.  Really, nothing will.  There are no tunnels here, I have no tools, and the black water laps at my feet.  That is all it can be, for it feels un-right against my skin.  It chills and the heat it takes dies, removed to nowhere.  Where it squelches in my boots it never warms, only chilling me more and more.

They have left me to die down here, naked in the dark, trapped in a well filled with treasure I can do nothing with.  Had I but a bit of cloth, I could bend it into the cool fabric I know so well, but here I am, stuck.  All I really have are the sounds of my enemies that pass my hole and the water slapping the shore.

It makes me wonder, though.  Why would they not mine this, bring it up in buckets?  Is my death more important than their profit?  Somehow, I doubt it.  There has to be more.  What keeps them at bay from riches beyond belief?  My prison is a strange horror.  And there across the black expanse walks my answer.  How long I have waited before it homes, I do not know.  Even in the black of the cavern, against the darkness of the dark fluid itself, it is a shadow.  It walks on legs, shifting between three and two and four with bursts of eight or ten or more.  It floats, seemingly, for it walks on the surface of the waves.  Above me are the hushed voices of dwarves, speaking in their ciphers.  Were my throat not parched from fear of shadow sickness I would have called out my fear to it or them, though it would do no good.

It comes close.  My limbs are limp with weakness and can stop nothing, so I sit, chilled.  With its head, a long nose like a beak sniffs over me.  With a hand, it cuts, pulling at my being, tearing through me from my heart to my neck, and my blood freezes to my skin.  Somewhere deep inside a scream grows as it does, pulling away two clawed arms where one pierced me.  My lungs do not provide the air, and my throat is torn asunder, but my spirit deep within is what lets loose this sound.

Elucidating the past.

When the light died, there was only one creature that kept walking the land, continuing to behave like the world still turned.  It, like the state of things, was a creature of utter darkness, a creature of cold and of finality.  Were the beings of the world still alive, they might even laugh at the idea that the last remaining mark of their lives was even real.  Few believe in Death as a creature, after all.

Still, it took its journey through the wreckage of a civilization that wouldn't even rot because it was so dead.  It walked among the buildings and the corpses wondering if somewhere there was something it had missed.  There was not.

It had all come about one day, shining brightly, when some wandering magician had cursed the light.  On what grounds he had a quarrel with it, nobody ever found out.  Death had dutifully claimed it before the day was done.  It had seen the shimmering pattern of nature in the sunbeams and the fireplaces, and that pattern had changed from the curse.  It said to the creature "Kill me for my time has come.  Kill me, for I am ripe for the harvest." and so Death had.  After the light went away, the rest of nature followed it, too cold and hungry to live on.  The fabric of reality called out and Death took it away.  All that was left was Death itself.

In this state, it wandered, searching.  It thought to itself of days filled with work and with the rot of rebirth that had opposed it.  There was not happiness in an end to the cycle, only a feeling of loss that Death had never felt before.  There was an emptiness where nothing moved and where there only seemed to be stillness.

Death sniffed the air, sensing in it a final state of the pattern, message for him hidden beneath its ever-changing fabric that now was stilled.  "Your time has come, now ends the everlasting cycle.  You must move on, leave, for this is not a place for you."  Ever dutiful, it did not hesitate as it set its thoughts inward to itself, and there it ended its existence, in a sense.

In the next world, complete in its cycles, something oozed in.  It was unlike anything that had previously passed through the void that separated things, for it was of the same fabric.  It was void itself, let loose upon creation.  It was Death itself, but not constrained in its being.  From the havens to the earth, nothing understood it.  While their death had been ordered, had a purpose, this new thing was blank and baffling.  All it carried was a sign that it had ended even light itself, that it was a force of destruction.

It oozed in, seeping down into the earth, and upon it were placed crystals of the sun to bear down a prison of light, a prison of that which confused it.  Why, it thought, were things once again spinning in cycles, why did the world turn again, though strange and unfamiliar at points?  And there, deep in the ground, ages hence, the dwarves found it thinking.