Fire Starter
The little fire was all I could see. Self-assured yellow-orange flames, bright, welcoming and familiar. An old friend. Sparks crackled, shooting up to the sky and dancing in the heat. Thick logs, already partially blackened. Ash formed a nest around the heart of the fire, and floated through the air like snowflakes, at the slightest hint of wind.
The fire preoccupied me for some time. I tried to discern a pattern in the flames’ movement; there was none. I sought to learn all of its parts, the hottest heart and yellowed afterthoughts too far from their source. After long stretches of staring I determined the origin of the wood: oaks from the low valleys of Ouakaroo, their forests nourished by the mists that enveloped the Viogo mountains, then slumped into the valleys that snaked between them, like scratch marks of some heavy-clawed god.
When I drew my eyes finally away from the little fire, it stained my sight—so that everywhere else it appeared held echoes of it, until eventually I was able to see the much less welcome truth. There was nothing else. Darkness contoured every part of us and without reprieve. After some time, I concluded that a long eclipse had descended upon us.
Though it explained the endless night, the eclipse did not explain my awakening in such an unfamiliar place. I could sense the mountains not too far away. The memory of their eye-tooth jaggedness was comforting in the cold expanse of nothingness before me and the fire. And while I could not glean any of the geography beyond us, I concluded that the little fire was, in fact, casting shadows around and behind me. We were sheltered in the crevice of some large rock wall. The mystery was no longer an amorphous, threatening void. We were at the foothills of the Viogos, I was sure of it. The rock wall a remnant of slow glacier drift. I had traveled here before, when shepherds came down to the plains villages to trade songs, wool and herbal tinctures foraged in those deep, exquisite valleys.
Perhaps, then, a shepherd had brought me here. I was usually awoken for some task or another. It used to bother me. Few summoned me for anything other than their own selfish needs. Once, a woman summoned to asking for help finding suitable herbs for a love potion. I was annoyed, having been in conversation with several thousand cyanobacteria I hadn’t met before when she came calling. It didn’t take me long to conclude that this was nothing more than a young person’s passing fancy. I directed her to several fungi that ensured her lover a night spent in his family’s outhouse.
But to have higher expectations for the Ouakarans was ultimately self-defeating. I existed for many reasons. But one reason was to help the poor folk of the mountain chain who suffered at the hands of fickle storms and a violent cosmos. If a shepherd brought me here and did me the courtesy at least of providing us shelter, along with ample firewood to maintain the fire for several months, then I would do what I could only assume was my task: I would keep the fire lit and hope my summoner arrived eventually.
There were no days to count and few creatures to converse with. My mind was soft. My thoughts drifted. Normally, I’d content myself by listening to the millions of voices that populate the world—larvae, drifting seeds, lively, metamorphic rocks—but either I was too weak to hear them, or they were silent in the face of the eclipse. I kept some sense of time by counting the number of logs piled around me I used to maintain the fire. Since I’d started counting, the eclipse had lasted ten long-burning oak logs. I worried for the photosynthesizing plants. No doubt they were already sun-starved corpses, black and shriveled. I worried too about the occasional voles that crept up to the fire for warmth, no doubt searching for food. A few nibbled at my body. I let them. There was little available to comfort their wailing stomachs.
When was the last time our hemisphere had such a long, endless night? I tried to think back through the eons, when the first people emerged from the trees of the valleys and started to spread through the mountains and down into the plains. The first long eclipse killed millions. The survivors became adept astronomers and were able to predict the next three. But, if my memory was true, those had lasted a few days? Maybe a week or two? And now, yes, I remembered, now Runists from the south claimed they actually knew the skies best, even though their sun was almost never shrouded by the rubble of a former planet and if it was, never for more than a day. They mocked our astronomers and broke their instruments.
There hadn’t been an eclipse of any kind for seventy-seven years. The astronomers, the few left, they watched the sky for signs of wandering moons, having gleaned a few critical patterns throughout their studies. But the Runists turned to their carved bones and their own fickle gods, who were eager for power and not much else. They insisted the age of eclipses was over. The skies had calmed and would not disrupt our lives again.
My disdain for the Runists came naturally. I am of the mountains, and mountain people were some of the first to look at the stars and wonder how they might get a closer look. Even I was curious. For a few millennia I tried to reach out and hear the debris that streaked through our night skies. But if anything was once alive out there, the dead airlessness of space had silenced them forever.
My initial suspicion that a poor shepherd had bowed before me when the eclipse started was summarily dismissed when I could find no hint of goat smell or hay amidst the branches in which I was swathed. Furthermore, surely if a shepherd had called to me, they would come back to pray on the regular, hoping I could do something about it, which, unfortunately I could not.
I tried to ask the fire, my only companion, hoping my regular refreshing of its fuel source would coax a response. It’s only interlocutor, however, was the weather. When rain spat down on us in a half-hearted country dance, the fire hissed its annoyance. When snow began to settle on us—exacerbating the hunger of every creature seeking to survive this endless night—the fire cackled with disdain as if urging the winter months to do their worst. There was no such defiance in my attempts to converse with the clouds invisible above us. I had no prayers, only supplications to our earth-bound companions who remained mute despite my increasingly desperate pleas.
When I finally began to hear the voices of the world whispering in my mind I wondered for a moment if the eclipse had passed. The excitement bursting in my chest quickly dissipated when I was greeted once again by the flickering of the fire and nothing else at all.
Yet something was changing. I felt more alert. As if in response to my wakefulness, more small animals began coming into the firelight and they could tell me stories of blighted landscapes, bare store cupboards and basements, pale, fearful faces alight in the reflection of their own small fires.
Everyone was suffering. There was little I could do to help, though I began working to touch the minds of families with music or sun-bright dreams, in the hopes that they might be inspired to play an upbeat tune or remind each other that the skies would return to their original glory.
It was at this point, when the fire had consumed thirty logs that I realized my strength was obviously coming from a believer, and that person was getting closer. I made every effort to listen for them. A shadow of a sound was enough to strain my eyes into the darkness. But I needn’t have bothered with the senses of mortals. Slowly, painfully slowly, I began to hear their thoughts. It made me giddy. I raised the fire without bothering to add more logs. It grew into a bonfire, so large I was able to expand my view of our surroundings. Scree and snow, a few bedraggled killmare bushes, a woman. Far off but moving ever closer.
Her skin was sun-starved. Wisps of curly hair peeked out from underneath a woolly hat looked thin and ragged. Blue shadows fluttered beneath her eyes. Her mouth and nose were covered by a red balaclava. But the eyes, a brown that engulfed you, made you wish you could be buried in such welcoming loam that surely homed a thousand creatures, roots of a million trees, I remembered them. I remembered them with a jolt that felt like fear and admiration and relief all at once. She squatted in front of the fire across from me, removed a large pack from her back. Rolled her shoulders and neck.
“We knew it would happen eventually, didn’t we?” Aydel, said.
She was one of my disciples and an apprentice astronomer. A mountain child who’d left for the plains cities to study and now had returned. If only it was under happier circumstances.
“How long this time?” I asked without speaking.
“The Runists say six months, I have my doubts. I think the Legions are in denial and so choosing to agree with them.”
So. It had not even been six months. A miracle how time hardly mattered with no movement in the skies to cut it into manageable slices. “I must thank you, little goddess,” said Aydel. “Of the twelve fires the Astronomer’s Guild set in anticipation of this dark age, yours is the only one that has stayed lit. Your sisters and brothers were less inclined to wake up.”
I preened a little at that.
“I may need your services still. I’ve been travelling by homing this whole time. But it’s been causing me headaches lately.” “I am at your service,” I replied.
She bowed in return. From her bag she took out a branch of tarred oak wood and lit it from my fire. Then she pulled me from my alcove, wrapped a moose-hide rope around my stone waist and tied the rest of the rope over her shoulders and around her hips until I was secured at the base of her ribs.
“I feel lighter already having you near, little goddess,” she chuckled at her half-hearted joke. “The Guild sent me alone. It’s been a while since I had any company.”
I said nothing. I could feel Aydel’s need, as familiar now as my own thoughts. She needed the fire like a starving wolf needs to hear the howl of its companions. The flame must not go out. We would be returning to our mountains, to the village of Souma, where she hoped her people had done enough to prepare for this nightmare, perhaps enough to help a few others who were not so forward thinking.
I concentrated. I wouldn’t need to keep the branch alight with anything but my mind. I felt her faith in the flame, in me, and we started off in a pool of fire floating through an extinguished world.