Young Flame

“It’s time to move,” Tetsu says the moment I finish burning through the last of the trunk.

She’d been so focused on her weapon practice, but still must have been paying attention while I ate away at the tree. I’d consumed it slowly, to give myself a little extra time to practice the ritual, but I guess there is only so much I can delay her impatience.

There was no need for me to eat the entire tree, but I wanted to have enough energy to last a good long while in this chill. I should also be good to expel quite a bit of energy in any fight we take.

I take to the skies again as the rest continue their run through the valley between mountains. Remus flings Jav far into the skies ahead of me, but he quickly disappears in the distance.

Thirty minutes later, he returns and I fly low enough to hear as he lands on Remus.

“They’ve moved further north since we last came through, but they definitely need a bit of population control. They’re overflowing at the moment.”

“Wonderful! We can hit three birds with one stone.” Remus’ eyes grin. “Anything to worry about in the area?”

“Nothing on the surface, but I did spot signs of burrowers to the west. River flow is too low for anything threatening to be hiding within. And I didn’t see anything in the skies. Should be all good.”

“Good, good. I’ll stick with Solvei. You three enjoy yourselves.”

As if waiting for those words, Tetsu dashes ahead without a word. Grímr and Jav follow behind her. I try to speed up, but I can’t reach their speeds even with flight. Remus matches my pace.

Time passes and I almost think I might have passed them or gone off track when I crest the ridge and finally find what I’m looking for. The slope beneath me flattens into a plateau between mountain ranges, and standing out from the snow covered ground are hundreds of thousands of brown critters crawling over each other. It is a disgusting sight even if they were tiny like normal bugs, but no, these things are as long as my legs. Bigger than I am as a bird.

A mountain of the bugs is blown into the sky and I spot Tetsu wading through the endless roaches with a grin as she swings dual sabres. Jav is flying ahead of me and Grímr is sitting off to the side, the both of them letting Tetsu have her fun and doing as much as they can to avoid touching the bugs.

Tetsu is dripping in some foul brown-black sludge. The same goop that bursts out when she cuts through the roaches.

“We left a pile of carcasses over there.” Jav flies close and nods toward a mound of the unmoving brown bugs.

“Perfect, we can get started right away then,” Remus says.

I bring myself down to land on Remus’ head and prepare myself to get through this. I can hope it’ll be quick, but I have a feeling it won’t be as easy as Remus keeps saying.

It takes me a while, but I feel like I’ve formed my flame to match perfectly with the inscription held by Remus. The shape doesn’t really feel different from normal. The pattern doesn’t create any extra effect just by running my flames through it like Remus said.

I compare my suspended flames to the parchment for the hundredth time, but I can’t spot any differences. Everything looks identical. So why doesn’t the ritual work?

“Are you sure this thing is supposed to do anything? The shape is right, but it doesn’t react in any way more than I’d usually expect.”

“Hmm.” He leans over and inspects my flame spread above the ground. If he spots any issue with it, he doesn’t say. “I think you might have to use that scroll, after all.”

“I thought you needed it? Wouldn’t I destroy it?”

“Well, yes. The hyle of fire is still fire, so the paper won’t last long. But if you can understand how it works before you incinerate the page, there shouldn’t be anything to worry about.”

“What is hyle?”

Remus’ eyes roll in his head to look up at me. “Er, well I can’t give you the technical details because I don’t know enough about it myself. What I do know is that it’s the form that any element can take to flow freely through physical materials. Have you ever seen a mage’s tattoos glow? That’s the hyle of their respective element cycling through their bodies. To my understanding, hyle is the only reason you can have stone or water mages and inscriptions.”

So the hyle of water was what Leal had running along her tattoos? Is there a hyle of everything? If you converted an element to hyle, can you send it through walls?

Huh? I’ve done that before. I’ve made hyle when I interacted with those inscriptions; at Leal’s mage academy, the manor in Zadok, and Henosis’ weapon. The inscriptions for each passed through walls, but I had no trouble passing my flame through them without needing to burn through the buildings.

I can do it. It shouldn’t be any harder than controlling fire normally.

I reach for the paper, ready to figure out what it is I’m doing wrong, but Remus pulls it away before I can reach.

“Don’t be hasty. You still need to memorise it before we should risk running your flame through. We have plenty of time while Bunny enjoys herself.”

I groan, but do as he says. This is gonna take forever.

❖❖❖

Two days have passed and only now do I feel confident I can completely recreate the inscription from memory. After the vast majority of roaches were wiped out and the rest scattered to the horizons, Tetsu took off to the west. The group seems wholly unconcerned about her actions, so I can only assume she does this often.

Maybe it’s because of the difference in the way we taste, but I find the roaches to be rather good. With all Jav’s talk about how disgusting they are, I expected worse. Their outer shell is resistant to my flames, not so much that I can’t burn through, but enough that their gooey interior incinerates the bug before they lose the exoskeleton. I wouldn’t call them sweet like sand-worms, but they definitely taste similar.

While the energy within each bug comes nowhere close to the creatures in the Void Fog, the sheer quantity makes up the difference. Unfortunately, I still need to keep them for practice with the ritual, so Remus only lets me eat a relatively tiny portion. A tiny portion that may have been about a hundred times my body weight, but compared to the plateau buried in the roaches, it is nothing.

“So, Ready to do this?” Remus brings the roasted thigh of some creature Jav hunted to his concealed mouth.

“Are you sure? You’ll lose the scroll.” I want to confirm it’s okay for the last time. I’d hate to have him regret his decision after it’s already gone.

“Yep, no worries. It’ll take some time to get another, but I might squeeze a more efficient ritual out of the upper brass.”

Remus lays the scroll on the hard soil. With all the fire I’ve had over it in the past few days, it’s no surprise the snow melted away. Even the ground dried out enough for me to land without issue. I still remain a falcon as the ability to fly away at a moment’s notice is just too important.

Remus picks up a roach carcass and places it so it is touching the centre of the large circle and places the tip of his own limb in the little circle.

“Should you really be touching it? What if I do it wrong and the inscription doesn’t do what it’s supposed to?”

“Well, you better get it right then.” He grins at me. “How else are we going to see if it works if we don’t have a target?”

Does he really have to add more pressure than I’m already feeling? Well, if he thinks he’ll be fine, then that’s enough for me.

I place a talon on the page, careful to not tear through the paper or burn it. With a deep breath, I push my flames through the lines of the inscription. I try to keep them as cold as possible and watch as the lines light up in a deep red.

Around the glowing lines, the scroll burns away. The burning inscription remains suspended ever so slightly off the ground, but it does not break down like the rest of the scroll. My flames flood through it and I finally see that I could never have achieved this simply by replicating the shape. The lines are unimportant. It’s the action that each line represents that matters.

A straight line reduces the heat from one point to another, while a three-pronged star with curved lines uses two points to create an empowering effect at the third. There are so many of these unique tiny shapes that create differing effects. Only when the ritual actually starts do I realise I’ve felt this sort of reaction before. Those odd actions the Henosis had me perform to power and activate their weapon. It’s not identical. Actually, it’s not even that similar, but it gives me the same feeling when my flames run through the inscription as each little shape reacts and plays off each other to create the effect of the dissolving roach before me.

Small, hardly visible motes float off the carcass toward the inscription where they are condensed and directed toward the smaller circle and into Remus’ tentacle. It doesn’t take long for the roach to be torn apart by the ritual, but I’ve already seen what I need. With nothing more to tear apart, the inscription falls away from my control, crumbling into ash.

“So, figure anything out?” Remus asks.

I nod, but don’t acknowledge him any more than that. In moments, I have the recreated inscription from my memory formed in flames before me. As fast as I can, I find shapes in the pattern and give each their respective action that I felt during the ritual. There are many shapes, but I think I successfully created a replica of each one. Now, I just need to reproduce the effect of each shape within the inscription with what they should have.

The inscription is not simple at all, so I don’t imagine this will be a quick process. I’ll need to memorise the changes as well. I sigh to myself. Hopefully, this won’t take long.

“Is she done yet?” are the first words I hear from Tetsu upon her return.

“She’s doing well,” Remus says behind me.

“No. Now go have a bath, you reek,” Jav says.

I turn to the group lazing around behind me. Except for Tetsu, they are all laying in the snow as if it’s a comfortable couch.

“I’m done. I was done a while ago now. I just wanted to memorise it properly.”

Tetsu’s eyes light up, as do the others as they rise to their feet.

“Finally!” Tetsu is covered head to toe in the blood and muck from whatever she’d been fighting. Maybe I should have waited until she’d washed to announce I’m done.

Remus grins. “That’s great Solvei, I knew you could do it.”

“We have a mountain to get through.” Tetsu nods to the roach piles. “No time to wait.”

“No, Jav’s right. You need a bath first.”

“Wha? But…” Tetsu looks to her other teammate, hoping for support, but Grímr holds a paw over his nose and pointedly doesn’t look her way. “Fine, but don’t you start without me.” She runs off to the nearest river.

“You might as well start,” Grímr says. “She won’t be long.”

I barely even spread my flame over the area when Tetsu rushes back. “Wait!” She’s dripping wet, but still looks filthy.

“You didn’t even wash yourself,” Jav says.

“Sure I did. I dove in and everything.”

“What, for a millisecond?”

“It was at least a second.”

Groans resound amongst the team.

“After the first round, you’re going to scrub yourself properly,” Remus says.

“Uh huh, sure,” Tetsu says dismissively, already looking over the inscription burning in the air as wide as I can make it.

I’m unable to spread it to the nearest mound, so I wait until they’ve piled up the roaches beneath the large flaming circle. With how excited Tetsu is, it doesn’t take long for everything to be in position and they stand underneath the small circle.

For the final time, I look over my work. I make sure there is no missing line and each has the appropriate effect attached. Nothing is out of place. With a deep breath, I connect the last few pathways. Immediately, I feel my fire flowing almost without my input. I could pull them back if I need to, but for now, I leave the inscription to guide me through the intensely complicated process of breaking down the dead bodies and direct their energy to those waiting in the receiver circle.

It’s an incredible sight. The blood and ooze around the roaches are the first to dematerialise. The hard shells don’t seem to put all that much defence against the ritual. Despite their resistance to my flames, they break into pieces and disperse into the air as they rise toward the burning inscription.

The sound is not something I expected. My flames roar in a repetitive, deep thrum. It’s not a noise I thought I could ever have associated with flames. Each thrum shakes the very air.

The shell and inner flesh of the roaches continues to flake and separate, being sucked through the inscription and charging into the bodies of the three in the circle.

Wait… three?

I look around to see Grímr sitting off to the side. Why didn’t he join them?

He catches my inquisitive gaze. “The ritual doesn’t have as much of an effect on me as the others. They help me out in… other ways.”

Okay. He’s being vague again. I’ll worry about him later, I still need to focus.

Eventually, the last of the bugs are gone and I feel the inscription powering down, taking the heavy sound with it.

“That was beautiful, Solvei. Good job!”

Jav jumps on Remus’ head. “Yeah, that’s gonna be a lot more convenient than having to wait for someone to draw it out every time.”

Draw it? “Didn’t you say mages create it with their element?”

“I did.” Remus confirms. “And technically they do. They combine their element with the paint they use on the ground. I’ve seen áinfean and some of the better mages create inscriptions in the air like that with their element, so I figured it would be easy for you. Also, much more convenient for us; we don’t have to wait while you prepare.”

I just stare at him for a moment. “Isn’t that too much expectation to have?”

Jav snorts. “You’ll get used to it, kid.”