“…But then he thought of her. The girl he had known, the woman she had been robbed of becoming. He was happy for a moment but then as quickly as a light from a candle is extinguished, so too had his happiness disappeared.
Tears began to collect at the corner of his eyes, mixing in with the sweat and salt. His breaths turned from deep, to erratic. In the wildness of his breathing and pain, the light of the ember grew and something began to happen.
He had become like an early man, forced by some unseen threat into the safety of a cave. He was kneeling, his head brought low, feeding a tiny ember with his breath. It began to grow slightly, his efforts never ceasing. It would soon combust. Being helped along by the man, it finally burst into a small wavering flame.
He continued to feed it life with his own. Something felt different and as he kept on, he knew he was feeding into it. He was no longer starting a primitive fire by crude means. He understood now, that he was a slave to it, feeling more imprisoned to it as it grew in size.
“Breathe out, breathe out,” it called to him and soon the flames had grown high enough to lick at his face. The heat was intense. The pain should have been insufferable but he did not hide from it. It was burning at his eyes and he could smell the singeing of his hair. Soon enough, it poured out from his nostrils and it began to swim down into his throat, passed his teeth and into his lungs. It -the thing he had given his breathe to- had now become his breath and liquid fire shot out from his mouth.
He had never felt so good, so powerful. He had never seen anything as intense as the flames that were leaving his body. He smiled as flames splashed against the walls of the cave, charring the ancient place and lashing out savagely around the rocky enclave. He knew what he was, what he had become, something mythical, make believe, and terrifying.
“I’ll burn them all to hell and they’ll scream the whole way there,” he said out loud as his wings stretched wide in the cave, his tail and horns scraping against the rocky formations that seemed to be holding him back now, more than giving him shelter.
Suddenly he was caught of guard. He looked down at his claws and wished with all of his heart -that part of his heart that was still the heart of a man’s- that the face he was imagining was hers. He knew better. A mass of flames spewed out of him that seemed capable of burning down the cave itself, even scorching the earth above. Flames encompassed all of that in his periphery, until all he could take in with his eyes was white, bright with a heat unbearable.
When it was over and the intense light from the inferno had subsided, he noticed he was no longer in cave but instead on the white salty sand of a place he had tried to forget…”
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