Kindled

[Aiden Swann]

A hiss of flame. A laugh or possibly a scream. Iron scraping on iron.

Woodsmoke. Parched grass. Air thick enough to wade through.

He was wading through the air. He was flying, but that was normal. The air wasn’t as choked with smoke up here. When there was smoke. There had been just a moment ago, but there wasn’t smoke now. It was a beautiful summer day, ideal to cook oneself under if not for the man-sized ants tearing out a living from among the sun-scorched blades of grass. And close enough to fly to, under a mile away if distances meant anything here, it was a balmy summer night, perfect to sleep under. Constellations slaughtered one another and reformed into other swirling masses overhead.

There was something he’d come here for, but he couldn’t remember what. A person, place, or thing. As good a place to start as any. But most of the people here weren’t alive. The place was acid green. The place was a juicy blood orange. There was something he’d come here to see.

You came to see me, said a voice like a prairie fire.

Aiden woke with a gasp, barely noticing the cold sweat he’d been drenched in a moment ago. It evaporated off of him like a shallow pool in August.

[Aiden Swann]

It wasn’t that he had had the song stuck in his head off and on for a week or longer that was unnerving to Aiden; that happened all the time, especially with catchy songs like this one. Or at least he thought it was a song. Maybe it was a poem instead, or maybe a chant. He was missing most of Mr. Morales’ lecture, but that didn’t especially concern him right now. He could sleep through algebra and do fine. He had more than once.

It was unnerving that the song wasn’t in English, but that he understood it anyway. It was a pretty little language with every hard edge rounded off. If you just payed attention to the sound of it and ignored the monstrous lyrics, it would actually be quite pretty. That wasn’t easy to do.

Char the bones and bake the land;
Change yourself to something grand.
Bake the land and boil the sea;
Make your enemies bend the knee.
Boil the sea and harvest screams;
Give them all to the lord of dreams.

He was glad Wyatt wasn’t able to understand what he’d recorded Aiden saying. He would figure out what was happening to him on his own--involving anyone else too deeply would be reckless, even dangerous. But even hearing the song in his own voice in a language he knew like something he’d only just remembered wasn’t the most unnerving part.

The most unnerving part of all was that it got less unnerving every time he heard it.

[Aiden Swann]

This place was full of monsters. He’d always been able to avoid them until now, but this one saw through his natural invisibility and, starving, charged.

If this is their home and you are the visitor, who is the monster and who isn’t? Aiden thought the voice in his head sounded like his own, but he wasn’t sure. It was off somehow. It was a weird thought to be having when set upon by a creature who was one moment a starving coyote with a scorpion’s tail, the next a scorpion with the face of a snake, the next a centipede crossed with a keening woman with hair that burned like the sun. Saliva coursed freely down its open mouth. Aiden rolled away from a slash with the scorpion’s tail. For some reason, he couldn’t fly to safety. It just wasn’t working. His fireballs rolled off its chitin; it swatted his arcane bolts away with its enormous tail.

So you have to kill. And you know how.

It came flooding back to him. He remembered. Had he known all along? The threads of arcane energy pulled at him, through him, and soon steam was billowing from every orifice and every crack in the monster’s armor as the liquid in its body boiled away. Clawing at its own flesh, it died, howling.

Aiden woke up, gasping. He remembered. He was so wet with sweat he thought he’d soiled the bed. The spell. He could do that. If he wanted to, he could do that to someone. He didn’t, except for in the utmost recesses of his mind, but he could. The realization made his throat clench. The room was stifling, despite the roaring of the air conditioner. By the dim, orange glow of a globe of light he conjured, he read the thermostat: 114 degrees.

Aiden wondered how many days he could really go without sleep. He would have to find out.