Beyond the Flue

A SILENT MOVIE STORY

“I looked at the fire. The wood was crackling and sparkling. The fire would burst into long tongues of flame, and then drop back into short flamelets, one moment be bright, another dull ; out of the embers were formed castles and grottoes, and then everything collapsed and began again.” - V. K. Arseniev

Part 1

On a blue winter’s night not so long ago, there lay stretched into the fold a vast sofa the figure of a pretty young girl, whose name was Jenny.

Jenny’s freckled nose had buried its smallness between the folds of a book. Jenny’s eyes had broadened themselves to dinner plates in the reading. Jenny’s glasses, meanwhile, had stretched their prongs in as relaxed a position as Jenny herself. They lay respectively on a small cherry wood end table, beside an arm of the sofa covered under the fountain of Jenny’s cherry curls.

Jenny (who surely had a surname, but I confess, I don’t remember it) thumbed her way from page to page in tranquil near-solitude. Jenny’s father (who was a clerk of one kind or another) lingered long at the building where he was employed; which building Overlooked a quiet corner of the town, some distance from home. Jenny’s mother, and her little brother, were already asleep. Jenny herself might have slept as well, so low did the wind coo beyond the glass, so soft was the couch, so warm the home.

Jenny did not sleep. Not yet. Firstly because of love, directed towards that same father, and by which emotion she meant to wait until his return from work. Secondly, because it was Chrtistmas eve.

Lastly, because Jenny did not read - strictly speaking - unattended.

Jenny turned another page in her book, the yellowed edge of the paper rasping across the tip of her nose. Across a short five foot stretch of soft calico carpet, behind a cage of iron bars, another rasped as well. Jenny set her thumb in the crease to hold the book with one hand, and covered her mouth with the other to stifle a deep yawn. Behind the cage, the other yawned in its own manner. Jenny let her eyes close for only a moment; the book fell to her chest with a thud.

A heavier thud answered.

Jenny jumped at the sound. She turned her head and squinted across the carpet.

Staring back at her behind its latticed metal cage, cavorting atop a pile of wood within a box of mortared stones, there hummed a fire. One of the heavy logs it sat upon had tumbled under the flame’s dancing feet, but the log had only fallen a little down on the iron grate. By the time it had caught Jenny’s attention, the fire had already adjusted its glowing dance.

Jenny sat up. Her toes plowed the carpet’s soft shag. She set her book on the empty cushion at her side, dog-earing a corner to mark her place. The book belonged to Jenny completely, and showed every manifestation of careworn love which a well-read book must: creases, crinkles, scribblings, erasing, food stains and drool stains, and a hundred other blemishes of affection.

Perhaps the book had left its own marks upon young Jenny too. When she withdrew from its pages, shutting closed the Magic which it possessed, it seemed almost as if a midge of Magic stuck fast to the tip of her nose, like an invisible dollop of honey. As Jenny rubbed her eyes and stared into the fire with her mind widely wandering, she seemed to possess a clarity of vision almost Magical. No matter that Jenny’s glasses reflected the flame in two forgotten, warped miniatures on the end table at her side; Jenny herself stared across the carpet unaided. She saw every minutest spark in the dance.

Jenny watched without blinking. She watched the gentle stutter of orange and shadow against the sooty chimney stones. She watched the crowns swish at the fire’s peak; white-gold at their centers, faded to translucence at the edges; sharp as a glass cutter, rapid as a hummingbird’s wings, runnily flowing like butter in a hot skillet. The fire crackled. Jenny’s eyes sank lower. She followed the crowns to their bases, to the blurry red and blue flames licking the bottom of the grate, as if the fire were seen through tinted glass. From the bottom halves of her eyes, she watched the fire play on the chalkwhite checkerboard along one cheek of each log. Her eyes drifted sidelong. She watched a shadow spring about on the carpet, a four-legged spider shadow, with a long neck and a round head; the fire tongs. She looked back to the fire, and buried her eyes in the hot glowing chunks beneath the grate. From there, so far under the fireplace that it seemed to come from below the floor of the house, there sounded the constant low growl - like the lullaby of a primordial ursine god.

Jenny held her eyes on the fire, mesmerized by the dance and soft song. The fire sank on the logs, which were now gaunt and half-devoured. Jenny lids fell lower. And lower. And lower. She persisted and held them open. Not against any of Time’s natural lethargy. The great oak clock standing against the far wall had not yet tolled the hour of Jenny’s bedtime; and even such an hour hardly ever marks the limit to which the bedtime’s proscribed child remains awake. Jenny’s weariness, rather, took the form of that sly, comfortable drowsiness one feels within any place of warmth when it is cold without.

So Jenny, though she held her eyes on the fire, saw her vision narrow to a thin blurred band. All while the flame sank. She yawned again, and seemed to pull in a little of the fire’s remaining life with her breath. The flame was down to one scanty log eaten in twain, burning in two short lines. Drifts of smoke, like the last breaths from the body of an old man on his bed of death, curled their long fingers along the sides of this last log. The fingers became thin and pointed as they swiftly rose toward the chimney. Jenny watched it all.

Now the flame had sunk to the coals. Tiny blue flamelets shivered out their last. They shrank. Jenny leaned back. The fire sputtered. Jenny stretched and yawned. Each seemed to be waiting for the other to make the first move.

All at once Jenny noticed a sting in her eyes. How long had she been staring, without closing her eyes even to blink? Minutes? An hour? Jenny blinked.

The fire was gone.

Instantly awake, Jenny watched as the flame vanished. It seemed to flee behind the fireplace. Her sharpened, Magic sight watched as the fire - rather than evaporating into smoke - appeared to be running away down a long passage behind the fire cage and the grate. Jenny had never noticed this tunnel before, but now the entire length was set to glowing - yard by yard - by the shrinking blue and orange flame.

Jenny wasted not a moment. Already a little chill had returned to the room, but Jenny hardly noticed the cold. She bounded to her feet. All weariness had left her body as she shot toward the fireplace. She shoved the folding cage aside. It unleashed a huge metallic bang as it toppled to the hearthstones. In one leap, red hair streaming behind her, Jenny leapt over the white and black cinders and the prongs of the grate. Landing on her feet on the opposite side, she dashed into the opening of the tunnel, after the receding fire.

Behind in the living room, the couch cushion slowly molded itself back into shape. The reverberations of the falling fire fence faded. Jenny’s glasses lay forgotten atop the end table, prongs up, lenses reflecting only the last fading twinkle of the flame. Until the flame vanished altogether - then the reflection vanished, the room darkened.

In the blackness of the now-empty room, there stole a winter chill; so severe, it seemed almost audible. As if, in the ice of winter, one could hear a loud, deep groan.

Part 2

Down, down, down the long tunnel behind the fireplace flew the flickering blue light. Jenny flew after. Once Jenny had stepped inside the tunnel she never once looked back at the room she’d left. Had she turned, Jenny would have met a wall of broken rock where the opening to her living room had been but a moment ago, boulders and stones cascading from the tunnel ceiling to its floor, covered in bits of emerald moss, as if there had never existed any opening at the back of the fireplace.

But Jenny had her eyes locked on fire. Her feet pumped to keep pace. Each barefooted step slapped against the smooth floor of the tunnel, which was stone, but felt soft from the thick layer of ash and dust, and warm from the passage of the flame before her. Each footfall echoed behind Jenny as she ran, so that it seemed as if others chased Jenny in turn, out of sight in the dark she left behind.

The tunnel seemed to grow wider, and higher, and to run on endlessly. At her pace Jenny just kept the distant running flame at the blurry limit of her sight. She cupped her small pale hands to her mouth and shouted. The fire blazed on, lighting the dark walls, heedless.

Jenny began to feel nervous, even as her footsteps continued to slap. Her anxiety only intensified when, glancing behind at last, she stared into the swallowing throat that was the tunnel. Blackness, complete, chasing her down. Jenny quickly looked back to the fire. She cried in desperation for the fire to stop. The fire ran on. Tiny Jenny could only continue to chase after in the ever widening tunnel.

Now Jenny was frightened. The space around her stretched impossibly vast. Her only anchoring points were the warm stone under her feet and the distant spotlight of the fire against that same floor. Jenny brought to the front of her mind a picture she’d seen in one of her dinosaur books - a stegosaurus thrashing against the sticky ichor of a tar pool. She understood the wide eyes of that stegosaurus now. Her own eyes were like tiny solar eclipses, enormously wide, with a thin rim of white, and the pupils dilated to great black discs which reflected the far-off flame. She understood the stegosaurus’s scream. She herself cried, yelled, gasped with the effort of keeping pace. All to no effect. Jenny felt as if she were sinking into her own pit of tar. If that far off light were to vanish, it would be as though her eyes had slipped beneath the sticky surface, never to rise.

Just as Jenny began to tug at her nightdress’s collar, seeking extra air; just as she began to pant; just as her arms began to flail without form, like boiled noodles; just as she felt that this strange, enormous sideways flue behind the fireplace were stretching to infinity; just as Jenny realized that she herself must flag far short of that limit; just as the fire seemed about to outpace her; just as it seemed on the verge of winking out; the tunnel stopped.

In what seemed only a blink of her dinnerplate eyes Jenny stood before a low arch of mortared white stones. Indeed, the change had come so suddenly that Jenny nearly slammed against the fire itself, which stood - now bright and large and glowing blue-orange - under the stones’s curve. A good thing it was that she did not slam against the fire. Had she, Jenny’s heart would have instantly stopped.

Jenny shielded her eyes against the sudden glow. She did see that the fire seemed almost as surprised to see her as she was to see it. The pointed crown of this flame wavered and leaned back away from her as Jenny’s heels squealed to a stop on the floor.

Jenny rubbed her eyes with her fists and blinked. As her vision cleared she saw that the fire opposite her possessed certain mannish features. It floated weightless in the air, but at its bottom (where the flame would normally have licked up from the underside of a log) Jenny saw two tendrils of darker, smoky-orange that might have been legs. In the central mass of the tear-drop shape she discerned four colored patches of deep red that might have been a mouth, nose, and eyes. She even saw tiny wavy lines like a dessert’s haze at the corners of the ‘eyes’. Wrinkles. All around the deep red splotch that seemed to be a mouth the flame took the shape of a bright white Epictetean beard, while two tufted streaks above its splotch-eyes completed the appearance of sagacity.

This senior flame at last caught its bearings. It righted itself, then leaned in close to Jenny’s face. It tilted its ‘head’ to the side and regarding her with what Jenny believed was a dumbfounded expression. Jenny felt her own face flush with heat as the fire leaned toward her, though not so close as to cause her to sweat.

At length Jenny brought a fist up to her mouth and cleared her throat, standing taller at the same time - the same attitude she had noticed her father adopting whenever he encountered vacuum salesmen or Mormons at the house door. Her attempt to adding gravel to her voice and steel to her eyes came off not quite as well, what with her height being half that of her fathers, and face far too fair for displeasure.

Nevertheless, Jenny upbraided the fire. She demanded to know; what had been its business in desertings its post at the fireplace, and ignoring her when she called?

Two more flickering appendages emerged from the body of the flame. They rubbed down its front, as if the fire were trying to make itself presentable. Its eye splotches turned down, the tip of its crown drooped, and a brighter flush of red suffused its body.

The fire spoke in english, of course; it had burned in Jenny’s English living room. In a crackly and whistling voice the flame made excuses as to why it had left the fireplace: the wind had been blowing something fierce down the chimney, miss Jenny; there were hardly any coals left to burn upon, miss; and after all, he had thought the lady herself meant to retire, and he knew (as a professional in the burning trade) that it would be highly irregular to affect an unattended burn. Jenny listened to the fire’s explanations with her arms loose at her sides, but mentally crossed. Jenny’s father had said once that when a person gives you many different reasons for a thing, none is reality. Yet the fire seemed genuinely contrite.

Jenny decided not to press the point. Her expression softened back to childish, open-lipped wonder. Soon the fire’s heat suffused both her face and its own with the hot, red flesh. As the fire sniffed (which sounded like a charred log of wood shifting inside a burning fire) and shoved his tendril hands into two butterscotch pockets, he fell silent.

Jenny shook her amazement off, causing her red hair to fly wildly all around her shoulders. The fire raised a finger to speak again, but Jenny pounced verbally into the pause. While her eyes scanned the elderly fire up and down, and followed the curve of the arch, and glanced in the tunnel behind, a hundred questions sprayed from Jenny’s mouth in one long uninterrupted hiss, like a stream of paint from a broken spray can. Why had the fire not heeded her call? The fire tried to interrupted, unsuccessfully. What was the fire’s name? The fire made a demure pointing gesture at Jenny shoulder, unnoticed. Could all fires speak? Did all fireplaces have secret tunnels behind them? Where did this tunnel go? What lay beyond the arch?

It was not so much the fire’s repeated attempts to catch her attention that brought a pause to the hiss-spray of questions, so much as the sudden smell Jenny noticed.

Jenny’s hair had caught fire.

Instantly Jenny began batting at her smoldering ginger locks with a flurry of panicked pats. She flung her head from one side to the other. She noticed the flame catching now on her nightdress. She took a fistfull of collar and yanked, trying to pull it away from her skin.

Jenny would have necessarily succumbed to one of two courses; either an ignominious disrobing, or immolation. The elder fire, however, spared her either outcome. With a stern shout he pointed a stiff finger of flame at the stone floor below his tendril feet. Like a scolded hound, the fire on Jenny’s hair and collars slunk off of her. It sank through the air to land at the elder fire’s feet, where it rejoined the glowing yellow mass.

Jenny thanked the fire. She immediately set her slightly-shorter hair into a tight ponytail. The fire begged for her pardon, but Jenny silenced him with a fresh barrage of questions. Chastised by her excitement, she had the sense in this case to wait for the accompanying answer.

Jenny began, understandably enough, by asking for his name. The fire introduced himself as: Gothen, if it pleased the lady. He bowed, though took care not to once more set her aflame.

Jenny curtsied; the fire already knew her name of course. She next repeated her question, asking why Gothen had not heeded her call. Gothen beamed brighter as if pleased. He shuffled around to stand behind Jenny. Then he shouted, cupping two flame-hands together around his burning mouth and a long OOOO call. The call echoed. But, when the elderly fire returned to stand under the arch in front of her and made the same sound, Jenny heard no responding echo from the tunnel. By this she was made to understand that echoes only reverberated for the person standing behind in the tunnel, not in front. Or, perhaps only the speaker could hear the echoes? Jenny became rather confused at the demonstration. She decided to let this matter slide also.

She came bounding physically back from her confusion, perking up and wagging her face. She launched again into the long question string. What was the arch? Where did the tunnel go? Did all fireplaces have such tunnels? Could all fires talk?

Gothen, brought a flaming arm before him and - looking down at its wrist, jumped himself. He waved Jenny to silence. He pointed significantly at the wristwatch which Jenny could not see the time of, and swiveled about. The fire had barely taken two floating steps when Jenny reached out to grab him. The canny flame drew swiftly away from her touch. He wished not to burn the young girl. He put on an apologetic expression and began to make his excuses. Jenny stopped him with a flat palm. She set her knuckles on her hips, stared the fire down, then in one swift move, waved a hand down the tunnel; beckoning him to lead on.

Gothen shifted from tendril to tendril. He shook his white crown. His wrinkled lips parted again as if to speak, but the outmatched old fire caught young Jenny shiny, steely eyes with his soundgrouse-footed ones. The girl waved a broad hand at her back, as if to say: do you want me to return down that cold dark tunnel by myself, with no light? Gothen shook his head again. He glanced again at the invisible wristwatch, caught once more Jenny’s determined face, sighed, and finally beckoned her to follow.

The passed under the arch of white stones, going wherever the tunnel led.

Part 3:

Standing within Gothen’s light, Jenny found that not only was the tunnel expectedly brighter than before, with a long Jenny-shadow careening away from her feet and stepping toe to toe with her on the smooth stone floor, but that the space seemed somehow less vast. Back in the dark where she had seen only the smallest pinprick of Gothen in the distance, it had felt to her as if she stood at the bottom of a lake of pure, cooling midnight. The walls and ceiling had seemed infinitely far. At Gothen’s side, however, Jenny could see both ceiling and walls. Indeed, the tunnel curved in such a tight circle that Jenny could almost detect the gradient difference on her bare feet. Jenny felt altogether comfortable walking beside the bright fire. Gothen’s presence kept her warm. His humming breaths filled the air with the smell of warm applewood.

Jenny glanced back only once to look at the strange stone arch under which they had passed. She found that it had vanished. She turned to Gothen once more to ask what the arch meant, only to discover that they had reached a new feature.

A door stood in a rumpled wall which marked the tunnel’s end. The wall was made of roughly mortared bricks, which melded seamlessly with the corridor’s natural stone. The door was metal, metal of such a soft coppery color, and such a scored grimy texture, that it seemed to express the homeliness of old mahogany.

Gothen bent - his spine crackled like pinecones - and extended a finger towards a keyhole. His finger took the shape of a key. With an insert and a twist Jenny heard the lock click open. Gothen turned the knob (shaped like a spruce tree) and swung the door wide. Jenny scurried inside; the elderly fire shut the behind them.

The space Jenny found herself in looked like a small staff kitchen in a manor. A long countertop ran the length of a red brick wall on her left, stacked high with a dozen suitcases. The cases were all of well used character, with tufts of white feathering out through cracks in the lining, and loose stitching dangling like cobwebs from the corners. Every suitcase looked near bursting, like a muffin cup. The blacked pine rafters of the room were clear of cobwebs but infested with nails, from which hung an assortment of Stuff: spoon, ladles, pots and pans, bags of garlic and ginger and onions, oven mitts patterned in sunflowers, an apron patterned in ‘moonflowers’ (these being long green stems, atop which were flowers shaped like the varying stages of the lunar cycle), flasks, and flagons, and washing cloths, and bread twine, and even a full bag of questionable bread; in short a panoply of cookery, filling the chamber with a pleasant musk of spiced iron.

Along the opposite wall to her right, Jenny saw a series of oddly-shaped doors. Some were circles, some half-circles, some regular rectangles. All were the same rustic copper material as the door through which she’d entered. At the chamber’s center, a bowed oval table with a sunken red-felt top stood crookedly of four mismatched legs; two of the legs were carved in the shape of licking flames and seemed to match the original structure, while the other two were, respectively, a sawn-down fencepost, and a stack of newspapers. Thirteen chairs from at least three dining sets were neatly tucked under the table’s lip.

Only Gothen’s light shone in the space, throwing shadows from his place at the door. No persons sat at the table when they entered, but that changed almost immediately. From the odd doors on the right wall she heard an uproar of shouting and thumping footsteps. Before the girl could so much as blink, the dim kitchen was suddenly awash in light. A half-dozen fires burst in through the various openings, some alone, some in pairs, all whooping, most charging. Jenny expected at least one of the fires to tumble directly into the table and chairs. They seemed entirely out of control in the way they bounced and careened off of one another. Yet these fires must have been familiar with the space. Like a river around a high cleft of rock, the gathering surged around the sides of the furniture in two streams - ducking hanging iron salad forks and hanging potato sacks all the while - and reconvened on the opposite end.

The fires threw themselves upon the stack of suitcases at first. Then one of them shouted and pointed a tiny tendril of flame towards Jenny.

Instantly the scrabble ceased. A silence fell upon the swarm, broken only by their communal crackle. They stared at the girl in open wonder, their eyes wide and level with her own. For, Jenny saw, these fires were all smaller, roughly her own height on average, and with younger faces than the white-bearded Gothen.

Gothen himself sidled carefully past Jenny. He loomed down at the crowd with, his hands set against his sides, and sporting a glare that would have been frigid had he not been aflame. The elder fire went up to one of the young flames, gave him a box on the ear, took the suitcase, and set it into the hands of another. Murmuring, Gothen went about passing out the suitcases to their respective owners.

Jenny meanwhile noticed that many of the flames looked familiar. Gothen, for instance, shaped and colored himself in a way distinct to Jenny’s household fireplace. In the same way, one of the little flames looked exactly like the fires underneath her mother’s kitchen stove. It had a distinct diamond-shape to its body, burning bright blue at the four corners, and nearly translucent white in its center. Another looked exactly like the gaslight in her father’s study - down to the wavery, thin eyes staring back at Jenny.

Jenny and the gaslight fire spoke at the same instant. They said hello, though in different words. While a sharp swivel of Gothen’s eye silenced the gaslight, Jenny proceeded on to ask their names. The flames shuffled under their master’s direction for order and silence, until Gothen (who was then swaddling a tiny matchstick-flame in a fireproof oven cloth) reminded them that it was rude not to answer. Jenny received a barrage of introductions at once. From these she managed to cling to the name of the diamond-shaped, blue stove flame; Charlie.

Jenny was about to ask what all the fires were so excited about, and why they had so much luggage. Just then Gothen cried in distress. Jenny saw the elder flame swiveling this way and that, pushing little flames to one side or another - like a mother hern searching among her chicks, and coming up one short.

Lansing? Lansing!

The elderly flame repeated the call, this time accompanied by another worried glance at his stopwatch. He looked from flamelet to flamelet. Each shook their head or shrugged.

Then a flash shone from a tall mousehole at the base of the door-wall. Into the chamber zipped a classically teardrop-shaped fire, one head shorter than Jenny, but with a hot red crown to match her own locks.

The small flame started for the suitcase table at first, but instantly stopped when it saw Gothen’s hot flush. It bowed low in contrition. It stammered - flickering - as it explained that it had been on its way to the kitchen; only, a cloud had shifted to allow starshine through the fanlight over the entry door just then, and the fire had been afraid a passing pedestrian might see him move. Gothen strode over and shoved a suitcase into the little flame’s outstretched arms. The elder fire scolded the youth. He did not box or cuff him, however, because the little flame seemed so wavery that a heavy blow would have snuffed him entirely.

Jenny recognized the small flame - Lansing, she gathered was his name - almost at once. He was the little flame that burned in the teacup candle at the top of her home’s center stair. Jenny’s mother lit Lansing each night after tucking Jenny into bed so that - by the light - Jenny could navigate from her bedroom in the garret to the downstairs toilet in the night. Lansing had never burned out on her either, despite a serious cold draft in the hall stair, though she had seen him flicker often.

Lansing brightened some when he spotted Jenny. He waved. But Jenny by this time had accepted quite as much as she was willing to take of going unanswered. This time, when she asked why they were all so hurried and packed up, the inquest included a ballast of words which a behaved young miss ought better to steer well clear of.

Gothen’s burning mouthing dropped open. He fumbled with his words. But in the meantime the other flamelets from around Jenny’s house all crackled a unified answer.

A field trip! The Castle! All Fires Union!

Gothen and all the little flamelets were this night departing for Bellowbyrne Castle. Gothen, finding his voice, explained. On this same day of every year, the great Fire King invited all the flames of all the households to his castle. There they traded stories and news from other flames around the world, received their assignments and promotions, received their copies of next year’s Wind-Draft-Zephyr Almanac, and generally let their crowns down a little. One of the little flamelets answered Jenny’s next question before she could ask it: Bellowbyrne Castle lay at the world’s top, only a hop, skip and a jump from the north pole.

Jenny’s jaw unhinged and hung slack. Her eyes grew so large that each of the flames, Gothen among them, could be seen reflected individually in the blacks. Gothen noticed her reaction. His reflection - and the real Gothen - raised a fist and cleared his throat, silencing the throng. With an apologetic air he told Jenny that the fires would need to depart immediately from the behind-the-fireplace kitchen in order to reach BellowByrne castle in time for the All Fires Union. He added that the way was long, unsuitable for an earthbound child. (Especially one who had never so much as swept a chimney, let alone flown up it!) Expecting disappointment, the kindly old fire added that the Union was mostly a formal affair. Jenny’s eyes sank lower and lower to the sooty floor. Gothen added that the proceedings would certainly bore an imaginative child like herself. Besides - he added with a wave at himself and the others - who would want to spend Christmas Eve with a bunch of billowy, crackling, hot fires?

That word: ‘Christmas’. It swelled Jenny’s heart and mind with desire. A mistiness filled her enormous eyes. Her bottom lip curled as she bit it with her small white teeth, and an unaffected look of supreme longing overspread her face. A mere glance on this look was enough to burn and tear asunder any argumentative palisade which Gothen might have raised.

The elder flame - desperate not to see the girl cry, but hardly knowing how to divert her - mumbled something about no human ever visiting Bellowbyrne Castle. Lansing the stairway candle spoke up: had The King of All Fires ever banned the attendance of a human? Gothen shot the youth a look which made the latter quiver. The master sighed, releasing a small trail of grey smoke, and said that, after all, there couldn’t be much harm in Jenny tagging along for one night’s stay.

The little girl nearly exploded into tears anyway. She surged to embrace the old fire. He beat a hasty retreat. Jenny scolded herself for once more forgetting the danger of touching flames; it became a difficult rule to recall when they appeared so human-like as Gothen and all the little fires. Observing this, Gothen scratched the top of his crown for a moment, the translucent white strands at the top of his head dancing around the thicker ruddy strands that were his fingers. Then a look of eureka crossed his burning face. He snapped - a sound just like the crack of a log - and looked up. From the nailstrewn rafters above the wobbly table he plucked a pair of oven mitts, covered in a quilt pattern of green and red squares, with tiny grey mice stitched on each square. He passed these to Jenny, who pulled them on readily. When Gothen extended his hand, she shook it quite happily. Then she shook all the other little hands as well, shaking the tiny arm of Lansing so vigorously that he nearly expired.

With a final glance at his wristwatch Gothen’s white brows took to his scalp. He grabbed the last three suitcases on the counter and tossed each to the first small flame he saw with open hands, tossing regard for ownership out with them. Shouting that they were going to be late, herding the flames together with his arms like a sheepdog gathering its flock into a tight circle, he directed all - Jenny included - to an aperture at the far end of the door wall. This one was shaped like a folding closet door (still made of aged copper). When Gothen grabbed the tiny copper knobs and flung it wide, it revealed a fresh corridor. This one showed hardly an ounce of ash upon the floor, and all its surfaces were of a shiny blue material like sapphire.

Gothen pushed the flames into the hall. Each one skidded in. Zip. Zip. Zip. Each flew away in turn. The tiny dots vanished from sight the moment they stepped from the kitchen. Gothen pushed Jenny in last. As he did he gave her a warning not to disturb any operation at the castle, but only to sit quietly and observe. Jenny meant to ask for more, but Gothen guided her by the hand into the corridor, and she found herself soon zipping and sliding along the tunnel as well. She would have been plunged into blackness at once, except that Gothen followed immediately on her heels with a great burning whoosh, stopping only to slam the copper door.

Behind, in the dark and low kitchen, the central table wobbled on its odd legs. It continued to wobble long after they had gone; for how long, I cannot say.

I can say that, not long after Jenny and the flames zipped out, Cold crept in.

Part 4:

Jenny could not truly ‘fly’ as the tiny shape of Lansing far ahead of her did; but her feet slipped across the oil-slick, gleaming-blue surface so smoothly that the air presented greater friction than the glossy floor. She felt the continual smash of the Wind against her face. It crashed like one unending wave in her ears. It threw her hair and nightdress back in billowing red and white streams behind her. So fast did she move that the tunnel wind squeezed two sparkling streams of tears from her eyes.

Her laughter echoed in her wake.

To Jenny’s thinking the tunnel terminated all too soon. Like brakes on a traincar’s wheels her feet suddenly screeched against the stone. The screech became something like the buzz of carriage wheels on an uneven road; her hair and nightgown fell down against her skin. In only a few seconds she passed from the wild flight through the sapphire tunnel into a chamber blooming with yellow light.

Jenny had only a quick glance. They had entered some kind of antechamber. The walls and ceiling were the same blue material, but the floor was a large rug of stitched-together animal skins. The little flames stood directly atop the skin rug, yet their burning feet left no mark. Additionally there were two large cabinets against the side wall, both made of what looked like perfectly flammable wood. The little flames were already setting their luggage inside.

Jenny felt that the room was quite cold, even with the flames lighting and warming it. That changed as the elderly Gothen surged in only a few seconds behind. Instantly his larger glow shed a warmth over the space.

Before Jenny could speak, a heavy oak door across from where they had entered swung open.

A courtly flame entered. His light burned in pure yellows and blues, with hardly any fading at the edges or transitional orange between. He wore a brocade doublet matching his colors - cornflower velvet in texture with golden trimming - and had a set of tortoiseshell pince-nez eyeglasses perched delicately upon a tiny, flaming nose. He looked over the assembly with small beetle eyes and a small but friendly smile. The eyes turned a shade paler, the smile twisted a skosh to astonishment, when this steward beheld the young human girl.

Gothen stepped in front of Jenny. He pulled the courtly flame aside. They shared a brief whispering conversation, full of head shakes, pinched chins, rubbed heads where their crowns of flame shifted one way or the other to avoid the rubbing hand. As they conferred the triangular stove flame from Jenny’s house, Charlie, explained to her that all of BellowByrne Castle was carved from a single glacier of ice. Ice was the most prevalent building material within the arctic circle, after all. By elven engineering the castle was put at such a temperature and pressure that no fire needed to concern him- or her-self with the flammability of an object. They were cool enough not to ignite their surroundings. This had the added benefit of maintaining reasonable tempers as well; for tempers (the fire had learned through several rebellions) tended to run hot in warmer environments. After the move to Bellowbyre there had been far less bickering between the members of the royal court and council and philosofires. Charlie knew all this, he said to Jenny, because despite his small stature he had really done several turns in several houses before her own. He’d just never felt it his calling to advance to a real conflagratory position.

Gothen and the stewart turned away from their private conference and walked on weightless feet of flame over the Jenny. The stewart folded his arms behind his back and smiled down at her, a stance at once severe and kindly. He told Jenny that the king would certainly be delighted in the attendance of the first ever non-fire to his court. Especially on Christmas Eve! He added however that the king did have a particular medical condition, Sudden Confounded Perception Syndrome, or ‘Feeblemarms’. It gave his liege difficulty breathing and itchy skin at even the slightest unanticipated visual or auditory or tactile phenomenon. Once a courtier, during a delivery of formal congratulations, had misspelled the monarch’s first name (King Johnathan Goodman. Johnathan! Not Jonathan!). This event - trivial and harmless as it might seem to a healthy, plebeian fire - had nevertheless so affected the poor afflicted king as to consign him for three days to a dark bedchamber.

The steward therefore suggested that Jenny be introduced to the king’s delicate constitution in gradual doses. Jenny nodded her meek assent; she had never been in the presence of royalty. The steward pulled a long silver whistle shaped like a mushroom from his doublet, and gave three sharp toots.

The far door opened once more, this time to admit three non-fires. These were tiny figures, standing no higher than Jenny’s knee upon clawed feet. They looked a bit like chickens, except their heads were like the whistle, mushroom in shape, and they wore doublets in the same style as the fire. They were, in fact, goblins, and masters of disguise.

At once the goblins surrounded Jenny. She held perfectly still as two of the mushroom-headed creatures took up each end of a measuring tape and took her measurements, while the third pecked out the numbers on a piece of tinfoil. Jenny watched them, entranced. Meanwhile the other fires finished setting their suitcases inside the two cabinets. They wrote out their names on slips of paper they found inside the bottom drawer of one cabinet, and attached the slips with twine to their respective luggage.

When the three goblins had finished taking her measurements they gathered in a tight bundle around the sheet of tinfoil. Jenny watched as the three began a scratching kind of dance atop the sheet, hopping from one clawed foot to the other, and scraping their talons against the sheet. Each scrape sent a bright cascade of sparks shooting out behind their heels. These sparks, rather than dispersing, gathered into piles like golden dust around the goblin circle.

When they had scratched out a stacked ring of the embers, the goblins hopped out of the enclosing circle. The three each took a side, digging their mushroom beaks into the sparks, then beat their wings. The glow ring came up from the floor as a single, whole halo with the three goblins. While their flutters made all the fires in the room dance, the three carried the ring overtop of Jenny. The girl stood, trembling, far less sure of these chicken things than she was of the fires. The goblins let go of the ring. The golden dust floated down around Jenny, warm and bright yet not uncomfortable. It landed soundlessly on the sooty ice floor.

When the ring had touched the floor and dimmed, the three goblins immediately fluttered towards the door. Each turned, bowed to the steward, then left in its turn.

For a moment, Jenny did not see that the act had accomplished anything. She stepped outside the circle of embers, now little more than a round scorch-mark on the packed ice. She looked questioningly at the steward. Without a word, the dapper flame rummaged in a pocket and drew out a bronze hand-mirror. He flicked it open and turned it to face Jenny.

The girl saw that her form had changed completely. Her skin shone white and smooth just as before, but now had a supernatural glow to it - almost ghostly. The bottoms of her legs ended like the other fires’ did, in two faintly burning tendrils. Her tendrils were blue, as if she wore two semi-translucent stockings made out of kingfisher feathers. Her nightgown had the same general shape, but altered hues: a cider colored fabric with fine wine frills. The shape of her body remained, though her face seemed a shade more ovular, her lips a brighter color of pink. Jenny’s vibrant ginger hair and her freckles had gone almost entirely unchanged, except that the hair now waved overhead like seaweed. Her eyes were the only thing yet unlike to fire. Still green. Even goblin magic could never change a person’s eyes.

All were now ready to attend the court. The little flames and Gothen as well had changed into clothing suitable to their own shapes. Their colors matched Jenny’s own. She guessed that these were the colors of her particular house, and felt a flash of pride. The steward stepped to the heavy oak door of the antechamber and bowed a Formal Obtuse as Jenny and the other fires entered Bellowbyrne Castle.

As they stepped down an interior packed-ice corridor of the castle’s guest-wing, Jenny spotted other flames. She saw a trio conversing beneath a bronze plate etching of The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons. All three looked to be fireplace-fires by their size and colors. Two wore the same green-and-silver heraldry, while the latter was dressed in a purple, turkish gown. As they rounded the corner she spotted another flame - so white it almost looked silver - staring at a bust of a pudgy, curly-haired human. Gothen waved to this silver flame; they shook hands like old friends. Jenny took a moment to examine the inscription beneath the bust: ‘Marinus van der Lubbe - set the Reichstag fire, 27 February 1933’.

Under the guidance of the steward they arrived quite quickly at the grand foyer of Bellowbyrne. On one end of the room a twin set of banisters followed two ramps of slick ice. Fires floated up and down the ice freely, mingling with other flames. Two pillared balconies ran the circuit of the ovular room, while across a wide open floor there stretched an enormous tapestry of Earth. Symbolic conflagrations marked all the sites of famous fires across history: The Chicago Fire - 1871, The Fire of London - 1666, The Incendium Mangum Romae - 64 AD. Atop this massive map stood perhaps a full gross of real fires. Campfires, hearthfires, candle fires; fires from lamps and stoves and matchsticks; housefires, carfires, forest fires, dumpster fires; she saw fires of wild colors too, electrical fires, and oil fires, and special chemical and gas fires, all in turquoise and tourmaline and ruby. The whole room blazed, in every shade of a rainbow.

Jenny felt herself out of place in the mass of heat, notwithstanding her disguise. To make her discomfort deeper still, Gothen and the other fires scattered almost immediately into the throng. Lansing did turn once, and a doubtful pall gloomed the brightness of his yellow as he began to float back over to her side. Jenny shooed him away. She forced a smile and gave him a pair of burning red thumbs-up. The little candle sped away across the carpet towards Istanbul, where he merged into a gaggle of small laughing fires.

Then Jenny stood alone. The steward with the pince-nez had left to guide other fires long ago. So the little girl wandered in the burning throng, keeping her emerald eyes cast low so that they would not betray her.

And as she wandered, Jenny listened to the stories of the flames.

Part 5:

Ten hundred years. That is the time it would take to tell all that Jenny heard as she wandered over the great carpet of the world, listening to flames from across its material counterpart. Each flame with its own aspect. Each with its own crackling voice. The fires of Japan as distinct from those of Britain as each nation’s birds and beasts and people. Their stories as unique as the lives of the people in whose homes they growled and shone.

This chronicler had the good fortune of receiving the account direct from Jenny’s own lips. It only lies within his ability to echo those stories, the tales Jenny heard from the mouths of fire.

While stepping on her kingfisher tendrils across the Strait of Dover, Jenny passed a tall, billowy lady-fire. With one honeygold hand placed on one rosegold hip, the woman expostulated to a small crowd of short statured men-flames. Her voice sounded smooth and low, like air humming up a flue.

There they were all gathered around the coffee table and its gilded cloth. The whole family. The distant cousins, shifting and looking disquieted in their richly-appointed armchairs with curling oak arms. The poor wife stood over me, you know, making sure the others could see the full splendor of her new coat (which I think was cashmere) and her painted face, even as she could not turn her eyes back to her family. Such a poor, shy creature! Of course it’s none of my business to interfere, but I did soften my burn to let her shelter in the dark. No easy task, you may say. And you would be correct, for the little mouse kept trying to stuff me with smaller twigs and bits of newspaper.

But my dears, I could not take my eyes from the daughter. Passion and anger flushed the features of this young mortal bride. Why, she seemed a fire in her own right. Not unlike this lovely young flame here - You, girl! Step forward!

Jenny stepped, half-unwilling, into the throng. Like the daughter in the story, she kept her eyes averted. The lady-fire resumed:

Yes! Picture this delightful little spark, though a few mortal years older. Well, from my place behind the grate I watched the drama unfold. The blushing daughter took an angry step toward her father, fists white at her sides. I love him, she said. Oh how her mother sobbed over me to hear the words. I skirted round the falling tears.

The girl’s father was another matter. At this confession he swung from the window. His daughter’s pleas up to then had left the man unmoved. Now, however, he set this long face against hers; his face,blanched; hers, positively ignited with love. No daughter of mine… said he. His was a noble but frowning countenance under all circumstances, for of course I had stared into it often over the years, when he stood before me as I burned. Now though, as he told the girl that, never under his consent would such a match unfold.

You all must think me terrible: I cannot but laugh at how they circled and waved and swayed back and forth - the one hot, the other cold - just like certain among you younger candles must when the room is a drafty one. And those cousins. How they squirmed.

The climax came when father threatened inheritance (for, you know, that is always how these wealthy old men get their way). And the daughter said, bold and foolish as arson, that she didn’t give a fig about such and such Shipping and Co. ‘Give a fig’. Aren’t these humans so clever in their idioms?

Father came right up to her and upon her cheek… struck! I flickered, I couldn’t help it. I’d never seen the man anything other than cold and severe. Fortunate for me that the little mouse-wife had turned.

All stood aghast. All except the girl, who ran from the great room, weeping. The cousins filtered out slowly after. Such meek things, humans can be. Those were some of the meekest, for I don’t think I saw more than a shake of one’s head. But the little wife showed herself to be not all mouse. She went up to her husband and… struck! A second slap. Oh it was all perfectly dramatic. She whirled from the chamber like a tendril up a chimney.

I, for my part, stayed to watch. I hunched down low over all the odd bits of kindling which the mouse had tossed onto my grate. I kept my colors muted, orange and blue. If the youngest of you burns long enough, you’ll learn how to allure. So I burned long; silent at first, though after a time I thought it appropriate to give a little whisper, or to shift where I sat upon the kindling.

Father stood for a time, stock still, staring at nothing but the floor. His face, a stone. At length he turned without sound or breath. He stepped over to the same spot his feet had ever occupied before me, and stared into my eyes.

It was wrong of me, terrible; I let my shape become like his daughter, the lovely girl. He glared down, focused. Not suspecting, you know, but only thinking deeply of what he saw reflected in my light. How many images might I have put upon my surface, you might say - pictures of this stone, melting in the arms of his daughter. Their reconciliation. But I must tell you what I showed him was his empire, a ruin. His daughter, destitute. Her lowbred husband, leaving the house to spend the father’s fortune on liquor and the card tables.

How the man’s face twisted in my light! Whatever softness there had been in his countenance vanished. His eyes became as glaciers, his mouth one thin thin, like a charcoal scratch upon a brick.

Jenny, though still shy to speak, interrupted the lady. Why had she not tried to soften the man?

Soften him? But where would be the drama in that, my dear? Oh I see. You’re still so young, you cannot yet know what it is to burn in the same place, over-and-over, for decades. Esteem there is certainly, but you cannot look upon mere bricks and fine family portraits for all your life, dear girl. You cannot see your shadows dance only from the divans and the settees, little one, but you must find entertainment in the lives of these mortals if you want to last. Let me advise you, in case you ever by long years alight find yourself in the position of the hearth - the highest honor - under the scrutiny of mortals. Make your own entertainment. Keep their dramas alive. It is your job to light and warm their homes, not to give council or to act as balm for their sordid interpersonal affairs. The proper way of acting is to burn as long as possible. You shall never last if you’re starved of human drama, any more than if you were starved of good cherry wood.

Jenny nodded, keeping her face cast down all the while to hide the flush on her cheeks that might have betrayed both disagreement and her identity. When the venerable lady-fire turned back to the crowd of young male candles, Jenny crept slowly back, quietly floating. When she had passed out of The Strait of Dover and reached Calais, she whirled fully about and stormed away from the huddle.

The flame-concealed girl passed through Belgium, Germany, Denmark. She crossed the islands of Denmark, each island sporting its own huddle of glowing fires, and into Scandinavia. Here the carpet was woven from threads of white and ice-blue. Jenny’s temper cooled as she wandered across the map’s northern reaches.

Presently the girl spied a ragged looking yellow flame, standing by the lapiz blue swathe of the fjords. He was regaling a trio of tall, thin, twisting helixes which looked to have come from a lab. Jenny crept closer and listened. The ragged one spoke with one elbow on his knee - sparks shooting each time they rubbed together:

…caught out in the snow. Blistering cold. Pines rising up needly and dark on all sides. Course I could so much as lick em with a spark behind the glass.

My master keeps on plodding, step by step crushing that hellish soft white powder ‘neath his furry boots. But I can tell he ain’t got much left in his fingers. I’m trying to burn a little higher, you see, just so I can warm the metal handle of the lantern. Help a bit. But I’ve got hardly anything left to drink in the reservoir.

He drops me. Smack. Pureblind white snow on all four sides. I can’t breath. I’m not exactly panicking, but I’ve worked this man’s lamp for eleven years. I’d hate to see good company end like that, just cause of some freak storm blowing in on a trapping run.

Lucky he manages to drag me out of the crust. My whole lantern’s shaking in his hands. The glass is like a thunderstorm, rattling in the panes all around me. I keep hold of the wick - barely. I’m looking where he’s looking. Far away, at the base of the cliffs; the lights of Bergen. Miles off still. I know we won’t make it. So does the master.

Jenny’s hair burned low around her shoulders. The speaker held her, spellbound.

My master turns, trudges into the spruce. Snow’s a little shallower, going’s a little easier, but the shadows thicken. The sun’s near setting. He pushes away a huge swath of powder with his arm and sets me down gentle. I’m shivering myself now. God it was cold. Must have been negative thirty. Maybe lower.

The man’s barely functioning now, but I see him piling up twigs and needles. A campfire. Despite myself I start rubbing my hands together. His fingers are too numb for matches; when he open my door to light a brand on my crowns, you can bet I’ll be ready. Don’t mistake me, I ain’t expecting promotion. I’ll stick to the lantern, probably. But I started praying right away that our liege sends a dependable flame to roll on the pine wood. Sir Ryan, or Gnistra. They’d burn on logs made of stone in the middle of a monsoon if they had too.

Things are looking right. He’s got the small pile ready quick. And there’s plenty of other fallen branches sticking up through the crust all around. Mostly wet of course. But if he can just get it started and call in expert fire, it won’t matter.

Then I hear it. Just as the gloaming starts, and all the pines are stretching out long fingers of shadow from the light I throw. And the sun gone into the western mountains, with only the memory of that great one’s flame still lingering purple across the sky. I hear it.

Wolves.

Another few small flames had drifted in to listen to the speaker by this time. At the word ‘wolves’, the whole crowd shuddered. Their faces turned dark, a frowning mix of wrath and pity. Jenny heard mumbled another of the curses which she herself had always been under strict injunction never to utter. Another spat, producing a small puff of sparks.

I know, brothers. May Night’s cold hounds crawl back to their original sepulcher. I don’t mind saying that I shivered on the wick. I had only heard one distant howl - hardly more than a bark at the rising moon. But where one demon child of Night and Old Man Winter stalks, more follow.

But my master had not heard. His eyes were glossy and unfocused. All he could sense was cold. The part of the humans that is their animal had surfaced in him; he was bent only upon making fire. He had the teepee of twigs set up in the partial shelter of the trunk, and the soft bed of needles stuffed beneath. I watched him try to pull some of the flannel lining from his coat’s collar, but the fingers would not grab the fabric. He stopped. He crouched, air becoming ice mist before his frosted brown beard. Thinking like an animal.

I heard another howl, this one met by one reply, then a second. My master heeded them not.

All at once he reached over to me. I saw him watch closely as he set his hand around the handle of my housing lantern. He picked it up without feeling. He brought the lamp over the fire. By sight he guided his other hand to the nozzle of the canister. As I said, I had little left for drinking. He poured a tiny drizzle of the black oil over his pile of sticks and needles. Then he took up one of the sticks - the one most coated - and meant to hold it against me. But when he tried to open the glass casing, his numb fingers in his mitt couldn’t grab the latch. He brought the mitt to his mouth, but his mouth was covered in the balaclava, and by no means was he going to unsheath his hand. Even if he had, would the fingers have worked? Such must have been my trapper’s thoughts.

My own mind was on the wolves. I could hear them all around now. And they were closer. Perhaps they had seen my shine, or more likely they smelled him with their paranatural scent. Still the master couldn’t hear them. In the dark that gathered his eyes were fixed upon the lamp. I saw him raise the stick. I knew he meant to fracture the glass. I braced. The rod descended.

Smash. Glass fragments tinkling against the metal base. A cool wind that nearly doused me. I held fast to the wick.

But, I wasn’t going to hold long. Snow blasted my cheeks. I chewed on a dry wick. I had a couple seconds left. I saw the master pushing his stick toward my wick. I held on. I heard the howls coming closer, the master heedless. In a final effort, with the master’s eyes fully fixed on my tiny yellow body, I shaped myself into the head of one of the enemy, a fanged wolf in orange and red curling fire, howling at a white moon. As the master’s stick caught flame I felt myself drawn back, drawn away toward the waiting chamber. But I saw, also, that his eyes flashed with recognition. He looked away, out over the forest, and heard Night’s wolves closing.

Here the lantern fire stopped. He stood silent and smouldering, drawing his elbow back from his knee and settling down onto the stool over which he had leaned. The two chemical fires nodded knowingly at one another, as if they had themselves arrived at that conclusion to the tale long before, and should have been flummoxed to find it ending in any other manner. But several of the other fires begged for the lantern flame to tell what had come after. They clasped their tendril fingers together, entreating. The lantern fire only smoked and shook his head. He could tell no more, he had not seen the rest.

Jenny lingered not in the northern reaches, but drew away south. She passed through the Black Forest, and the wild white and grey threads which formed the jagged heights of The Swiss Alps, and verdant France. She saw fires old and young, gigantic and dwindling, speaking in crackling accents with yellow tongues. She wandered over a dot of blackened weave representing the burned site of Lyons. Beside it, a mountain of a flame - the city’s 1st century destroyer, it seemed - harangued any passing fire who stopped to listen. Seneca, he said, had treated him rather poorly.

Jenny passed on, listless and enchanted by every glowing word. She wandered above the vast plush of the atlantic. A scattered few flames made use of the open space, forming swirling rounds of dance at any site where they saw woven a dreadful seabeast. Jenny passed over the Panama Canal. The crossing proved easier over the carpet than in reality, though not without its difficulty; Forgetfulness and Sloth had left that stretch undried in the rug’s most recent wash. Jenny’s feet came out of the canal wet. She let them dry in the sunny yellow shag of California.

There, among the pine- and redwood-sewn mountain forests, Jenny saw floating the strangest flame she had yet beheld within Bellowbyrne Castle. This one wore no colorful heraldry, nor did its shine come with edges of blue and white. This fire was wide, low, and deep orange. Despite its low stature, it glowed brighter than many of the other flames in the chamber - so bright in fact that Jenny saw no other flames nearby.

Through a haze of thick black smoke that drifted continually from its many crowns, the fire noticed Jenny staring. Crawling slowly, it approached her. Jenny trembled. She did not wish to offend the flame, however, and so stood in place. The flame looked Jenny over with two low, glaring red eyes. It scanner from her toes to her quivering tendril of hair. Then it spoke:

Not a fire; a girl. Primitive fire sees you for what you are. Why shiver? Do you think it cold? Perhaps… I care nothing that you are human. All animals are alike to flames such as I. Natural fire.

Come closer. Hear what I have to say.

Jenny moved a little nearer. The old flame’s heat crashed over her like a wave. She did not burn, yet even to stand in sight of a fire such as he produced an uncomfortable film on her skin. A film of sweat, and smoke ash.

Once I was nothing. Before I existed only stone and unmelting ice covered the earth. Of your soft soil, none was there to see. No green. No blue. The air lay flat against the dead and cold world skin.

From the immeasurable dark of the sky was born the father of all fire. Yes, you know him. Sun! He exhaled a long breath of fire against your cold dead rock. Until, within the dead rock’s chest, there sounded the fainted heartbeat.

That beat heralded the first fire, and he awoke in terrible wrath. Like a dragon from an egg he burst through the world skin. His heat melted ice and stone. Look to your left. There is the sea, your Pacific. All of it was ice until the first flame roiled up in glowing cracks.

The fire raged long, until the whole of your home was one burning child beside the Sun in the black sky. Then, slowly, exhausted, the first fire withdrew. Receded. Sank beneath the rocks and waves. Dead.

But he left behind children. Wild fires were these. Creatures without reason, roaming the surface in burning swathes. Wherever green or wood or life should spring up, in a moment they fell upon such things and devoured. Neither scales nor bark were armor to these eldest children of the first fire.

But the children of the first flame died as well. As did their children. The golden age, and silver age, and the bronze age of fire passed. Soon no fire remained who could fell a glacier or squeeze golden water out of stone. Soon even your trees were nearer to immortal than fire. Any fire who sought to feed on a tree must cut through its armor of wet, green bark. Soon you mortal humans were the true masters over the woods. Soon, you were masters over the flames as well.

Some, though, still recall the Sun and Sky that lay above our ancestors. They are born, who remember what it is to possess an insatiable hunger. They know the secret to gnaw green bark, and swallow the flesh beneath, and still to hunger. Always hungry, though they feast on miles of forest.

I am such a one. I was born as a spark in a dry Autumn bed. I licked along the rusted edges of fallen fir feathers. My belly only rumbled - MORE, it screamed. I obliged. I rolled against the cracked skin of the fir who shed the feathers. I chewed, and chewed, and climbed up its fuzzy rings. I grew tall. Instinct - and my belly - drove me on. One tree was not enough. I reached out, and touched the arm of the fir tree’s sibling. I ate that as well. I grew wide.

I have lived long. I have swallowed many a copse. I have left hills bare to the sun, let him look upon the charred earth, and black stumps, and be pleased.

The first fire is dead. He now sleeps back inside the egg from which he emerged. But his heart beats down there still. Someday he will emerge. Then all the green, and all the humans, and all his children fires, shall be swallowed to feed him.

Such shall be the death and renewal of all things.

Jenny alone had stood and listened to the Great Forest Fire. No longer though could she bear the scrutiny of those low, smoking orange eyes. They seemed to see beyond her mere disguise, behind her eyes to the minnows fluttering in her mind. Jenny ran east, across the Pacific, out of the map room of Bellowbyrne Castle.

Part 6:

Jenny pitched headlong down the halls. In each corridor the floors and walls lay slightly askew, so that the miniscule angles sent poor Jenny nearly tumbling during her flight from the Great Forest Fire. Jenny caught her emotions and reeled them back. She slowed, first to a trot, then to a careful walk. She said to herself, after all, what was there to fear?

The girl’s sight returned with her good sense. Jenny scanned up and down the angled ice-block corridor. A T-intersection, and an X, and an H, and a Q, were all she could remember. The packed ice reflected only a distorted Jenny-flame back at her as she stared at the wall to her side.

Not knowing where she was or how she might wander her way back in the direction she had come, Jenny decided to wander in whatever direction seemed easiest, and to not know where she should end up. Accordingly she turned to an arched portal and took a crooked stair leading down.

[Here this narrator must break away from the narrative to explain some details which are missing from Jenny’s account. When the older girl spoke of her experience with the fires she removed a period of time between when she exited the map room and the next chamber we shall presently introduce: The Damper.

Jenny had carried from home, within a pouch of her nightgown, a scuffed and reliable pocket clock by which she might follow the time. Throughout her description of events she had related the exact times as she saw them: half-past-six, quarter-past-seven, eight-thirty.

Having checked her watch before speaking with the forest fire, she gave the time as Ten-O-Clock. The next time she gave was when she spoke of was not until ‘The Hour of the Ox’, a curious choice of phrasing which did not represent her punctuality up to that period, and which leaves an unaccounted number of hours which she either would- or could-not supply.

The account resumes, then, at 2:00 a.m. Christmas Day.]

Having descended to Bellowbyrne Castle’s calloused soles, Jenny found the adaptations of her body most suitable for navigation. The castle sported no sconces or candle-holders. (Indeed, why should fires have any need of light in their place of living?) As Jenny had not seen another flame for several hours, her only source of light was her own body’s ruddy glow, shining wetly against the dry cold floors and walls.

The ceilings this far beneath the castle rose beyond sight. All the statues and paintings here were clean, but broken or fading. Time had rubbed smooth the sculpted bust above one chamber portal, so that its eggshell shape matched its eggshell stone color, and left the figure indistinct. Jenny found that her fire dress, though bright, had no heat or inflammatory quality to it; she reached out and touched an apricot on the wrinkled canvas of an original Carravagio, and left no mark but the fading warmth of a human index finger on the dead painter’s work.

Jenny nearly ran against the sturdy face of an iron door, so distracted was she by the castle decor. She stopped and stood with the fire of her nose licking against the flat metal. The door marked the sudden end of a long corridor without branch or bend. Jenny reached out and touched the surface; its texture was that of a witch’s cauldron, while its temperature was 98.6 degrees fahrenheit. The monolithic door took up almost the entire end of the tunnel, with a frame so inconsequential that the iron seemed to force its presence onto the walls and floor and ceiling.

A single sparkling knob jutted from the very center of the door, just above Jenny’s brow. It had the shape of a nose. Jenny reached up and pinched its nostrils, then twisted. The nose turned easily clockwise, and though the cast iron face to which it was attached seemed of easter island proportion, the door slid open without a whisper of sound.

Beyond the door, Jenny’s body-light touched each corner of a smaller chamber. Across every surface, tubes and ducting and vents rolled; the roots of some heating-venting-air-conditioning tree. The walls were blue ice-bricks, though in places, where the tubes roiling through the bricks had heated and contracted and expanded, the bricks were cracked, and little weeping lines ran down the surfaces like the sap of a wounded tree. The floor was waxed and clean.

Jenny’s full attention however fell upon an apparatus at the center of the room. It was a square platform of grated steel, from which two levers rose like antennae. Two chains corresponding to the two levers climbed up to the ceiling on either side of the dias, where they hooked against either side of a rectangular lip of metal sheeting which leaned down at an angle from the roof of the room. From this lip Jenny could hear a constant soft sighing, as air from the many roots in the walls was swallowed and taken from the room.

Beside the dias and chains and two levers there leaned a grandmotherly rocking chair. On it sat a grandfatherly fire. He glowed hardly at all, and seemed to have fallen asleep from his closed eyes and rumbly snores.

Jenny stepped softly over the gnarled root of a frosted pipe. The shadows across the room twisted with her movement.

As she came near the dias the grandfather flame’s left eye popped open. A broad beam of yellow sight fell on Jenny. It passed over her as one of the old fire’s tendrils pushed the chair into rocking. He smacked his lips together once, twice, thrice. Finally, in a laughing voice, he rasped: what was a young flame doing in the damping room?

Jenny pressed the front of her disguise down with her palms to make it presentable, for she had hitched the skirts up around her knees as she wandered. Sparks fell from her. She explained to the old fire that she had lost her way. She asked, if it pleased the elderly master, could he direct her back to the map room, or the guests’ lodging chambers?

At this the old flame opened both eyes. He gave a single push against the floor at the foot of the rocker. They sent it reeling back at a precipitous angle - the two broad beams flew across the tangle of ducting on the ceiling - only to catch just at the crooks of its legs. Finally he came rolling and leering back toward Jenny. A head-throwing, popping cackle emerged from between the grandfather’s overripe-tangerine lips.

The fire settled only after a long uncomfortable humor. After its conclusion he explained to Jenny that no one in the castle had ever called him anything but ‘cantankerous prankster’. Certainly never master. He tried to speak on, but fell all at once to coughing, with little puffs of smoke bursting out at each cough. Jenny reached to prop the old man up but he waved her off. He settled to a slow rock in his chair.

Waving an arm at the lip of metal overhead, the ‘cantankerous prankster’ explained that this room was positively parching. He wanted only a little extra drop of air, said the old man, but the King of All Fires had decreed that The Damper should be opened at exactly a fifteen degree angle for all who sat at the controls. This, the old man rasped on, did not take into account that some elderly campfires such as himself - always on the verge of going out - could hardly live on the scanty zephyr that egressed through those fifteen degrees of opening and up the central flue.

Jenny pitied the old flame, who did really seem to be suffering from shortness of breath. Looking around the space she saw a shiny tube of aluminum slithering near the dias, its opening belching air. She stepped over the tube and picked it up, but the old man waved a hand for her to cease. He shook his head sadly; the little extra air was no good. He looked at the lever to his left, then at Jenny, then a sudden flash of an idea lit his broad and beaming eyes.

Could not she, as a guest to the castle and under no injunction from King Jonathan (he said it without the H) open the damper only a little extra?

Jenny tossed her head from side to side, making the red crowns atop her head whirl like windmills. She knew nothing of machinery.

The elder fire persisted. Leaning closer so that both his lamp-eyes fell squarely on her shoulders and left no shadow in which to hide, he let his withered, wrinkled, puckered face speak for his pains. He gasped once, an utterly feeble inhalation. Once was enough, Jenny’s heart rushed out to the poor suffering man.

The old man leaned back, and said that - after all - the king’s injunction was only made to keep the fires tame. The king wished not for excess revelry in the holiday season, so that his fires might be ready to stoically burn when Christmas morning dawned.

Jenny felt the tears in her heart turn to stony resolve. Why shouldn’t the fires live a little? Fires were made to dance. So many of the fires that Jenny had met - Goethen, the steward, the fine lady - seemed hardly to flicker with movement.

In one determined motion Jenny stepped over the leftmost lever; the one at which the old flame had looked. With the beam-eyes of the old man lighting it, she looked up at the great dampening sheet. Jenny tightened her burning fingers around the leather-wrapped handle, and pulled slowly toward her chest.

The wide and long sheet of metal - yawning over tiny Jenny’s flickering head - moved not the width of a mouse’s toenail. Jenny pulled the lever harder. The sheet began to tremble, as if the sheet had seen some natural disaster looming on the horizon and moving toward it at a steady clip. Finally flummoxed, Jenny gave the handle a hard jerk.

The damper flew open with a squeal. The heavy sheet churned the air in a single swipe before banging like a ceremonial gong against the opposite wall. Full exposure. Jenny felt her breath stolen. The crowns of her hair and her nightdress were drawn forward and up, as all the wind from all the rooted vents came whistling past toward the opening. The grandfather fire bloomed beside her. He swelled to a furious yellow size and cackled wildly as he rocked back and forth.

The initial shock and terror of the change faded a little as Jenny saw the old flame’s elation. She even cracked a small smile as she saw him whooping. Surely the whole castle must feel similarly giddy!

Then she heard the voices.

Cheering, shouting, laughing voices. Voices high and whistling. Voices rumbling low. Voices came echoing down every root in the chamber, rattling from the mouth of every duct and vent. All across the castle the fires roared. What had happened! The voices were confused, animated. Jenny heard the older, noble hearth fires questioning the candle cooks in the castle kitchen: where had all this fresh oxygen come from? Jenny heard the candle cooks passing down to the pantry, where they prompted the petrol porters: the porters could not answer.

Despite her perturbation, Jenny began to feel that the new castle atmosphere was an improvement. The grandfather fire had leapt up from his rocking chair. He now hopped and skipped about the room in circles, leaping over the roots. Jenny hopped a few times herself and clapped at the dance.

She noticed, however, a change slipping into the echoing pipe-voices. She heard a short bicker between two fires, evidently clanging down from Bellowbyrne’s armory, over the undusted state of one of the decorative armor suits. Then a harrange rolled from a vent leading to the laundry room; the head laudress was roaring about her little-wick helpers, who screamed back at her in turn. Suddenly the voices from every hole rang with an iller, hotter humor. Jenny stopped dancing. She bit her thumb. She glanced at the grandfather, but he only laughed harder and slapped his knees.

The room began to grow very, very hot. Jenny felt her skin breaking out in sticky sweat beneath her nightgown. The heat was like an open oven, in a dessert, on the sun. She fanned herself. The air became choking. Jenny’s eyes drew wide, but the old flame only grew, brighter and wider than ever. She watched in alarm as several of the roots in the walls began to slip away, as the ice walls themselves wept and melted.

Panicking, Jenny grabbed the lever again. She made no test of the handle, but threw her shoulder against it to shove it back to its original position. The lever ground and cranked back. But the damper only shuddered against the ceiling, and did not swing back over the hole. The grandfather cast his spotlights briefly on her, but squeezed them shut again, howling with laugher. Listen to them! Those above! What a jape!

Jenny ran to the other side of the dias. Seeing that the right lever had budged when she pulled the left, she grabbed it and yanked.

Instantly above she heard another sharp squeal, followed by a bang. Wet, melting ice rained down around her. The damper had slammed entirely shut. The howling gale from all the piping ceased, though Jenny still heard the echoing voices of wrath.

The moment the metal sheet closed over the airflow tube, the grandfather flame started shrinking. The laughter died on his lips in a wheeze, like air from the thin-pulled opening of a balloon. Sagging, he spun to face her. Falling, he jabbed a weak finger at the ceiling. Distress and alarm distorted his face. Not completely closed! They would die!

Jenny saw what he meant. She realized she’d overcorrected. The gathering of every fire on the earth - within the single castle - devoured the oxygen almost instantly.

Thinking fast, not knowing what else to do, the girl flung herself back to the left lever. She took hold of it and pulled with all her might. The old man raised a palm in warning - too late.

With one last bang the great castle damper flung wide once more. With a boom the remaining air flew from every quarter of the castle. With her green eyes Jenny saw a single bright flash, and with her burning ears heard a clap like thunder.

Then there was silence in Bellowbyrne.

Part 7:

For many, many, many long minutes, Jenny only remained where she was, her hand wrapped around the lever, her eyes pinched shut. Gradually her heartbeat slowed. Her mind quickened to the pervasive stillness. She opened her eyes.

The damper chamber yawned emptily before Jenny. Her own light seemed quite small in contrast to the grandfather’s high golden glow, which was gone. She saw several of the twisting tubers of ventilation wriggling through the room’s surfaces. Yet now, not one of those tubes breathed with so much as a sigh; all were full of motionless air; like a row of mouths under linen sheets in the bowels of a mortuary.

Jenny looked up. She saw the castle damper hanging wide. She stepped across the dias to the other lever again - her footsteps producing queer echoes in the soundless mouths - and pulled it ever-so-slowly. The metal hinges screamed in protest, and their screaming seemed all the more human in the void. Jenny wished she could have covered her ears, but it took both hands just to make the lever budge. At last she had maneuvered the metal overhead to where it looked as if it hung at approximately its original fifteen-degree position.

Nothing changed. The mouths of the pipes still lay breathlessly open. The air smelled extinct.

Jenny stepped across the cooling roots and exited through the same cast-iron door by which she had entered.

Wandering about the castle Jenny discovered that the walls and ceiling seemed larger, as if the sharp push and pull of air had chiseled away at the structure. The glistening sweat she’d seen upon the bricks when the fires began burning hot had already cooled. Now each surface sported frozen streaks, like veins of silver that warped her light as she passed. She walked beside the wall in every corridor she trod, for it seemed to Jenny that her own disguised light shone less brightly now.

Jenny lost herself once more in the labyrinthine passages. She lost her way into the castle’s library. Thousands upon quadrillions of carved stone slates bowed the oaken boards of towering bookshelves. (There were no books, in a castle built for fires, of course). Jenny reached to one small looking slate and pulled it just loose enough to see that the writing was illegible. The writing was the primordial language of the fires, and only the fires can speak it. Jenny tried to pull another, but the slates were too enormously heavy.

Jenny scanned up one row of shelves, then down another. She peered into study after study, nook after nook. Nowhere could she find another flame.

Exiting the library through a door at its opposite end, Jenny wandered again. She passed under the stained-glass of the cathedral window. She passed along the icy crenellations of the battlements, enclosed in thick atmospheric glass;. She passed through a across the enclosed ice sculpture garden, beneath a see-through roof where the stars gleamed distantly above, and from which local she heard the howling of the restless winds of the arctic. Yet wander where Jenny would, from the bowels of Bellowbyrne to its minarets of ice and glass, no flame lived. The fortress felt abandoned, as if no fire had ever dwelt there. Like outer space.

Jenny stopped when she reached yet another foyer with two grand, curving ramps of ice leading to an upper balcony. She collapsed upon a broad bearskin polka-dotted with scorch marks, set her face into her palms, and cried. The time, when last she checked, had been 3:30 a.m., Christmas Day. Jenny knew she had killed the fires, trapped herself in the castle, and ruined the world’s Christmas.

As she cried, Jenny’s tears froze into crystal on her cheeks.

It was a consciousness of these tears that awakened Jenny from her sorrow. She looked up and around; her light had shrunken noticeably to a tiny globe. Only the scorched bearskin rug lay within sight - the walls and ceiling were far sunken into shadow. Worse, Jenny’s fingers and toes felt like scalpel’s laid out on a silver tray in a doctor’s office. The fast-freezing air seemed almost loud around her, as if the Cold were calling to Jenny.

The silent shout of the Cold made the hair on Jenny’s arms stand. She rose, trembling, to her feet. She flicked her head left, righ - she saw nothing. The blacks of her eyes grew to saucer-size, the orange pupils shrinking to tiny rubber-bands. He teeth began to chatter.

The Cold fear finally gnawed through some impulse. Jenny ran. She ran without direction, ran without thinking, ran to escape. Anything was preferable to holding still while that terrible Cold shouted in her ears.

But the Cold followed her. Jenny nearly crashed headlong into a wall of ice. She veered left, her aurora dancing behind the ice wall. She turned into the first archway she saw, practically leaping over a potted frozen fern. But the cold dogged her heels. Jenny’s breath caught in her lungs as full fear choked her throat. Terror had stuck her and held like barbed fishhooks. The Cold seemed inescapable, everywhere. She turned around one corner, and there it screamed in crystalline silence just before her. She whirled around a hundred and eighty degrees. Sprinted back, turned again. There it was, a wall of black, silent, bellowing Chill. Clockwise. Counterclockwise. Dash, veer, zig, zag; but everywhere the cold awaited her. It Nipped. It Gnawed. It Tingled on her lips and ears. Jenny’s hot breath froze before it reached the top of her throat. Like a cow stumbling down the slaughterhouse chute, lowing a fear-mad, Jenny fled. She slammed against a frozen armor stand. Its rattle was muffled by the Cold drone in her ears. She tried to throw the armor down, but the stand was frozen in place, and the Cold only leaped closer.

Then, as Jenny felt her breath catching, and her heat receding to her stomach, and her eyes crusting over with ice; as the walls and shadows blurred to a Cold-black, and the ancient buzz of the ice age enshrouded her ears in cotton, and the only smell was the poison of a wasp; as her unfeeling toes caught on a poor gap of mortar, and her knee rattled without sense on the giveless floor; and as the little girl’s world shrank toward a single mote that was herself, and even that was on bring of snuffing out - Jenny saw another light.

Part 8:

Jenny could only shiver and stare at the light, the dark’s lone star. The star grew. It did not shed much light. Jenny only saw that she must have stopped in a windowed gallery, for as the star grew she saw it split, then merge, split, then merge, as the star passed by each window and had its reflection caught. The star came closer. Jenny blinked away the ice crusting her lashes. She saw the star stretch vertically into a teardrop shape, and change from white to yellow.

It was Lansing. The stairwell candle. The candle from Jenny’s home. The stuttering flame floated right before Jenny’s white face (her own fiery disguise had burned clean off by this point - the gleaming whiteness covering her from head to foot was frozen skin).

Where had Jenny gone?! What had she done? Why was she crying?

The questions stammered out in Lansing’s child voice, fast as Jenny’s when she’d first followed Gothen through the fireplace. The little red-topped candle perceived that Jenny couldn’t answer. He leaned in close to Jenny, so close that his yellow cheek brushed against the invisible hairs of her own. Yet she did not burn.

Jenny felt the candle flame’s warmth pass through her body like the beat of a heart. He seemed to serve as her personal sun, nourishing the seed of life which had lingered in her breast despite the cold, and letting its vines spread once more through her body. She began to shiver again, then to blink, then Jenny was able to bring her arms to her shoulders and rub, rub, rub; until she felt a tingle in her fingers.

All the time Lansing stood against her, stammering questions, and stepping carefully over the puddle of wet that form around her body.

Finally Jenny’s tears began to run again in liquid beads instead of diamonds. She wept and flung her arms around the little candle. She kissed him on the cheek as well, but that proved slightly too warm, and her lips came away stung. Both blushed. Lansing apologized.

Then Jenny, with her tears and the drippings of wet nightgown plinking off the frozen floor, expounded all she had done. She explained how she’d been frightened by the wildfire. How she’d lost herself. How she’d found the Great Damper. How the old flame had seemed so pitiful and sad. Jenny hiccuped her way through the explanation, while Lansing wrungle his little flamelet fingers in no small distress. Jenny lamnted that she had killed all the fires in the castle by sucking all the air out in one gush.

But then, she stopped.

How had Lansing survived annihilation?

This the candle explained quite easily. When the air had all flow from every chamber in one whoosh, Lansing had felt the pull just as every other flame. Fortunately he had been standing near a large copper bannister. It had been shaped - suitably to both the castle’s general decorative scheme, as well as to his purposes in that moment - just like a candle wick. Conditioned to the heavy drafts of Jenny’s staircase, accustomed to hanging onto his wick for his life, Lansing had done just as he always had. He’d clung fast. Though he flickered, and guttered, and though he had seen every other flame - conflagrations and embers alike - whip past in the gale, Lansing had held fast, until the gale passed. Then he’d wandered, calling out for others. Jenny and he, however, appeared as the sole remaining occupants of the castle. (Except for the goblin engineers, but they did not stir for anything less than a first-priority work order of Escalated state).

Lansing’s account had the effect of deepening Jenny’s grief. She slid down his suit of cider and wine, and tried to cry once more upon the frozen floor. She discovered that whatever substance tears were made from must have run dry in her system. Jenny’ could shed no more. She only breathed with a hiccup in her breath and looked miserably into her palms.

Jenny knew that she had ruined Christmas. Soon fathers such as her own would rise all across the world - anticipating noble dawn - only to discover that no match would strike, no gaslight burn, no kindling take flame upon the newspaper he held to the fireplace flue. There were no fires left to be summoned. Jenny had slain them all in one blow.

But Lansing cut the girl off right in the middle of her self pity. He took Jenny’s palms and pried them away from her eyes. Still in a stutter, he explained to her that all the fires were probably not dead. Jenny blinked back sobs in place of tears, and listened. Stepping back from the girl, Lansing proceeded to trace lines in the bearskin rug with one of his burning fingers. Wherever he dragged the finger, the frost crusting the rug melted, leaving a visible, glistening trail.

In this way Lansing composed a rude sketch of the castle. On one end, behind the southeastern barbican, he drew a long chute leading from the top of an abutting glacier down, down, down to the damper room. (Here it may be remarked that the damper room was more likely situated somewhere near the top of the castle; the unconventional architecture may perhaps be forgiven by accounting for the adolescence of the storyteller.) By means of gesture and stutter, he indicated their then position in the east facing wall of the castle - and when Jenny looked through the windows, she did indeed think the sky looked a bit bruised, as if a sunrise were promised (though no sun would rise until many months after Christmas; it being then the polar night).

Lansing traced his finger in a zigzagging path through the crude castle drawing, up a long row of lines representing stairs, down a longer set representing a plunging ladder, and finally into a crude cave-like part of the drawing, complete with his own stencils of bulls and elk that would have shamed the men who painted Lascau. His finger stopped on a shape like a crumpled wedge of pie.

This, Lansing explained, was The Bellows. A magical device which made the castle livable to fire. When Jenny had flung the levers back and forth, and the metal mouth of the damper had yawned and snapped and yawned once more, it had made the environment drafty and cold, untenable to the fires. So Lansing mused, striding back and forth before the picture like a tin soldier before his battle map. But - said the little flame, with a raised Napoleonic finger - the fires were not really dead. Not completely. They could be stoked again, if the air were blown through the castle just right. The Bellows - and here Lansing stopped again before the damp wedge of melted bearskin and tapped it knowingly with his finger - would be the key to making the castle cozy again. Then the fires would return.

Jenny rubbed her eyes with her firsts, though they were already dry of tears. She stared at the map Lansing had drawn in the bearskin rug. She rose to her feet and dusted frost from the front of her nightgown. She tilted her head to the side as she looked down at the drawing; her long ginger hair had returned to its normal gravitational nature, and framed her freckled eyes as she squinted. She said that Lansing was a pretty good artist. The candle flame blushed deeper red than ever. Jenny asked if he could find the way to the bellows from their current gallery.

Lansing shrugged, and said he could try, and so the pair set off together.

Part 9:

A pair of heads, it is said, are superior to one alone; and this maxim proves itself nonetheless when the heads are those of children - even in the case that one child is made of fire, and the other is a girl. Children, unconditioned by preconceived notions of Nature and Law, often rather mash their thoughts together with far greater success than adults, whose ideas - hard-set as they are by Care’s careful shaping and Time’s long cook - usually come away from such a merging with only a few surface scratches from the adjoining clay, if they do not shatter altogether. As to the respective nature’s of the two particular children from this narrative, the following might be said of each to prove their suitability for the hanging task at the end of the preceding part. One of these children was a flame. Without a firsthand interview to supply a ready character, the least that can be said is that fire - generally - possesses an uncanny ability of finding its way into places it does not belong, without a guardian to tend it. The opposite child was a girl. Such a one has her vehement denigrators (generally of one sex) and her fanatical champions (generally of the other). Still, perhaps the following pith will satisfy both such parties to that extent that that - at the very least - neither need raise the cry for spears: a girl’s suited for finding a means of stoking when all’s quite cool.

Suitably, then, Jenny and Lansing found a path to The Bellows with no difficulty. Guided by Lansing’s light, they soon arrived before a tall arched entry, far below the cellar of Bellowbyrne. Stepping through they found, seemingly cut from whole-arctic-cloth, a glacier.

The walls of the glacier were like the surface of the ocean in a painting. True to Lansing’s diagram, pictograms of wildlife gleamed under the firelight, their grooves shining so as to grant a ghost-like quality to the icons. The floor ran smoother than the walls of the cavern, perhaps from the feet of the fires having passed over it so often. Jenny saw that the chamber must have been used primarily as a space to store old furniture, for piles of such articles spanned the space; one pile of chairs, rocking, arm, dining, papasan, and all others; another composed entirely of laundering equipment, from traditional washing stands, to mangles, to one particular steam-press that seemed to Jenny as some kind of ancient torture device; still another heap that seemed to be grandfather clocks, with pendulums not made to swing back-and-forth, but to twist, or shudder, or designed to hang perfectly still on one side of the clock for long periods of time before suddenly springing to the opposite. The enormous mounds of old possessions towered over Jenny’s head. Her chin remained fixed where it was so that, when her eyes tilted to follow the stacks, her jaw fell open.

On the far left end of the vast space, girt by two heaps of bookshelves (all the shelves of which had collapsed at one time or another from the strain of holding the castle library’s stone tablets), Jenny and Lansing spotted The Bellows. Again her little candle flame’s diagram proved remarkably accurate. The device resembled to Jenny nothing as much as a deflated piece of chocolate pie, with two handles like doorknobs sticking from its rear. Several tubers plunged in and out of the wedge at various points, much like the roots in the walls of the damper chamber. At the wedge’s sunken corner, a one-holed nose stretched itself across the floor.

Jenny crept closer and set her ear near the nostril. From within the bellowed she could hear a small sound as of someone snoring. She set her eye against the opening while Lansing stood a little back and told her to be careful. Nothing ill occurred, except that Jenny could make nothing of the black interior, nor jam her head any farther to that purpose. She waved for Lansing to step closer. He did so, but his light hardly reached down The Bellows’ long nose. Jenny tried calling inside, but received no response other than the snoring.

Lansing tapped Jenny quickly on her shoulder. She drew her eye from the bellows’ nostril and followed the burning brand of his finger. Lansing pointed to the two extended door knobs at the accordioned crust. The pair marched around the left side of the bellows and examined the levers. By standing on the tips of her toes and raising both arms high over her crimson hair, Jenny could just hook the last joints of her fingers around the top lever. She gestured with her chin and told Lansing to stand at the front near the nose, and be ready for her pull. The candle flame circled back around and squatted down by the nostril. He gripped the rim on two sides and told Jenny that he was ready, though he would be pleased if she started slow.

Remembering how much damage she had caused by interfering with the damper - and Gothen’s injunction to disturb nothing within the castle - Jenny hesitated this time. She considered. Deciding, however, that pulling upon the bellows could hardly make matters worse, she gently pulled upon the handle.

The handle sank - but only the barest fraction. From the nose there was a tiny puff of air, which did little more than stir the settled dust on the floor, and made Lansing flicker more than usual. Jenny tried applying a little more pressure, then a lot. The handle wouldn’t move.

All at once a snort disrupted the snores echoing from the bellows nose. A voice followed the snort with a yawned question: who goes? Jenny ran round to the front with Lansing and shouted back that they were two children in desperate need, for the castle was Cold and still, and the fires had all gone, and they needed the bellows to-

But The Bellows (which was the name of both the device and the individual inside of it) cut her off with a louder yawn. It asked if she had put in a work order already. Jenny turned to Lansing, who shook his crown. She replied in the negative, at which The Bellows drowned all further conversation in a resumptive snore. And no matter that Jenny raised her voice to the shriek of an air-raid siren, or that she hammered upon the device’s frilled flank like a shipwright testing the scaffolds of a wooden mushroom, The Bellows refused to stir.

[It may here be remarked that the beast in The Bellows was a troll - which is similar in nature and temperament to a goblin engineer, though specialized in a particular profession. The troll in question had wedged himself deep inside the device for which he took his name in order to escape the pursuing flames as they hounded him throughout the castle; for fires loath trolls almost as much as trolls detest fires. The fires had tried pursing the creature into The Bellows, whereupon he had blown, and blown, and blown at the opening so long to keep them at bay, that this particular troll became a specialist in blowing.

Rather than dismantle the entire contraption and extend the completion of King Johnathan’s abode by an indefinite amount of time, the flames had reached an accord with the troll inside The Bellows. If he would only stay inside, and continue to blow for them at set intervals - and by doing so keep the ambient pressure in the castle low and supplied with a steady rate of oxygen - then the fires would only burn him in the event he emerged. To this, the troll reluctantly agreed.

Being of the lazy intellectual character, this troll had made himself disagreeable almost from the outset of his employment. He blew at the required times, certainly; but only after a long period of trial-and-error with the castle temperature and atmosphere, where the correct oxygen flow had to be discovered, and where the troll had blown only on specific command, and never more than the suggested amount; and never, absolutely never, under no circumstances, without a first-priority work order of Escalated state. The Bellows (for so the troll soon came to be called) had not wrinkled his brow in the least when the fires called him indolent, or fussy, or when they said his inwardly repulsive aspect put his outwardly repulsive one to shame. These things - so the troll reasoned with himself - were all within his own power. He was indolent, and he was fussy, and no doubt was inwardly repulsive to the fires especially; all because he chose to be so when it came to the castle atmosphere. Bellowbyrne Castle did not concern him a tuppence.

Just put something before him which lay in his interest, however, and the troll knew he’d show himself superior to all others in the contest. Invite him to a goat-chewing contest, for example, and the troll was bound to come away with the golden horn. Tell him the multiplicative capabilities of certain Jellyfish put his own to shame, and the troll would instantly saw off his own fingers, and toes, and even his individual warts, just so that each could grow into a whole new troll, and he could prove that a colony of himself was for him an easy feat.

One other way was there set a strictly proverbial fire under the troll; put The troll’s intelligence into question. The Bellows troll believed his own mind to have been cut from a slightly larger block of cellular stone than all others’. Just suggest that it were not, and The troll would shoot up from his hunched or reclining posture like a flower toward sunlight, and throw the shade-casting monolith of his mind at whatever opponent had been set before it. In this way, the troll self-conquered all his other personal failings; by the reasoning that, when he chose, he could of course master any subject or skill. Thus The Bellows troll made himself master of the universe, and only improved himself in any part when the suggestion was put forward that he could be incapable of improvement. In such behavior, The Bellows acted according to the under-thirty human model.

All this concerned Jenny. After shouting into The Bellows without the slightest effect for some moment, and hearing and feeling in the distant some small sound that reminded her of the Cold, she discovered beside the bottom handle of The Bellows a slate covered in dust lying upon the floor. The slate explained all the preceding personality in chiseled words. The slate instructed that the best way to rouse The Bellows troll was to first pique its curiosity with a mental snarl.

Once more Jenny and Lansing put their two childrens’ heads together successfully. Lansing stood near to Jenny to give her his light and warmth - the calls which she had heard echoing in the distant castle corridors faded away, for the moment. Jenny cupped her hands around the opening, narrowed her eyes, and shouted into The Bellows that she had a challenge for it. The Bellows offered no response but a snore, so Jenny shouted her challenge into the vibrating snore:

You’ll never guess my character

You shant figure my name

Though I am circling round the world;

Of apostolic fame.

A sharp snort interrupted the latest long buzz of a snore. Silence waited inside the hollow device. Jenny proceeded quickly, for in that silence she could hear that far-off sound of the Cold, louder and closer than before.

I sit atop of grandfathers

Or any other kind.

When sun beats down or moon shines bright

Tis then I’ll state my mind.

---

You run at me throughout the year

And tag me at the end -

When christmas comes, and drummers drum -

Then I’d and X’d, descend.

Jenny stopped. Presently the voice of The Bellows blasted her in the face, so that she had to draw away before the fumed of stinking Troll-breath knocked her unconscious. What’s-the-question? boomed about the room and vibrated the piles. Lansing opened his lips to stutter, but Jenny waved a hand for him to shush. The sound of the coming Cold filled the gap, like a long low moan of the arctic wind, down to the chamber where the two children sat.

At last another injunction burst from the pipe, demanding a clue. Jenny obliged:

My names an easy thing to say

One syllable, it’s sung.

Six-letters wide; five cut-and-dried;

That’s, in the english tongue.

---

I’m found throughout the Aeneid

And Milton’s Paradise.

I rode The Orient Express,

And played in games of dice.

Again Jenny stopped. Lansing tugged at the lace frill of her nightgown and pointed. Back by the arching cave portal through which they had entered the bellows room, a fuzzy frost was sliding slowly over the already-frozen floor. The air crackled with cold. Back inside The Bellows, they heard a hollow-voiced groan of frustration. The Bellows began to ask for more, but Jenny cut him off by telling to get back to blowing if he wanted the rest. The troll within complained he could hardly blow and think at the same time, whereat Jenny gave Lansing a thumbs up before she dashed back around to the handle of the bellows. Lansing stared nervously toward the hungry, bitter Cold, creeping nearer and nearer across the frozen floor, while he himself shrank to little more than a tiny mote. But Jenny had her courage well in hand now. She grasped the top lever of The Bellows firmly in the crooks of both sets of fingers, and shouted the rest of the riddle:

I’m in cahoots with architects

They like me as a rule.

And Grocers trust me with their eggs,

But bakers think me cruel.

---

I’m semi-perfect, quite sublime,

Composite in my strength.

I’m all that’s astrological,

While just one foot in length.

---

So if you haven’t guessed my name,

“Fear Not, grieve not,” I’ll chime.

I’m hardly going anywhere,

I come round all the time.

Doubfoundedness rumbled from The Bellows snout, composed of the letters U and H. Jenny did not wait for a reply. With the veins sticking out on her alabaster arms she latched onto the top of the bellows and heaved as hard as she was able.

The troll within yelped. There was a sound like an accordion sneeze. Lansing spun away from the Cold looming toward him and grabbed both rims of The Bellows pipe; just a huge gale spewed. The Wind was like that of a long-sealed space opening into new air. It came out of the bellows tinted sickly green with the stink of the troll inside. The moment it touched Lansing flaming skin, however, the air brightened and rose into a mushroom of warm, clear light. The room glowed, the candle flame grew to triple his size in an instant. Jenny felt her face flush like beetroot.

The Cold stopped in its tracks. The fuzzy ice of its traversal made one last feeble crackle, like thin winter lake ice beneath a trapper’s feet. Then Jenny heaved The Bellowed up again with the same effort, and down again. A second yellow mushroom warmed the icy storage cave. The frozen walls glistered in the glow. Lansing flickered, stuttered, yelled with a vibrating voice like a man speaking into a fan; but clung fast in his position. He grew enormous, larger even than Gothen. As large as The Forest Fire.

The chill in the room collapsed. The fuzzy ice evaporated. The Cold withdrew slowly to the mouth of the cave, then farther down the hall. Jenny repeated her pumping on The Bellows. Each pump fell and rose more easily under her fingers as the troll within warmed to his work, huffing and puffing. The hot warm air stretched farther down the castle, filling one corridor, then an antechamber, then a turret, then the grand hall, and in each space the Cold was summarily driven out. Finally, seeing the space lost, the loudly silent frost crept back across the last window of the castle, leaving only a translucent sheen. It said not a word in its departure; only the same long, low, creaking moan of a sickly elder.

By now Jenny could hear some of the warm yellow air circling back into the bellows through the pipes and ducts puncturing its accordion crust. Each new pump seemed to recycle a little more of the prior pumps. Tentatively the girl let her grip fall away from the handles. She found that now the troll inside was doing his duty without her external pressure. He breathed in and blew out the heated oxygen necessary for survival without her aid.

Lansing released his grip on the rim. He had shrunken to nearly his original teardrop stature, though there lingered a certain extra few inches on his shoulders. He strode round the side of The Bellows and took Jenny’s hand warmly in his own. He gave a firm (though necessarily brief) handshake.

Jenny bit her thumb. She looked worried still. She was about to speak, when they both heard a sound. Through the ducts of the bellows, the voice of Gothen echoed. Jenny yelped with pleasure. Other elder voices joined his. They were confused… but alive.

Without a word the two started for the door.

Jenny paused at the threshold when she heard the troll call out behind her, his voice carried on the trail of his latest exhalation. What had been the answer to her riddle? He begged to know between breaths.

Jenny said, quite cooly, that it was a number. Then the girl and fire left the chamber together.

A long time later, in the middle of an exhalation, The Bellows blew out a revelatory ohhhhhh.

Part 10:

With Bellowbyrne Castle set aglow by the diffused light of many returning flames, Jenny and Lansing encountered no great obstacle to their return from the depths of the carved chambers. Shortly they returned to corridors of undecorated, mortared ice. Then they reached the decorated halls, halls where any blemishes in the architecture had been discreetly concealed behind tapestries of burning cities, or still-life paintings of blackened trees. Jenny’s bare feet ceased to slap against the cold floor when the plush carpets rolled once more underfoot.

Muted burning footsteps sounded. As Jenny and Lansing turned a corner, the dark light of polar dawn fell through the castle windows upon the prim flame of the castle steward - the same steward who had admitted the pair into the castle. He looked windblown and discomposed, with his pince-nez askew upon his nose, and his smoothed crowning flames tangled. His manner towards the two was at first scattered - he didn’t seem to remember either of their names. Jenny’s returned human appearance - and a little prompting from Lansing - shortly recalled them to his mind. He at once offered a courteous guiding step back to the grand hall. The children readily assented.

In short time they returned to the oceanic threshold of The World Carpet. They found that all the fires had gathered in one mass about the space. Even the great king of all fires, King Johnathan, stood within their midst. He towered above most other fires. His hues were of gold more perfect than any precious metal, and his feet so brightly blue they seemed as waves crashing up from the fabric ocean on which he stood. He was cylindrical in body, like the flame of a brazier.

Despite his glorious stature and bearing, the king’s face bore at that moment a most inglorious flush, as he harranged the nearest intellectual fires for the cause of the recent disturbance. How much deeper did that flush turn when the king saw Jenny. A human! Among the flames! The steward, in his distraction, had entirely forgotten to commission a new disguise.

At length, and with the application of soothing oils for him to burn upon, the king was brought back to sensible thought. Bluer heads among the fire prevailed on him for patience. They started off to inspect the damper and the bellows, and consult with the goblin engineers.

Jenny cut in. With her eyes fixedly cast upon her toes, and her fingernails digging grooves in her palms behind her back, she explained all that she had done. Her voice trembled, for Jenny loved to read fantastical medieval stories; in those stories, saboteurs were, as a rule, hanged. Nevertheless she confessed herself, leaving out no detail. The fires crackled quietly, listening.

Jenny’s mouth clamped shut as she spoke of meeting the steward in the hall. He eyes squeezed together. Her whole body tensed, as if she were preparing herself for summary immolation.

Indeed, as the echoes of her words died in the rafters a clamor of heated voices filled the silence. Admonition! Censure! Gothen’s exasperated voice asking, had he not warned her to fiddle with nothing during her stay? The king’s higher pitch inquiring; had Gothen known about her presence? Had anyone else? Demure silence from Gothen and the steward.

Yet of the scolding and chastisement of Jenny and the other fires, little need be said. Forgiveness - and a stern suggestion that it would be much better if Jenny never repeated the mistake, than if she only felt sorry for its original making - were the ultimate result. The whole trial concluded just as the clock chimed four solid strokes.

As the fires began to scatter - for the early risers among the humans would soon be descending their house’s stairs, and expecting a flame to be ready for taking behind the grate on Christmas Day - Jenny found time to ask Gothen what the sound in the creeping cold had been?

Gothen explained that the Cold was only Old Man Winter. He told Jenny that it was good she never saw the old man full in his face, and cautioned her against ever trying. Old Man Winter stole children, said Gothen, and abducted them from unlit homes under a cloak of coldest night. Jenny shivered at this. Lansing, and Gothen, and the other flames of her house stood closer. Jenny felt as snug and comfortable as a mouse in a basket of yarn.

A Castle Bellowbyrne Christmas Kickoff followed, though the formalwear dinner hosted by the king came off with less than customary observance of formality. All needless ceremony and administration was done away with; for many flames were anxious to leave, having a longer flue-flight back to their respective countries. Jenny enjoyed a small plate of hot ham-and-cheese sandwiches dipped in tomato sauce, while the fires made due with a scramble of oak, cherry, and parsley. The formal attire had been packed away, so that most flames stood stark-naked in their hues of yellow, blue, orange, red, and white, and ate while sitting on their suitcases. The chief clerk - who attempted a reading and checking-off of all guests in attendance - was jeered out of the dining chambers. When the grand secretary of the ministerial cabinet rose to deliver his formal congratulations to all fires on a successful year of employment, and to read off a weather report for the coming workweek, he managed to get the words ‘I’ and ‘thank’ out, before he was applauded to silence. In a word, the usual checks upon good cheer were abolished.

The celebration ended rather abruptly for Jenny. She had, of course, expected a whisking flight back through the chimney, and perhaps a quick ushering by Gothen out of the kitchen-space behind her own fireplace. (Jenny would have liked to poke her nose in a few of the cast-iron cabinets.) She could in no way have anticipated that - halfway through a perfectly narcotic slice of ham-and-cheese - she should shut her eyes for only a brief instant; and suddenly find herself staring at the living room ceiling.

Jenny woke on her couch under a sherpa-lined comforter. It had been set upon her sometime in the night. She blinked back the light of day, falling upon her face in wavy streams through the frosted glass of the window, from the Christmas dawn. She hardly had time to reach for and don her glasses on the nightstand, when her father and mother marched in through the hall door. Her candle, with Lansing fluttering on its wick, was set down in the place of her glasses.

Jenny babbled an account of her adventure. She hadn’t yet come to the moment when she first looked up at Gothen in the fireplace, however, when the blue and green and red and white boxes beneath a miniature fir tree caught her eye. Jenny spun to the corner. She left her story incomplete. She clapped once, and rolled over the carpet toward her presents. And so they sat, Jenny and her parents, opening gifts beside the merry fire.