I grew up around the fire stacks, hidden away in the hills surrounded by a thick forest. We were a small community but one held fast to the traditions of hard work and strong family ties. I was there the day the stacks blew and the storm clouds came in. It had never happened before, the two colliding in the sky. We had been preparing for the coming rain, covering our homes and bundling down under pillows and blankets to keep warm. The storms help the stacks cool down, allowing us to work and live around them without the ground getting hot beneath our feet.
The clouds arrived like always on the backs of phoenixes. Graceful, vibrant birds with long necks and tails; the Northern phoenix with rich blue feathers like the ocean carried her grey clouds behind her as the Southern phoenix, white like snow, carried her own. It's beautiful to watch them dance in a mating ritual, soaring and circling one another, blending the clouds together in a thunderous release of passion and nature.
This time though, as we watched them come together, we felt the ground beneath our feet begin to rumble. It's the only warning sign the stacks give when they are about to open their tops and release ash into the air from the inferno that fuels the underground. I was standing in front of one of the small stacks, my eyes cast to the sky, when the ground rattled up through my shoes.
I turned, unknowingly, towards the stack and, before I could move, the top opened up, fire suddenly flying past me into the sky. The searing heat of it singed my clothes and skin but that had been palpable compared to the raining fire the stacks began to bring down upon us. The flames licked the clouds, the once cooling rain turning into pounding hot cinders, scorching everything they struck and burning holes into the ground.
The pain of the hot rain as it pounded upon my skin was mind numbing. Everyone else had time to scatter as the larger stacks began to release one by one but I had already been caught in the storm and could not run towards my home with my family. So I pounded my legs towards the woods, seeking comfort in the shelter of the large ash trees as I continued on, my lungs burning from the heavy smoke cloud encircling my village.
Eventually I found myself under a bridge, resting my scorched body in the cool touch of the stream as the glowing ash continued to fall, smaller cinders slipping through the cracks to land upon the skin of my hands, burning deep marks across my calloused fingers. I knew from this moment onward I was an outcast, my body ravaged by the falling hell. I could not face my family nor my fellow man. Who would accept the scarred horror I had become? I must, from this day forward, wander the plains above and below Under Earth...alone.
* This fantastical short was an old dream I had wrote down and stored away until I could decide what to do with it. So I figured, today, I would finally share it with all of you.
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