To Bind Fire

sneak peek

We all have a choice.

What will you choose?

Iris had always been friends with fire.

It listened, dancing on her face, as her mother sang away the nightmares in the midnight hour. It warmed her brother’s toes when he came in, his nose cherry red from the winter nip, demanding to know why Iris got to sit inside while he labored. Its heat provided her family with popped kernels before bed in the deep solstice watches. When the darkness of those days pressed in, threatening to stifle, the fire pushed back. It gave her room to breathe.

Its soft crackle-pop in the night let them know they were not abandoned to the harsh mountain winter. Its light was cheerful as it danced off the cabin walls, laughing from one beam to the next.

But now, Iris looked deeper. She gazed into the flames themselves, and she did not see cheer.

She saw hunger.

A savage, destructive, desperate hunger; never satisfied, always devouring. Nothing can stand before fire. It knows no love, no compassion, no gentleness. It knows only its own need. It feeds, it consumes, and only moves on when nothing remains.

They thought it their friend. But they did not know that fire resented its service to them. They thought it watched over them as they slept. Really, it waited.

And when its chance came, fire took everything from her.

Snow and ash mingled, covering her where she knelt. The screams had stopped. The wind that had once fed the flames engulfing the cabin now lowered its voice in reverence for her loss. There were soft pops and hisses as what was left of the frame mourned.

She was alone, but she felt a hand on her shoulder. A voice spoke her name. She didn’t have to look.

She knew who spoke to her.

Accusing.

It knew what she’d done.

She shrugged it away. No. This wasn’t her fault.

This couldn’t be her fault.

At some point, she must have stood, because she found herself beneath the doorframe. It remained standing, resolute against the sky, but nothing was left of the cabin beyond. She was afraid of what she would see if she looked toward her mother’s bed. Unbidden, her eyes turned to take in the sight.

Ben had been brave. When he saw what would happen, he got her out. He went back for Mother.

Ben would never be brave again. Even in death, the shoulders that had supported his mother and sister now supported the weight of four heavy roof logs. He lay across the foot of the bed. In the final moment of his life, he’d been about to lift Mother.

Iris breathed in the smoke. Maybe it would take her to the place her family had gone.

But it did not. She let the smoky air leave her lungs again.

Red light flared from somewhere behind her. Slowly, she turned, her nightgown brushing against embers. Wrath screamed like a vise crushing her chest.

Behind her, casting a contented glow over the fallen mass and out further across the ash-strewn ground, a small flame bounced happily in the fireplace. It beheld what it had done that night with no remorse. It smiled out at her, as if to say, “What? I’m where I belong, and where I would have stayed if you had been wiser. Don’t you want to play?”

“No.” The word grated against her ears. It was a moment before she realized she had spoken it.

The flame flared, and she heard merriment. The fire laughed.

It laughed at Iris.

Her scream rent the night sky, piercing the low clouds and shattering the stars. She plunged her hands into the fire and clutched it around its throat, cutting off its air, smashing it into the ashes. Pain lanced up her arms as the fire fought for its life, and she screamed again, “No! No! No!”

The fire sighed and relinquished itself to the night.

Silver tears fell onto her reddened hands.

“I hate you,” she sobbed. “I hate you.”

Chapter One