A lone man walks on blackened earth, feet padding silently in the ashes and dust produced from flame unto flame; magma trails beneath his toes, pooling like dew in the grayscale landscape that once was the Earth.

Trees reach to the eclipsing sun with gnarly hands wreathed in heat, their wooden knuckles coated with embers and sparks that rain below them and onto the roots that breathe above the dust. They sit on the edge of a mountain that spits out lava, flowing from the peak in rivulets of destruction. When the lava meets the wood it consumes, swallowing tendrils of life whole and spitting out nothing.

The man too consumes. With every forest he passes he blows the leaves through the boiling air, turning them to flames that ignites the branches that once held them, sending light blazing into the slowly darkening sky. The moon slowly starts to shadow the sun, making the once bright star a circle of void and black.

“I can’t die to the dark,” the man whispers to his feet, which are dark with ash stains. He looks up to the smoke hazed sky, brightened by the flames that circle the man strolling across the burnt earth. “I will not die to the dark,” he says louder, and his eyes are slanted and crazed.

The flames around him billow when he steps forwards, and he reaches his hands out to a blazing one perched on a bird’s nest, letting the heat blister on his palms and letting the fire consume what he gives willingly. His flesh rises with his blood in its tendrils, up through the air and spearing between blackened clouds, up to where the light doesn’t reach. The flames can’t breathe that high, but with the food the man gives it can eat and climb and thrive and live.

It can light up the sky, substituting the sun’s once brilliant light, creating new stars from embers and new comets from sparks. It streaks in the atmosphere, creating northern lights that are warm and ensnared with oranges, reds, and yellows. 

The man shoves his other hand into another flame and then his whole arm, and he laughs as his skin fades to blackened bone and the particles of his being feed the heat, feed the light, until the whole ground he stands on is alight with dancing fire that whispers screams into his ears, nibbling at his flesh and hair with a greed that the man and the flame shares.

He floats, dying on the earth he killed, sharing secrets with the life he burns along, letting the light meet his eyes blind him forever.

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  A woman sits in the cockpit of a plane painted red, and she curses when her windshield is obscured by smoke yet again.

“The fires are just going up!” She screams into the radio on the side. “I don’t think we can put them out in time!”

“We’ll have to!” Screams a voice back, and then suddenly they scream. The radio blinks with a red light twice.

“Another one?” The woman mutters, swerving to the right just in time to avoid a plume of flame. “You’re kidding me. It’s like these flames got a mind of their own.”
She flips a switch on the side of her controls, and she tries to move over the forest as fast as possible so that the extinguishing agent lands properly. She glances over to the photo taped on the wall with her face and three others on it – a daughter, a son, a partner.

In her distraction, she doesn’t realize the cockpit practically melting until her hands are stuck to the plastic controls.

“Damn it-” she hisses, and pulls up as hard as she dares. The plane swoops, ascending at a speed that makes her back hit the chair with a dull thud, and then she cruises up in the sky to see the darkened sun.

“I was supposed to see the eclipse with you,” she whispers to the photograph. “I was supposed to have a normal life with you.”

A shooting star of flame trails above her head, and as a plume of flame strikes the plane from below, she wishes into the embers that in the next life maybe she could be alive again and also be normal.