Flame of Knowledge — by D.K. Lawhorn

My ears fill with the flapping of a bird’s wings. The crow alights on its special perch outside my cell. I open my eyes to a world bathed in darkness, but not for much longer.

A metallic click sounds above my head. The switch has been flipped. The bird has performed the first half of its duty.

Beneath me, twenty-four jets ignite with the tiniest of flames. Two parallel rows of twelve priming themselves for the big show. I shudder in relief at the comforting warmth they provide. The darkness I exist in before the flames are always so cold. Then, even in their small state, the flames heat the metal grating I am lying on. The bare skin on the backside of my body begins to burn. I struggle against the unbreakable chains binding me, more out of instinct than any cognizant attempt at survival. 

Even with my infinite strength, my restraints do not so much as move. 

After prolonged moments of vain resistance, my nerves numb, allowing me time to revel in the glorious return of sight.

The ceiling of my cell is a short distance beyond the tip of my nose, reflecting and refracting flames beneath me into hundreds of bright beacons. There is a small clearance between my broad shoulders and the walls on either side of me. As is always the case, the steel box of my prison remains unchanged.

I crane my neck to look through the ventilation slots just beyond my head. The crow’s black tail feathers stick down from above. An expected sight. Beyond them, however, something is different. 

Someone else is here.

I open my mouth to ask who this stranger is, but this question is answered before it passes my lips. Electricity sparks on the tip of my dry tongue. My mouth fills with the taste of static. Attention sharp now, I feel tiny shocks across my naked body. Some arch out in vivid blue bolts when they make contact with the chain. 

Why is he here?

Is what I think. What I say is:

“Hello, cousin.”

“Ah, good!” his voice booms, reverberating around my box, coating me in his natural conceit. “I feared so much time and death may have addled your brain. But it seems you are sharp as ever. I’m glad to see it, cousin.”

“What do you want?”

My feathered jailor lets out a soft caw of annoyance, ready to get on with her job but not wanting to interrupt the between conversation her master and charge. 

“Calm yourself, Crow,” my cousin reprimands. “I know you keep a tight schedule, but I’ve left you alone to work as you please these past hundred years. Running late this one day won’t harm you.”

The crow ruffles her feathers, but the main cycle of the jets does not start. They only need a few seconds to prime, so the bird has heeded my cousin’s command. What sort of pact has he made with this bird? Can I talk her into a pact of our own? One day of relief would be the best blessing I have ever received.

“Now, to answer your question.” My cousin’s returning attention is marked by every hair on my arms and legs pulled toward him. “Upon your sentencing, I said I would come to you one hundred years hence and seek your confession of wrongdoing.”

“Oh, I know all that.” My scoff is granted extra rancor by the dehydrated rasp of my vocal folds. “I have counted each day since you put me in this cell. Easy to do when every morning is marked by such a blazing sunrise. What I meant is, why are you here when you know I will give you no such confession.”

“No such confession!” I raise my eyebrows at the amount of surprise in my cousin’s voice. Did he really expect me to change my mind in a measly century? “Cousin, you do realize the flames you burn in daily are of the same source as the one you gave Those Who Live Below?”

“I do.”

“Then you must realize now just how dangerous the Flame of Knowledge is! It’s a beautiful and seductive thing when viewed from a distance. But when you’re wrapped in it, consumed by it, it’s nothing but eternal agony and suffering until Death finally relieves you of the Flame’s burden. You must see the damnation you’ve delivered to Those Who Live Below in the form of the smallest flickering coal from the Flame of Knowledge!”

I laugh. It sounds more like a croak. A desiccated frog stuck far back in my throat, its whole body slowly drying out. A grotesque noise. I see my cousin wince. Let him. He needs to understand what he has made of me.

“For the past century, my entire existence has been the inside of this cage you created for me. Nothing differentiates the day from the night. Everything is darkness. Inky black nothingness. Except for the brief period every morning when your corvid comes to pay me a visit. When she bathes me in the Flame of Knowledge, I can see again! And if I must burn for those few glorious seconds of sight, then let me burn.”

My cousin shakes his head. “I don’t understand you.”

“No? Then let me enlighten you. We were wrong to force Those Who Live Below to exist in perpetual darkness. They needed the Flame of Knowledge to see, but we hoarded it from them, afraid of what they might do to themselves — to us — if they gained possession of it. But tell me, cousin, what is life without the knowledge you are living? What is sight without the ability to see? What does it mean to choose when there is only one choice?”

“You truly are lost.” My cousin’s disappointment drips off each slowly spoken word. But the flames beneath me burn it away before it can touch me.

“Lost? Is this what it means to be lost? If so, never try to find me because I wish to remain lost until the end of eternity.”

My cousin lets out a disgusted ‘hm’ and closes his eyes. 

“And here I was hoping you’d have seen the light after becoming so intimately familiar with its source.”

“It is you who refuses to see the light, cousin. Why are you so afraid of it?”

“Go about your duty, Crow. I’m done here.” His words are grunts of pure anger.

And just like that, my cousin is gone.

Feathers ruffle in what I can only imagine is a cold dismissal. A peck echoes through the silence.

Only, it is silence, no longer.

The crematorium I am doomed to spend all of eternity in roars to life. The jets douse my body with the Flame of Knowledge until I am drenched by it. Although I have been through this tens of thousands of times, I cry out as the flames soak into my skin. Just once, I want to die in dignified silence. 

But some things cannot be controlled.

My hair is the first to go. From my feet to the top of my head, every single follicle is turned into less than dust. My skin begins to blister and boil before shrinking and cracking. The outer layer chars and is run through with fissures of dark red. My muscles contract and contort on their own. I am writhing in my cell, my cousin’s unbreakable chains restraining the majority of my movement. Inversion begins. Everything I am begins turning to carbon. Large swaths of me slough off in clouds of grey. Fusion, which has been happening since the start, is the last to finish. The remaining carbon of me crystalizes and melts together. They form a mockery of my body’s shape. At the slightest touch, I will collapse.

My eyes are the only things to remain unaffected by the Flame. My cousin’s special trick. I am forced to watch myself burn and unable to blink away the darkness that fills the void left in the wake of the Flame of Knowledge. I have never seen my body reform; I only felt the slow, agonizing process. I will be whole again and free from pain moments before the crow returns tomorrow morning.

This is for later, though. For now, I stare at the ceiling of my cell. The regeneration process will not start for a while yet. I do not hear the crow leave, for I have no ears, but I know she is gone. Who would want to spend their day with a statue of fragile ash? 

A tiny glow remains to me. It comes from the unbreakable chain. I take comfort in this rapidly fading light. 

My cousin, he shuns the Flame of Knowledge. Is terrified by it. Me, I embrace it, let it consume me day after day. In return, it teaches me. And one thing I have learned from it is that all metal when heated and cooled repeatedly, will eventually become brittle enough to break. 

All it takes is flame-bright patience and the knowledge to see when the time is right.

AUTHOR BIO:

D.K. Lawhorn has previously published stories that have appeared in Sick Lit Magazine and Ghost Orchid Press. He is a Native writer, enrolled in the Monacan Indian Nation and still living on his ancestral land in Virginia. He is studying Native spec-fic at Randolph College’s MFA in Creative Writing program. Follow him on twitter @d_k_lawhorn