<digression> This is an unfinished draft, posted to finally lift the curse of Paimon. <end digression>
Such a love lingers in long strokes of flame, a love of wood, and earth, and flesh. A fire is such a curious thing, unweighted by old obeisance or the blanket of all the years to come. It gorges on the space between seconds, illuminating and devouring with a russet skirt of embers.
You have spent too long in front of a fire.
The hands and eyes catch first, soft grey smears discoloring your vision and held objects, small shells cracking and falling with every blink and gesture. Bind your fingers and lids softly. Prepare to lose more as the fire explores you.
A: Now that you carry an ember within you, at any time you may cup your hands and blow softly to ignite it, casting the spark onto a flammable surface, or into someone's eyes.
B: When you cast a spark into someone's eyes, they begin burning.
BOUND SEEKER or CHARCOAL RIND
BOUND SEEKER:
Your skin is past sweating, now - there is a dry, sore heat to your touch, as certain as the thrust of the knife into a heart. Your fingers are heavier with bandages, and shift like a loose tooth if you push too hard. Trail the cakey remnants of your nails across something to tell where the fire would explore if you burned it. Recently extinguished fires will reawaken.
Thrust your hands entirely into the remnants of a fire, squat and shuffle, bandages flickering around half-remembered contours to discern exactly what objects were burned. You may pull one of these objects out, and brush any clinging coals away - it functions exactly as it did before. When dawn's light touches you next, it blows away in ash.
Instead of withdrawing an object, you may unbind your eyes and read from the lacunae between flaky layers extinguished by your bumbling, beetling fingers. The meaning of any writing or figurative representation torched is discernable.
Each ash carries something known, and you are known. Unbind your hands and forearms, letting them dissolve into the wind, exposing blackened bones. No agony awaits you - this is something known for a long time now. Now you may grasp at the world with whorls and forks of cinders billowing from any fire which lights your way. These fragments tug at more than the mass of an object - they seek its purpose, which you can choose to extinguish - rendering emotions cooled puddles of slag, or tomes tepid with colorless words, or knives to temporarily forget their nature.
Focus this blizzard of fragments on something, and it must Save versus being discorporated into a puddle of ashes. After you do this, you will not be able to reach with the embers until you burn something of equal value.
CHARCOAL RIND:
Underneath the ashes a harder truth is revealed.
- stiff blackened hands
-
