Everything in the room was starving, down to the infant at its mother’s breast and the fire blazing in the hearth.
Asch stood with his back to the rattling shutters, where he could watch the two most dangerous beings in the room, his father and the fire, and still listen to the storm howling madly beyond the thick stone walls. If the wind and snow stopped, he could go out for wood for the fire, maybe find some beast unlucky enough to be caught in the pure ice, and they could have food and fuel again.
Almost absently, Asch jerked the fire back when it reached hungrily for his half-sister, crouched almost in the hearth. It grumbled at him, and continued consuming and re-consuming the ashes of old wood.
His half-sister whimpered and his father’s face became angry. Asch shifted to better watch the danger her couldn’t control as easily as the fire.
“Shut up,” the older man said. “You think you’re the only one who’s cold? And I’m not the one practically crawling in the fire. Maybe my belt across your back would warm you up a bit.”
She looked at him with wide, frightened eyes and huddled closer to the fire. The fire leaned toward her as well, sniffing like a dog seeking its next bone. Asch pulled it back.
His father settled back again. “So damned cold. Maybe I should have sold you to that Hell-damned Legion trader. At least then we would have had the coin for a few more decent meals before this Hell-fire storm blew in.” He directed his comments to Asch. They both knew his father would have spent the extra money on drink, not grain, but Asch didn’t say anything. He had enough scars. Instead he watched the fire that was his father’s life blaze up as his anger gave him energy and purpose. But it flickered too, like the fire when it had nothing to burn. Asch directed a little more fire into his father, a little more warmth to keep him alive, and maybe enough energy to keep his temper banked, not blazing.
“Aren’t you going to answer me, boy? Or are you as dumb as that bitch there.” He nodded scornfully to his third wife, curled in the corner with her baby. She’d been dry for three days now, but she still kept pressing it to her breast when it fussed, cooing mindlessly.
“What do you want me to say, sir?” Asch asked dully. He hadn’t slept since the wood ran out. They needed the warmth, but asleep there was no way he could keep the fire going and also stop it from eating anyone who got too close. They were all just fuel, to the fire, which was a view he could understand when he watched the heat lapping stronger and weaker in his father’s chest. Just a little bit less flame inside him, and he would be gone. Just a little bit more, and the fire inside him would become the true fire and would consume him.
His father jerked himself up from the chair where he sat, his hands automatically going to the wide leather belt at his waist, unstrapping the thick iron buckle. “Just a little acknowledgment is all I ask. A little respect. I bring in the food we eat and the wood we burn. I plow the Hell-damned fields the frost eats every year, and I damn well deserve a little more respect.” He started tugging off the belt, looping it through his scarred hands, and the staggered closer to his son.
I wonder where he found more drink, Asch thought, but the fire pulled his attention again. It didn’t want to leave again, and the farthest strand of fire was only a finger’s length away from his half-sister’s hair. What would it hurt, one strand of hair after all those days of burning on emptiness, on nothing? And how good it would taste, to burn, until every strand was consumed into dust.
Asch pulled the fire back and then his father slammed him into the wall.
The blow took his breath away. He could feel the cold seeping through the wall, though he never really felt cold through the fire that burned inside him. His father shook the rusty stained belt in front of him and thumped him on the cheek with it.
“You think you can give me disrespect, boy?” his father said. “I’ll teach you to respect me.”
Asch could smell the drink in his father’s breath. And in that second he felt the flame that was the baby’s life flicker and go out.
He almost relit the flame in the small body, but stopped himself in time. He knew that whatever answered his call would not be the fire that belonged to the baby, but the fire. And the fire that he called did not belong inside anyone else’s body.
So Asch stopped before he could touch the infant and create something that was not really alive. But he couldn’t stop the motion he made toward his little, dead half-brother.
His father’s eyes burned like he was already undead, and he unfurled his belt. “Did you just try to hit me, you little bastard?”
He hit his son before Asch could move out of the way, the wide belt cutting into his shoulder, lighting fast. The second hit him across the face and he fell to the ground where the pummeling continued, his father puffing like a Hell-demon, the belt coming up with blood as old scars reopened in Asch’s back and soaked through his thin shirt.
Asch felt his father’s fire growing hotter and hotter in his excitement and rage.
One blow hit him solidly on the head and Asch blacked out for a few seconds. It was enough.
When he opened his eyes again the fire was everywhere, on the battered wooden furniture, on the shutters, crawling out of the hearth eating the generations of dirt embedded in the stones. His father was screaming and beating at the flames with his belt, the fire inside him blazing almost as bright as the fire laughing through the room, and his half-sister was lying still where she had fallen and few steps away from the hearth, all her lovely hair burned away and bits of her already turning to ash as the fire ate everything she was.
The fire reached Asch’s hand and crawled over it like a puppy ready to play. Didn’t its friend want to come too? But Asch couldn’t focus his right eye, and his shoulder wouldn’t work where his father had hit him too many times. So he curled his fingers slowly around the flames, taking its warms into himself, and watched as his step-mother tried to run, dropped the infant, and went back for it. The flames were hungry enough that she became a part of them instantly.
His father turned to him, his eyes mad, the leather burning in his scorching hands. He was a demon. Asch knew that only a demon could burn that bright inside without being consumed, could stand in so much fire and not be one with it, as Asch was.
And Asch was very afraid he had created his demon, called it into his life because he had tried too keep the fire in all of them for too long this winter. And now his father was part of the great fire, and yet he still lived.
“You killed them, you little bastard,” his father said. “I’ll kill you like you killed them, you little Hell-fire demon.”
He stepped forward and Asch could only see the mad eyes and the fire blazing ever brighter, ever more wrong.
And he stretched out his good hand as far as it would go and whispered to the fire that, restrained too long, had finally eaten them all. You took the rest, he whispered. Take him, too.
Like a good friend, the fire answered his call.
His father screamed before the fire was inside him, and the flames ate the unnatural fires inside him before consuming the organs, the bones and all the flesh.
Asch watched the skin scorch and peel back and the cindered corpse drop before he closed his eyes and let the blaze that had taken his family take him also.
