It felt warm.

She cupped the ball of desire manifested as flame. It was a part of her seen from a different angle. Illuminating so clearly what she’d taken for granted.

The flames flicker through her fingers. Light as a warm current of air heavy as a gentle touch. The rainbow flames cast her myriad colours. Streaks of passion amid the black.

It was Burgundy’s and Burgundy was gone.

Two closed her eyes and let her heart roil. She felt and tasted Burgundy’s heartbeat in sympathy. The flames pulsed in time with her warbling spirit. The myriad forms of anger suffused her senses.

Yet there were new notes. Blind rage was joined by incomprehension. Little betrayals fueled a simmering anger and hope crushed into a thousand half-living splinters gave birth to a small flame she knew to be grey despite her closed eyes.

Different fires borne of myriad sources. All flames could be called anger, and all fuel named pain. Even the flicker light of hope.

She opened her eyes. Her heart steadied and mind centred. She had planned to cut away. She stared deeply into the orb, her gaze fixed on motes of char that floated amidst the bright currents. She found another path.

“I’m not ready to see you.”

The black ate her words. It pressed in. Encroaching until it swallowed the island and its light. Until it hung about her, close yet never quite reaching. Like the suggestion of a touch. Her world became a lone spot of transparent water and light.

Everything else was dark and it listened.

“But I won’t ignore you either.”It brushed her then, sending shivers that raised her hair and scales both. A weight on her shoulder that would never leave. How could you hide from something you truly believe?

And did believe it. It did not whisper cruelly. Nor scream to spit her ears with its message. She wished it had. Instead, It simply was.

She lifted her right hand, the one with burs and reached behind her head without looking. She fixed her gaze on the flame. With something that could’ve been a kiss. It touched her.

She pulled her back into the light. A single drop of absolute black sat on her finger. As if someone had cut out a part of the world leaving a void. The incongruity shook her but she pushed forward. It was not the full horrid truth, just a reminder.

She promised never to forget what ails her. It was one of the few she intended to keep. She placed her finger into the flame.

The drop peeled off her finger and rose as if oil in water. The char and ash joined it coagulating in the fire’s centre into a fat black droplet. The flame gushed. Fire rushed through her fingers like tendrils of steam through a kettle. All that was missing was the whistle. Instead, there was a quiet whuff, as gay flames displaced the dominant red.

Now to refine it.

She lacked the skill and self-knowledge, to nudge and alter her heart. But this wasn’t a place of technicalities or precision. It was one of metaphor and spirit. So she made one.

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“Anger, it’s a response. To pains real and imagine. To every kind of hurt. It is the proof of a scar. It is fear turned outward, hope pressed into desperate action. It is…” She looked for a word, a phrase. Something to represent who she wanted to be. “Motion.” She breathed the word.

The world listened.

The chaotic flame settled. Its colours melted, and they clashed. They warred amongst themselves but became one in the end. A beautiful silver flame. Not the stark white she hoped to claim. Nor the flat grey shared by crushed hope and loneliness

Something in between, yet entirely its own. Ir flickered with a metallic sheen. It smelled cinnamon, it tasted like choice and the will to move forward. The oil remained, the fuel for her future.

It was beautiful, it was hers. She pressed it to her chest. “Thank you she whispered to the thing behind her.

The ball melted into her chest. Passing clothes and bone to find her heart.

Then just a bit she exploded. Life flooded her limbs washing away all her aches. Then Ghosts of pain, both recent and distant rose. Her skin became a map of every injury she’d ever suffered. She could feel her lungs through childhood colds. Every growing pain reminded her of their existence. Her organs twisted into awayness an incomplete tapestry.

Then emotions joined the mix. As shadows and spectres of hurt, but a lifetime was a lifetime. It filled the moment, and crushed her. Her mind shut down, so completely the hurt broke with it.

She slipped under the water.

Then a certainty bloomed. She breathed, she hadn’t known she’d stopped. Her mind crystallized a paradigm of action around a kernel of suffering. A thing stripped of humanity.

Like a gear falling into place she clicked together and then into motion. She rose and gasped as breath as she breached the crystal water. Then she blinked. Her thoughts felt different. A black and white masterpiece to her prior colourful scrawl. She’d never noticed how loud emotion emotion was until now.

Her desires had consolidated. Into either the Pain that urged her to think and act. Or the purpose that structured the mind thinking these very thoughts into useful order. There was no place for anything else. No place for the Pain to hurt her. Instead, it was felt and processed into the next goal

Analysis complete she jerked and pushed to her feet. She noted the change in her muscles, they felt stronger. She noted the presence was gone. She contemplated its removal. It represented an unwanted path, yet its continued existence might prove useful. She shelved the thought and continued her observation. Her senses had sharpened. She could taste herself now and see in the black. Though the latter was inconclusive. She didn’t know if her eyes were better or if the surroundings had changed.

Furthermore felt novel sensations entirely divorced from her mortal senses. Most were vague and were borne of the internal awareness her Pain brought. Others were stranger, familiar parts of herself she only now felt. The Pain helped identify them but she felt them without it. She labelled the novel parts her spirit and moved on.

She’d leave the Labyrinth soon. Her task was done and with it, her need for the spirit’s assistance. Her mind turned to further excavating what value she could from this place.

A ghostly strand of grey captured her attention. It hovered to her right and spanned the horizon. As she focused, it came into focus. She walked to the oddity. Undaunted by the Pain that rippled through her with every step and breath. The strand hovered idly as he approached and, after further observation, touched. Her fingers passed through it, but the thread responded all the same.

Like a thrummed string in shivered but it did not sound. It rippled and the dark grew alight with grey thread rippling in sympathy. By ones and twos then threes and further still. Until the sky was crisscrossed by gossamer threads.

She watched and idly strummed the incorporeal thread. Ripples ran their length to spread to the threads attached to its length and through them the entirety. That ran through and attached to everything, including the ground she stood on.

They tasted like apathy.

Then the moment passed. The Pain and purpose faded. From absolutes to mere facets of her being, like all the other changes.

She had a scant few seconds as her emotions reasserted themselves to admire the crisscrossed sky before realization crashed into her. A deviation she’d had a deviation. If cultivation was surgery she’d nearly botched hers.

Another second passed in which horror bloomed to dominate her mind. Lethargy like the fall of night put an end to that worry. She was too tired to contemplate her brush with insanity.

She fell back and back and back. Further than the water should allow. Her eyes drifted shut. Her last thought before sleep took her was if Igni felt this way when he flew.