It burns.

Aelius was trying to breathe but it felt like his lungs were inhaling liquid fire instead of air. Meanwhile his heart was beating so strongly that he considered it on the verge of breaking free from his chest.

He wanted to be everywhere but here.

Everything around him was white.

And silent.

He didn’t know how long it had been like this.

First, dad disappeared.

Then mom disappeared.

Was he going to disappear ?

Did he already disappear ?

The thought of mom and dad burned him even more.

He wanted to forget.

He wanted it to be a bad dream.

He wanted to wake up, in his dinosaur bed, to look at the small light mom put by his door to reassure him after bad dreams.

He wanted to call for her, for her to come, as always, for her to kiss him on his head with a smile and to sing until he fell asleep again with her warm hand against his cheek.

But he couldn’t wake up.

He tried very hard to.

And it burned him even more.

It burns.

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Aelius didn’t know how much time had passed.

He felt like his entire being was on fire, not just his body, even his mind and his soul.

He wasn’t very sure actually, what a soul was. He just heard the grown up talk about it during Mr Doffle's funeral. But he knew that something was burning, something that wasn’t his body or his mind.

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He was past the point where it hurt some time ago. Now he just felt strange. Like distant, very distant. The burning was still clear to him but just not that hurting anymore. And there were parts of him that stopped burning at this point. They felt dry, like a scorched earth after the blaze. And then they felt strange.

As if flowers were beginning to sprout back. Deep rooted flowers that were only able to bloom because the fire cleaned up all the wild grass that was strangling them.

Some were of a profound dark cosmic purple, just like the photos of deep space in his favourite manual he borrowed last month for his dad to read to him at night, before sleep. He won’t be able to return it, Aelius thought, the book lady won’t be happy.

Some were of a vibrant off-white colour, very similar to his dad’s lightning he just saw. And the new sun that still encloses him. He liked them very much because it reminded him of his mom’s promises. She said that they were with him and he took the dad’s thunder-colour flower to be proof of that.

A few multicoloured flowers peppered the landscape too, one red there, a few blue here, a small patch of green ones just behind… But most of them were shared between the two main colours as their numbers increased.

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And now he began to feel much better.

The blaze has finished passing over him.

New flowers were sprouting everywhere. Some purple, some off-white, some intertwined.

It was beautiful.

It was soothing.

It was him, on a very intimate level.

And he began to feel a bit bored.

He wanted to be somewhere else.

He felt like the purple flowers would help him for it.

He willed it, ever so gently, politely asking the purple flowers to move him somewhere else.

It felt like they agreed but were kinda lost on which destination to go to.

He himself didn’t really know where to go.

Just somewhere else.

Somewhere that felt like home but wasn’t home.

Because he didn’t want to go back to the white sun or to some rubbles that used to be his home.

Somehow this was enough.

As if the purple flowers knew where it would feel like home while not being home.

So he said please. Some kind of breeze flowed over the dry lands.

And he wasn’t there anymore.