It was the fire’s prerogative to try and consume everything it touched, for fire cannot get diabetes (Ugah Caveborn, 31897 Before Cutbastra (9 After Dogmestication (65920241 after Tulio the Depressed Tyrannosaurus rex))] [I ran out of parentheses] nor suffers from obesity. I would know: in this house we tried fat-shaming fire. We lost our dinner anyway. Most of the trees of the forest were pretty vexed for the horrible death they had been delivered, except for one that grew in the center of a clearing that had been created because the other plants were horrified of its kinks.

The fire advanced towards the caramelized roofs with unchecked greed, burning everything in its wake because, uh… it was fire. Fire. It does that. Burns shit to make more fire. It’s like a living being without all the disgusting things that make living beings a sort of fire in slow-mo. Why is life a thing? We have fire. We even have a species known for going out of its way to make fire. Which leads me to the conclusion that life is but fire conspiring to reproduce without depending on thunderstorms.

The elder caressed his long beard as he stood in front of the raging inferno, a thick coat of kerosene that suffered from dissociative personality disorders protecting him from the flames. I wonder if I can burn this thing. Burnt hair emanates a terrible stench, though. I need a load of some of those new flus or colds to take away my sense of smell in an art of mercy. Tomorrow I am volunteering at the sick bay. Maybe bedding some sexy patient and… my sleeve has caught fire.

He disembarrassed himself from his kerosene trench coat and let it burn. Poor thing had finally learned the meaning of hydrocarbons. Outlived its usefulness. The shorts made a terrible job of covering his toned torso and abdomen, if only because the elder was a man that one would never caught wearing his pants anywhere but around his legs and waist.

“Fire, turn around and leave this village alone,” the elder ordered in his somewhat authoritative voice.

“Scald you,” The fire sizzled with emotion.

What were a few burnt houses anyway. “Well, tell me who or what gave you birth, then. I need to beat the sense into him, her or it.”

“Flares of slightly old,” the fire answered, proud of its heritage.

The Elder joined his hands. Inhaled deeply. Then exhaled. “Who, or what, birth forth those flares that parented you?”

“Flames of less-slightly old,” the fire crepitated smugly.

The elder made his hand into a flat surface and slapped the fire where he assumed the flame’s face would be. “Listen here, you ember-shitter, I, Elder Nosirio, hold in my hands the power to extinguish you and all your family. My neglected skin has run out of fucks to give, it won’t blister under your lick. My kerosene is as inbred as my great-grandchildren-grandchildren-children, so it barely knows how to catch fire.”

“Insolent primate! my siblings will consume even the lake’s waters!”

“Yes, that water is so full of my descendant’s piss and poop it may be wishing for a mercy killing.”

Then, the elder watched a flaming, angel winged catapult casually flying overhead, perhaps migrating to the north in search of colder climates.

“Can you wait here and not burn anything while I ask around about that.”

“That’s not really part of my nature…” the fire crackled, its tone hot and avoidant of the issue at flame.

“If I cared about nature, I would be worried about the forest around us, don’t you think?”

“No, I am fire, I don’t even talk.”

The elder took his bottle of Kerosene out and gave it a long, invading stare. “must be expired.”

Then the elder backflipped out of the scene, and the flames gloated. “Ha, got him!”

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The door was particularly noisy today, or so Crusadina’s mother thought. Maybe a couple shots would calm the rapping down, as they often did. But then followed the cultivator’s girl’s screams and Crusadina’s complaints about her shooting all of her friends. It wasn’t her fault the children weren’t bulletproof, but the insolent brat would never listen, and, to make the matter worse, her father would side with her little demolitionist princess. Besides, the door was quality oak, a material hard to get in the vale. It would be a shame to get more bullet holes in it, it had a cute prime number of them that doubled as improvised peepholes.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“Polvorina, open the door! I am Nosirio!” The elder authorited from the other side of the Americanized oak.

“What do you want now, sexy old rascal?” she rebelled from her comfy arm chair.

“I need information about Crusadina’s period. She is burning down the forest.”

“She menstruated a week ago!” She responded so casually.

The elder took a finger to his chin and pondered. “So this isn’t a mythic menstrual cramp.” He then rapped on the door again. “Thank you, dear.”

“No, problem, sweet mantits!”

Then, the elder frontflipped towards the forest.

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To say Crusadina sang happily as she pulled the flamethrower’s trigger would be an understatement. “I am a burny girl, in a burning world. Blazing old teaks is fantastic…”

The elder landed in front of her as she was about to read a sapling its rights, elevating sooth and embers around him. He wore a frown 1,04 Crusadinas over his heart- patterned boxers.

“Hello Venerated Elder! I am cultivating.” Crusadina said, hiding the flamethrower that was about her size behind her back.

“You are setting fire to the forest. This forest is property of every inhabitant of Valelike Vale, Crusadina,” the elder scolded her, shaking a long skeletal finger that didn’t fit with a body so ripped.

“I follow the road of the tragedy of the commons,” Crusadina lied as naturally as she tried not to breath in the smoke-laden atmosphere.

The Elder crouched to stare her into the flicking nostrils, and then faster than the resident lightning bolt, he grabbed one of Crusadina’s ears. “You are coming with me, brat. We will give you a slight punishment.”

Crusadina was about to begin crying and apologizing, but then rage overtook her. They were with the walls. The people she loved, they had been turned into dirty wallites. She showed her teeth and pumped her Erito (the Vital Energy) towards her arms, and then to the muscles of her arms and legs. She grabbed the Elder’s wrist and launched him in an arc over her head. The Elder didn’t let Crusadina’s ear go, so they both flew forward and impacted a carbonized sequoia that had picked the wrong place and time to go on vacations.

He let go to try and cover his face from the impact, and both cultivators ended up buried in the rubble, among the charred remains of the mighty vegetal tourist.

They both rose unharmed, and dusted off their clothes and bodies. The Elder conjured a shining, slick plate armor made of Kerosene. It covered everything but his head.

“You are coming back to the village for a punishment, Crusadina. Either conscious or… knocked out,” the elder began advancing with sure step.

Crusadina gasped, horrified.

“I said out. Out. What kind of degenerate you take me for?”

The smile returned to the girl’s face. She picked up a piece of charcoal and retracted her arm as if she were about to throw a ball. “Mankind’s first siege weapons were our very hands.” Her Liop (the vital energy) flowed, shining sky blue around her, forming tendrils of power.

The elder felt the spiritual pressure and stopped his advance, taken aback by the sheer power of the girl. “You brat… You reached immortality already?”

Crusadina buried her feet into the debris, her eyes ablaze with the will of the millions of microscopic trebuchets that now covered her skin, forming a scaled plate. “And when you demolish a castle, there are no warning shots. Be thankful you aren’t a castle.”

The elder couldn’t see when she launched the piece of charcoal, but he got knocked down by the gust of ignited air it sparked. The burning forest had become a smoking clearing in a fraction of a second. He had been deafened by the boom, disoriented, and Crusadina still stood untouched, closing and opening the fingers of her hand in awe.

“So this is it, the power of the Totalitarian Siege Tower Dictatorship stage! Katie, I am awesome!”

Katie manifested by Crusadina’s side, giving a long, eyeless stare at the felled and scared Elder.

“I believe gramps deserves to meet a merciful end.”

Crusadina picked another piece of charcoal.

The elder began to cry, and let his armor get undone. “I surrender, child. Have pity of this old man!”

He crawled to the girl’s feet and kowtowed, blackening his forehead with the coal under their feet. “This one begs forgiveness for his insolence.”

“This one has cooties,” the girl sentenced, and raised her leg, manifesting a ghost of a battering ram around it, facing downwards. From this position, she brought down a kick upon the elder’s back, crushing vertebrae, ribs, lungs and heart, splattering pitch black and oily blood upon herself and her ashen surroundings, putting a pathetic end to the man’s life.

“Holy sexual fornication, I killed him!” the girl almost panicked. “Katie, I liveoffed the elder!”

“You brought down his walls, Crusiecrus,” Katie said, in a motherly and catapulty tone.

Crusadina smiled and began laughing coyly. “I did… I released him from the walls inside him. My feet can stomp any wall, Katie.”

“yes they can, dear, let’s go somewhere else, more important than the walls mad ethe nature, are those erected by men. They shall fall down first.”

Crusadina nodded and summoned the winged Catapult, to then jump on the construct’s frame and hug one of the wooden beams that constituted it. “Now, fly slowly and low: I fear heights, Pultiana.”

As a last act of debasement, as soon as the catapult took flight, Crusadina’s stomach content exploded forth, landing upon the dead elder.

“Slower! Slower!” she begged her flying catapult as they left the smoking clearing.