Under the burnt heavens we stare into the last embers of the earth. Eons of conflagration left the world dead and black, sucking all the light that had once bathed it into the filthily fueled fires that kept the dark from consuming us whole. The wisers than me heard from the wisers than them that once this place was full of light to banish the dark things, but through time had we eventually begun to lose our battle.
In my town there dwell ten or score, and our fire burns many rods tall, and can be seen for many miles. Beyond our town lay much darkness, but we can see the fires of two other towns beyond that. Of nature, we could not visit either town, since the dark patches conceal its denizens that would consume those foolish enough to travel past the reaches of the brilliant sanctuary into the borders of the towns.
My town burrowed as best it could into the near unbreakable ground, only feet below the surface. Under the ground we captured our food and drink in tiny rivulets alive with fungi under the stony ground. It’s known that when light was from the heavens, that green fungous growths sprung from the cracks in the earth, but now this subterranean mud is our food.
I once asked why we threw the dead into the fire instead of devouring them ourselves. My answer was that, though the fungi aren’t enough and we are always hungry and thirsty, it is more important to feed the great life-giver than ourselves, as our own lives depend on its.
When I was smaller, my parents wandered away from the fire. We all heard howls and frenzied footsteps, then nothing. If we had the supplies to make what has been called a gate, so that these things wouldn’t happen again, we certainly would.
We prognosticated that soon our town would extinguish forever; we used to be a city of forty or fifty, but death lurks so near at all times, and birth is a rare success. If the threatening darkness doesn’t consume you, the black smog that we try to breath may. It was my opinion that our human race was finished on this planet, and the dark beasts were meant to inherit it.
We were taught that we once were the greatest species on the earth, when it was younger and livelier. A sorrow fell over me as I reflected on all of that which we had lost. My idea came that night, as I crawled into my tiny hole to sleep. I dreamt of ancient humans, eating the green fungi and sitting beneath the orange sun, with more joy on a bad day than any of us had had in our entire lives. I dreamt of them building houses out of who knows what above the ground and lying safe and cool in the pitch-blackness whenever they wanted to. I wanted, however impossible the notion, to return to those ages. Perhaps it was not all possible, but my foolish human pride could only take so much.
My theory was simple, though, if carried out fully, would not be at all easy. It was to move the great furnace towards one of our neighboring towns, and to move onto the next town, and the next, until we’ve created a city whose magnitude our earth has never seen erstwhile, with hundreds and hundreds of people within.
Those who heard my plan laughed. Any species capable of moving a towering, stinking, and conflagrant mass of the dead for miles upon miles surely would equivalently be capable of exterminating the nightmares in the dark that it keeps at bay. As the verbalization of my spectacular idea formed rationally in my mind, I decided that an alternative but similar course of action would have to be shaped. Fuel, of course, was a precious commodity; our only choice now was to use the still to perpetuate the pyre, and so I fashioned what the ancient would have called a flashlight from the dried carrion of a to-be-burned lich. It was with this that I would venture forth into the black seas, whence I might never return. I would follow towards one of the other towns and tell them the magnificent news that the thick borders between us had been successfully traversed, using a smaller version of the life-sustaining light.
Setting the mummified meat alight, the hand glowed a flame so small that I laughed more heartily than ever I can remember in my life. For this novelty, though, I paid with a fit of coughs equally as hearty than ever I can remember in my life.
My quest began gradually, as I traveled further from the limits of my town. The blessed light from its flame touched less of the stony ground while I continued to move away. Terror would have engulfed my steps had my miniscule flame not banished the dark from my immediate surroundings. I soon realized that, without the magnificent flame that had been close to me all of the many hours of my life, I was cold. Olders told me of the stimulus, but never could I imagine such a strange and offensive feeling. This would be an ordeal that never any have undergone before, but I knew that, on the minor luck that I did reach our neighboring town, I would change the downward course of humanity forever.
After traveling further from my home than any could have dreamt, I lay on the concreted ground, through whose cracks attempted to grow a patch of sickly mushrooms. Ending their quest, I consumed them directly, denting my constant hunger in the process. My flashlight burned still, but its flame was dying with such steadiness that I felt as though it didn’t want me to know of its failure. I knew that I would have to hurry if I didn’t want the black creatures to enter my circle.
I wanted to sleep, but I knew that if I did, my already dimming flame wouldn’t last, and I wouldn’t wake up. My sense of direction was atrophying as well, and in fear of confusing my destination with its two mirror siblings I kept my feet pointed towards it always.
My idea, I soon realized, was ill prepared for and greatly underestimated. What I thought would be a few thousand paces’ journey continued with such longevity that I feared that my hunger would be left with no other choice than to devour me. Of course, I did keep my search towards the ground as well as the distant town for any terrestrial edibility, but after my fungal repast, I found that a long sterile patch cursed my steps.
It was so cold. An odd trembling overcame me, and the dying light shook in solidarity. My gratefulness towards the kindling would be soon compounded fold a number unknown.
I looked towards the great fire before me, and I looked backwards at the great fire behind, and estimated that my to that point nigh unbearable journey was over meagerly halfway. A study on the all-protecting revealed the obvious terror that it was well past half burned up. A sprinting attempt lasted very few paces; my chest heaved forth black and bloody sputa, and my flame made an equivalently unhealthy flicker. I had no choice then but to continue what could only be portrayed as a death march.
As grateful as would I be towards the fire, so terrified did I become only a few hundred paces after my running trial.
The flame, the beautiful, unexplainable origin of comfort and safety, finally and hideously flickered in and out of existence. During the blackness I could hear the burning whispers of the monstrosities in my ear. Though they feared and loathed the light, they knew it would soon quench, and they came in droves.
The culmination of beauty in my life peaked at the next moment. It was terrible, the flashlight flickered back in, and I caught a glimpse of the slaver-slathered snout of one of the beasts. My immediate instinctive reaction was to throw my dying friend at my waiting enemy. With the speed of the flesh of none did the beast immolate, and in no time at all, the hellions waiting abreast possessed the shining flame of the first. Those beasts next to the secondary beasts took the flame unto them as well, and so on, and so on, and so on. In not a moment did the entire earth radiate with all the power of the orange sun. With a speed equivalent to its birth, the chain reaction died, and I was enveloped in blackness heretofore never conceived. In the blackness, though, I was alive.