The Primal War : First Elements Saga Book 1

Chapter 3: A Road Paved in Fire

Blink. Marcus was staring at the flame in Chenoa’s meditation room. Blink. The flame was staring back at him, beckoning him towards it. Blink. He was in the flame.

Blink. And Marcus barely fought off the impulse to scream as he looked around himself in shock and fear.

The world was on fire. No! The world was made out of fire!

Marcus now stood on a vast plain that stretched out to the horizon in every direction. A plain in the orange and red of a wood-fed flame. Yet, even as he focused on it, he could see flames that were fed by other fuels: the blue flame of natural gas, the darker red and black of coal, the yellow, green, blue, orange, and even white flames made by burning metals and metallic salts. Oily gasoline and petroleum fires, the electric blue of aviation fuel burning, and the white and red of rocket fuel.

Every shade was here, either dancing across the orange and red plane like dancing wraiths. Or dropping out of a firestorm-filled sky in fire twisters to walk across the land like giants, stepping over the wraiths with almost intelligent action to regally stride across his frame of view. And, despite the heat distortion twisting the very air of this place into a shimmering ocean of motion, he could see everything with a crystal clear brilliance, it was almost as if his vision had become superhuman.

Even as he became aware of every shade of fire that was present in this place, Marcus could also feel every kind of fire. Hot fire, cold fire, chemical fire, nuclear fire, molecular decomposition fire; combustion, implosion, consumption and welding. Every possible kind he could think of, and a thousand more that he couldn’t. And yet, as hot as some of those flames were, he was merely aware of the heat, not actually feeling burnt by any of them. In fact, it was as if he was standing on a tropical beach being caressed by a cool breeze off the ocean.

As he tried to wrap his brain around what he was seeing, Marcus looked down at himself. And was astonished to see that he was still made out of fire. But now, instead of being wild flames coursing through the space his body once occupied, he had an actual body that wrapped around the now white-hot core still visible through his translucent skin.

The young elemental lifted his hand and looked down at it. There, bones made out of crystalized fire, muscles out of condensed flame, and blood: seething magma. The air moving in and out of his lungs danced with heat distortion and he could see flickers of flames dancing across the muscles that were active, like his postural muscles keeping him standing erect. Even his nerves, which he could amazingly now see, were tiny conduits of pure light, the impulses moving so much faster than the biochemicals that normally conducted the impulses through his nervous system.

That hand then rose to his face and he nearly shouted out loud in relief to find it touching something solid. His face, his eyes, even his hair felt like it did when he was in the real world and not in this place. This place of entropic decay. This … this plane of fire.

The sudden flare of a new flame emerging from amongst the countless ones rippling across the plain caught his attention. His eyes drawn to it, he could feel them narrow as he focused on the familiar lick of a wood-fueled fire. Then he felt his heart slow as the flame suddenly became the only thing he could see. Blink. Blink. Blink.

The man dressed in tribal clothing stumbled wildly back from the fire as what looked like a man of pure flame grew out of his small campfire to over six feet before carefully stepping out of the fire and onto the dried grass beside the fire pit, instantly lighting it on fire.

<Allah be merciful!> the man cried out in Farsi, holding up his hands in fear.
The man made out of fire looked at him with eyes that glowed before turning to slowly survey the place where he had appeared. There, a flock of mixed sheep and goats that stirred uneasily with the man’s shouting, beside them a small dog barking wildly in alarm, and beyond them a dry plateau. A wave of the man’s hand produced a flicker of flame over it that was smaller than expected. He was somewhere in the mountains, the air thinner here, but still capable of supporting flame.