The Flame

Yavi sat on top of her folded legs, her eyes staring intently into the fire. She watched the flames sway like golden dancers to a silent drum. The words came out of her mouth, but she may as well have been silent for her mind was far from the chunk of bread that lay at her feet.

"What exactly do you mean by that?!" He asked her through the smoke of the fire.

"I mean you needn't worry about where I got the bread, Patad," she said boldly. Yavi felt the blow before it even crushed against her jaw, it was almost like a memory she was stuck in. Forever repeating itself, never ending, and there was no such thing as getting used to it. She was back in the flaming hell that was Tlar with each kick. Patad's brown eyes were lined with wet rims from the smoke, she stared directly into them as his boots burnt into her ribs. There was no shame in his eyes, no anger either. There was something a lot worse, there was nothingness.

There used to be words, they would rain on her with spit and blows, but those had gone away with the anger. Those had been better days.

Yavi felt heat bubble up at the pit of her stomach, as if a flame had sparked inside her. Her skin was afire, crawling with calidity, numbing all the pain from Patad's fists. "All you have is your fire," her mother's voice rang in her head.
She let out a shrill shriek as she tried to quench the heat. With one final kick, Patad turned around and was out of the door. Yavi lay shaking in a pool of sweat, mumbling her mother's words. She felt the heat melt out of her, and her breathing steady.

After lying in her own sweat for ages, Yavi heard the door creak open. Her mother came limping in. Das's shawls were layered carelessly over her stooped shoulders, her face as red as her bushy hair.

"Don't try to move, child, let me warm the soft wave first," her mother said softly, although without much sympathy.

"I...I...can...not," Yavi struggled, each word sending a sharp pain through her jaw.

"You should stop provoking him," said Das after holding a tiny blue bottle over the fire. She helped Yavi sit up, then made her swallow all of the its contents, as vile as anything Yavi had ever tasted. However, it worked quickly, and within moments she was able to move without much pain.

"I will kill him," said Yavi bitterly, as her mother dabbed some ointment on her wounds.

"You can try," replied Das with a strange chuckle.

"I will stab him in his sleep, I swear it!"

"Like I said, you can try, child. But that thing is man no more. Knives will only anger him," said Das in that absent tone that Yavi loathed.

"I will burn him then," Yavi said softly, and watched as her mother's face turned to stone.

"Did I not tell you that we should never speak of it? What is wrong with you, Yavi? You keep talking like this and they will find us! It's bad enough that your husband is Tigsa, now you want to….." The sudden panic in Das's voice was terrifying.

"You do not know what it's like," said Yavi, fearing she would burst into tears. "What it's like to feel the flesh cook beneath your skin, to-"

"I don't! Thank the gods, I don't! I rejoiced when I knew I had been born without the...It." Terror crept between the lines on Das's face as she spoke. "I watched it consume my mother. Then the Masters came, with much and worse."

For a moment, Yavi saw her mother as she had never seen her before, as a woman, sad and afraid. Her cracked lower lip quivered slightly and she bit it, the same way Yavi often did hers.

"Nothing, not even your life, is worth them finding us. No matter how bad it gets, how hot it burns, bite it down," her mother said slowly. "All you have is your-"

"I have heard that my entire life. What good is this fire if it can not protect me? Mother, how many nights have we spent cold in some forest? Or hungry in some foreign city? I hated it, but it has to be better than this." Das's green eyes looked deeply into hers, it felt as if she were staring inside her, Yavi said:

"Let us leave, let us go to the East in the cold deserts or the West."

"It's too late, they will find us if we leave. You are protected because of your...affliction, but the powers of the Musters know no bounds. Already they turned Patad into Tigsa. We can not go, they will find us," said Das with a shiver. She gathered her shawls and was out of the door as swiftly as she had come in.

Yavi closed her eyes as the last wisp of her mother's scent followed her out, how the woman still smelled of red roses in the middle of Tlar was beyond her. Patad's face drifted in front of her, she knew she was dreaming because it was the face she had known before, not the face it had become. He had the brown hair of the Tlar, thick and soft. His skin, a beautiful, golden brown and as smooth as a drop of water. It was his kiss that had brought her back to life.

They had been travelling for weeks through the most terrible heat Yavi had ever felt. Das had been the first to give in to either hunger or thirst, and Yavi had run frantically through the dry, skeletal trees, until she too had collapsed. She had woken up in the very hut where she now lay, warm air trickling into her lungs and soft lips pressed into her mouth. At two and twenty moon deaths and having been to more cities and villages than she could count, Yavi had still never seen a man quite like Patad.

Patad was a trader, therefore, he was had a sweet tongue and the Tlar always were known to be a cunning folk. He could talk a man into selling his soul. Within a fortnight, he had talked Yavi out of her Maidenhead and into a marriage. Yavi was certain she was in love and Das's pleas fell into the dust, and Patad loved her just as much.

"What do you fear?" Patad had asked her one morning as she lay on his chest. The cold from the night would soon be gone and the heat that would follow it could dry a man into a bone.

"I fear they might find us, and hurt you," she had whispered.

"Whoever they are, they can not hurt me. They can not hurt you either, for you and I are one now," he had replied confidently.

You have not the slightest idea what they can do, she had thought, but she did not say a word.

The temper had always been there, but it was only after two moon deaths had passed that he had first struck her. He had apologised on his hands and knees and sworn never to do it again, an oath he had not kept. But even then, he had been Patad with his beautiful skin and his sweet tongue. But then the tigsa had come. Das said it was an ancient weapon of the Mustars. A creature that slid itself into a man's soul and made the worst part of him his existence. Patad had become a shell, shrunken, vacant and silent, speaking only with his blows and kicks. Yavi's mother had begged her to leave Tlar with her, but she had refused as she had done many times before.

Her affliction had always been there too, aching beneath her birthmark. An almost circular black mark on her wrist.