Firestone

By Prerna Prakash

My name is not important, but my words might be. I am here to tell a tale, a story, perhaps a fable. Whether it's true or not, I do not know, for I am just the teller of this tale. 

It belongs to someone completely different. 

Forgive the stutter and stumble, for there are a lot of words in my head and lodged in my throat, and sometimes in their haste to tumble out they stumble on my tongue, falling over each other. 

This tale begins like many others, in front of a fire. There has been a rich culture of oral storytelling throughout the world, and I like to imagine that most of the time, the Bard likes to begin in front of the fire. The tongues of the flames lick into being new realities. 

As I tell you the tale, you do not need to look at me, or each other, or look at all. Best close your eyes and imagine the warmth of the fire, just like he was. And here begins our real story, just like many other beginnings. 

There was once a boy. 

His name we do not know. It could be Sergei or it could be Aman. John, James, Ji Han, or Jamshed. It could be Abraham, or maybe Mohammad. All we know is that there was once this boy, waking up in front of a fire. 

He woke up, slowly–just like a yawn–but as he did, he did not open his eyes. His body awoke from a deep sleep, and he felt the fire. 

From behind closed eyes, he felt the warmth of the fire caress his face, saw the blood-coloured gleam from behind his eyelids. Like a soft breath, a breeze tickled his foot–unclad–and crickets chirped softly. Slowly he savored the wood-flavoured smoke, breathing in the must and music crackling in the fireplace. 

Crickets?

As he now slammed into his body from whichever dream he had been inhabiting, he felt the strangeness of reality. There were no crickets in his 20th-floor apartment. None in the metropolis he called home. No crickets amidst the trams, buses, and smoky domes. There had been no crickets for a long time.

His eyes snapped open and he was caught mid-breath. A lump of air hanging in his throat, looking at the wood fire. Not in a fireplace, but in what seemed to be a forest. 

Now I apologize for the words, but I must tell you that they aren't mine. Just like the crackle of lightning he heard far away, words burst out of his mouth. You can probably imagine what they were.

Sitting in damp moss, leaning against a log, he awoke to aromas he had never before been surrounded by. The wood smoke he knew, but not the upturned soil. Damp grass and greenery, something rotting somewhere in the dark? The smell of wood bark and weaving through all of that was the smell of his fear. He did not recognize it.

Ozone dampened the air around him, pushing him down. He had never felt a storm in the wild, not once. But he knew the taste of it in his memories. A storm was to break he feared, but it stayed just below the horizon. 

As his body adjusted to the surroundings, much harder than the plushness of carpets and woolen rugs, he looked into the ink stains between the great trees that ringed his bonfire. Indigo shadows that his eyes did not comprehend skulked in the distance, away from the amber glow. 

He couldn't just sit there, and wait to become game. He had heard of forests, in newspaper articles and horror stories. As he surveyed his surroundings, he remembered another time when forests and woods had been in his life. 

His grandmother was a storyteller–as much a storyteller as you can be when you are handcuffed to your bed by a broken body. She used to spin tales of wood faes and fairy folk. Faces in the forest he had never been to as a child. Faces in a forest he would never want to visit.

You must have heard of fairies. Tinker Bell, the godmother? Beautiful fairies who granted your wishes? Swishing around in capes and wisps of sparkly magic. Crowned, maybe?

Alas, his bedside stories never consisted of such beautiful idyllic ideas. In his nightmares, these fae creatures roamed. Dark and twisted. Beautiful, but never what you expected them to be. His grandmother was vehement–stay away from the fairies. They will switch you for a changeling. 

And if you meet them as an adult...run. 

Run as fast as your legs will carry you. You will be too slow, but try anyway. Never trust the fairy folk. They are much more than just mischievous. 

Her crackling voice carried him to sleep, night after night after night. Even after she could speak no more, he heard her in his head. Telling tales of the fools who were led into dark crawls, the shimmer of wings leading them astray from their forest paths. 

As he sat in the darkness, an ancient buried fear tingled up his spine, carrying shivers to his scalp. He stood up, paced around, never venturing further than the light of the roaring fire. But soon after, he got tired of being chained to his fears. 

He was a modern man, with degrees and distinctions beneath his belt. He had left all wipers of the natural world behind and walked into civilization. He had only a dead grandmother tying him to the idea of anything other than cities of bright light and modernization. 

He knew. A forest could be dangerous, sure. But darkness? It was but the absence of light. 

Just as he was gathering nerves, and a few twigs to make a torch, he spied amidst the inkdark boughs, a glitter. Just beyond the ken of this world, he knew. This world of warmth and light and rationality. A glitter, faint and abrupt, vanishing for seconds before reappearing again. 

His heart thumped as he thought for a second – just a second! – of fairy wings and dark magics, but this glimmer was too consistent to be one of those elusive folktales. The ocean thumped in his ears, the blood gushing to support critical thinking, and he inched closer to the edge. 

A deep breath. Then a step, and another. One more, and one more after that. 

Before he knew it, he was standing there, facing the darkness, his shadow stretched out in front of him–wiggling with the flames. 

He bent down, pulling the long-stemmed ferns aside, looking for the source of the reflection. He must have hoped for it to be a weapon, but as with most stories that begin in dark woods and uncertainty, that was not to be. 

Crouched in the underbrush he found what he had been looking for woven into the soft bellies of the huge springy leaves. As he went closer–almost close enough to touch it with his nose, his faint fear turned to fascination, pride overriding every instinct that told him to run. 

Sewn to the leaf was what looked like a dewdrop, rainbow-hued bubbles that sparkled like spilled oil on wet roads. This must have caught the light, glimmered, and drawn him out. 

Inside the bubbles slept a small humanoid figure, shrouded by the ridges of overlapping surfaces. Features distorted and misshapen by the darkness and the fractal lens laid over it like a blanket. The creature did not stir, and nor did it appear to breathe. 

As most of us would, when confronted with such a situation, he too looked in amazement. He too believed that he was dreaming. As sudden as a gust of wind, one of the small spittle-like bubbles popped, right over the distorted face. As he fell back, he smelt a strong scent of roses and then the fire at his back flared high...once. 

Complete darkness descended. 

***

The last thing he remembered was a face, beautiful and shimmery, just like the bubbles under the big leaves in the underbrush. A face that was angled and fair and otherworldly. He was not a poet, but if he had been he would have called it ethereal. Magic.

When he woke up, he was face down on the moss, a stone digging into his cheek. The sound of water lapping shore reached his ears just as he felt his body convulse. His arms curled around his stomach, and everything hurt. A stinging stabbing hurt that started at the base of his neck and spread down his shoulder blades. 

He was sick. So sick. He needed help, didn’t he? 

He tried to move but all he could manage was to pull himself to his knees. Pain burst across his skin like a smattering of stars. 

Stars! He hadn’t seen the stars in so long!

He blinked, and as the tears dripped down his cheeks, he felt an itch rolling over his eyeballs, a flickering as a second skin crawled across his vision. As soon as it snapped into place, the world changed. The lights were different, the colors much more. He looked down at his hands and his skin crawled. Literally. 

As he looked on, hunched over and on his knees, little ridges appeared beneath his epidermis, lines like maggots beneath the surface. Little feathers sprung from his pores, pricking out, pushing through like needles in cloth. 

His shoulders popped, and the ringing in his ears intensified. Like a million centipedes rushing through the layers of his body, he felt something emerge from his back. 

The back! His back! It felt so wet. Like beads of sweat rolling out in directions they were not supposed to go. 

Slime oozed down around him, brown in the emerald light of dappled trees. It took him some time to realize the slime came from within him. 

He could see color in the darkness!

He crawled to the lake, dragging his throbbing body to the mirrored surface. As he looked down, he saw his face, marred by little ripples. His face, but also not. Smooth and angelic, his face was that of porcelain. An alabaster mask that housed dark slashes for eyes, no whites. As he looked, something emerged from behind his head. 

Translucent in the sun that had not yet risen, throwing light off their slick films, the wings–his wings–extended. He heard the forest breathe as one and as his body screamed for release, his wings, over his dislocated bones spread of their own accord. There were no screams, because his face melded seamlessly, with no opening for a mouth. As his fear congealed in his belly, the scream of terror stuck in his throat, he wished with all his might that he had listened to his grandmother. 

He should have listened to his grandmother.

***

He was never seen again. Never heard from, never witnessed. 

We don't know his name. All we know is that it was a boy. Man, he used to call himself. I don't know his name, but you hold it within your hearts. It could be your name, or mine. But all we know is this. We know his story, and we know the smell of wood fires and the sound of crickets. 

If this story is true, you must decide for yourself, I cannot tell you. I am just a bard, sitting in front of a fire, stoking the coals that help it crackle.

By Prerna Prakash