when there's nothing left to burn

Eve thought little of the book when she first reached down into the tomb’s chest and found it, lying by itself in strangely good condition for being abandoned to a glorified rotting crate; the leather binding kept none of the slime that coated the wood or the stone walls. In cracked gilt lettering on the spine the book was titled Lanternthrust. Odd enough. Conscious of the mess she was standing on and the bloodshot moon waiting for her above, she skimmed the pages.

The pages were filled, she swore, even the margins covered in a scrawl of black ink, but it vanished faster than she could read it. A trick of the dim light, perhaps—until the pages began to furl at the edges, blackening and sparking with an invisible heat, and the whole book went up in smoke in her hand.

“Huh,” Eve said, faintly. She turned her hand over, but her glove was intact, untouched by whatever magic set the book ablaze. She knew better to hope that she was untouched. A faint warmth radiated in her chest. Her next exhale tasted like smoke. She felt vaguely ill.

The other book in the tomb performed no such tricks, and she was thankful. Its contents were miserable, and boded ill for the ruins of the town she found herself in, but a litany for the dead was more palatable than the memory of flames. Eve ascended back to the surface with nothing in her pockets but what she came down with, and something stranger in her chest.

She didn’t want to speak of it, not to anyone.

By daylight the threat to the town was lessened and she had a moment to herself. She had marked a lantern by one of the entrances and headed towards it, glancing around to make sure no one was watching before she took it from its post. A few paces out of town and out of immediate sight of the path in and out, and she stopped. This wasn’t a good idea. Neither was letting it stand uninterrogated. “Here goes.”

It felt like flexing a muscle she wasn’t aware of before that moment. It felt like lighting a match. In one moment the fields around her were clear but for the pale, watery daylight. The next, they were ablaze. Eve swore violently. “Jesus Christ–”

She was going to die, again; more importantly she was far too close to the town and its wooden walls, and the dry grass of the plains was ripe fuel for the inferno. Eve wouldn’t take it down with her. She cried out for help and beat down the flames until nothing was left but barren grass and two confused strangers and herself, alive, somehow, miraculously untouched, not a thread of her clothing or hair even singed. “I dropped the lantern,” she heard herself excuse. It was an unforgivable sin to be a monster, and she had made herself more of one in that tomb. “The fire’s out, now.”

Her chest was cold, colder than the artic. Eve moved stiffly back to the fence and put the lantern back, silently vowing never to pick it up again. As the sun rose further in the sky, warmth returned to her, in bits and pieces. First it brought feeling back to her fingers in fits of pins and needles; next, her breath stopped coming out in clouds, and smoke returned to coat her throat. So she could do it again, she wondered. Whatever magic she’d absorbed was not so content to be used once and never again – it would haunt her like this until she found a way to exorcise it from herself.

There were enough things to worry about – food, shelter, acquaintances, missing persons, mysteries – to linger on it overlong. Eve managed to forget about it, content to lope after Walter, speak to Otto and Francis and meet strangers who, for once, didn’t seem afraid of her. Until days passed, and the exhaustion hit her all at once as she emerged from the caves beneath Oakenhurst.

Her skin was tight, especially around the stitches, and her borrowed flesh ached down to the marrow. Every breath felt scratchy and suffocating, every step a monumental effort. Eve sprawled across what of her mattress she could fit on without taking off her boots. Was the pain only a memory, or a real side effect of the magic? Was it hurting her because she repressed it or simply because it existed? It didn’t really matter. Whether it was a malady of the body or the mind, she wouldn’t be standing for long anytime soon.

Her eyes closed, her fingers twitching around imagined silk. When she was well enough to sit up, she’d get to work on clothing, for herself and her companions and anyone else who asked. Eve would make herself useful, with the string she’d collected from those pale, dead trees and the wool from Gravedigger’s menagerie. Paranoia was starting to take root, she knew. It wouldn’t be so long until eyes turned on her unnatural form and found its myriad faults, the stitches, the spark.

It would be so much easier if she was one of God’s creations, loved and forgiven.

But she was only herself, and she was burning.