Years later,he remembered his first encounter with fire. It wasn't the soft yellow glow of a candle or the warmth radiating from the hearth in his tiny living room. These flames flickered dimly in the back of his mind, mundane and insignificant, not worth a second thought. No, his first real memory was of the time he discovered fire, true fire-the kind that is pure and beautiful, wild and untamed.
Like all fires, this kind started with a spark. It happened when she turned around. Her long braid whipped the air, and in a flash the grey flint of her eyes met the steel of his and something ignited within him.
In the beginning it wasn't a very impressive fire, more like an ember,a tiny glimmer of red, a smoldering speck that was equally likely to catch the breeze and fan into a roaring inferno or flicker out, suffocated by the lack of fuel. This seed of fire stayed small for a while, wavering with indecision, unsure of its destiny. But soon, something changed. Slowly, the ember began to grow and expand, feeding off his hope and suppressed emotion. The orange fingers that once tentatively reached out to touch his mind, softly caressing his subconscious from time to time, now seized his attention with a greedy, grabbing grip. He couldn't focus on anything other than the fire that burned inside of him. Hot tongues of flame danced behind his lids in a hypnotic movement; he was mesmerized with this new feeling. As it spread through him, every waking movement was spent obsessing over the fire... that, and the mysterious girl from the woods who had lit the match.
The more he watched her, the more he realized that she was special; there was something uniquely different about the girl with the bow, aside from the obvious, and he couldn't quite figure it out. But as time passed and she opened up and grew to trust him, he began to see it more clearly. There was a light inside this girl; she kept it hidden most of the time, but it was there. He caught glimpses of it every now and then- when she was being stubborn and determined, when she refused to give in to the forces that tried to extinguish her. This girl had spirit, she had fire- she was fire. He saw it in the flash of her ash-colored eyes and in the hot flare of her temper and angry burn in her cheeks. Her hair was the same blackened shade of burnt cinders and the smell of wood smoke lingered on her skin. This girl was firey and her flames had touched Gale and set him ablaze too.