Not All that Burns is Consumed
A young woman with asian features and long dark hair comes home to her small bachelor apartment carrying a bundle of mail over to the couch to sort it.
"Let's see here…phone bill, power bill, water bill, huh?"
She sets down the bills and opens a plain brown envelope post-marked for her brand-new address and with a return address in Regina, SK. The young woman opens the letter and reads:
"Hi Honey,
I just want you to know that I know that what happened isn't your fault. Maya knows it wasn't your fault. We talked about what happened and I understand that you need some time to come to terms with things. I'll help out the best I can without your mother knowing. I don't think she's ready to know what really happened.
When you're ready, we'll be here waiting for you to come home. No matter what happened, you're still our little girl. You'll always be our little girl, whatever else changes.
Love,
Dad."
The young woman puts down the letter quickly, tears forming in her eyes, and leans back on the deep cushioned thrift store couch tilting her head back. A small tendril of smoke rises up from the letter where a patch the size and shape of a thumbprint has blackened the paper. She takes a deep ragged breath and whispers to herself.
"I control the power, it does not control me. The power is my sword, but I am the hand that strikes or stays the blade. I control the power…"
After a few minutes of repeating her mantra, the young woman gets up from the couch and changes into a running outfit. She gathers her keys and wallet from the bowl she keeps by the door and leaves the apartment.
Driving to the Meewasin trail, the radio in her car stopped working.
"Damn it Kaki, calm down." She forced herself to breathe deeply and slowly. Ever since she discovered her power, anything electronic seemed to be going haywire around her. Cellphones usually stopped working within a day or two, computers crashed when she was nearby, and things like car radios blew out static or quit completely. When she got her license at fifteen her parents had bought her a car, new and modern, right off the lot. It was dead within a week. After no fewer than six trips to the dealer for warranty repairs and replacement cars, Kaki decided to take over her dad's old 1975 Lincoln Continental Town Car. Her dad traded Kaki's cute little sedan for an SUV, and everyone walked away happy.
That was last year though, and Kaki hadn't been home in almost a month. Thinking of that, how had Dad been able to find her? It's not like she told anyone where she was going. When she ran, she made sure she did it the right way: Closed out her bank account, carried only cash and no credit cards (that part was easy, since credit cards only lasted a couple of weeks in her pocket before they stopped working anyway), and left a note telling her parents that she was leaving, and not to follow her.
After she burned Maya, she didn't feel safe at home anymore. Who knows when she might lose her temper and burn the whole house down or something? Or worse, hurt Mom or Dad? No. Better to be as far away from them as possible. But at the same time, she didn't want to get so far away from them that she couldn't get down there if they needed her. So she came up with a plan: Run to Saskatoon. Only a couple of hours away, it was still far enough that Maya and her parents wouldn't be able to find her, and she could figure out how to control the power inside her that kept trying so hard to get out whenever she lost her emotional center. So she made her arrangements in secret, waited for Mom and Dad to head out to work, and pointed the car onto highway 11 north.
It didn't take long for things to start going different from her plan, though. On the drive to Saskatoon there had been that guy being tortured by a gang of bikers. They had parted to let her go past, and she had seen him tied to the bike in the back, and dragging on the road. His skin was scraped raw, and his clothes were hanging in strips off of him. She had looked at him, meeting his eyes.
She had been transported for an endless moment to the hallway outside of a barred and dank jail cell. The cell was barely lit by a small candle lit one corner. By that meager light she could see that there was a man chained to the back wall of the cell. His wrists were manacled from above, held around shoulder height as he sagged in the restraints, pulling them taut. There were obvious marks on his wrists from when he had repeatedly tried and failed to break the manacles by main force. He wept in his sleep, tears digging furrows through the caked grime on his face on their paths over his cheeks. She took a step toward the unlocked door to the cell, pulling herself up short when she nearly collides with a petite brunette woman carrying a porcelain bowl filled with soapy water and a cloth.
The mystery woman entered the cell and started cleaning the grime and sweat from the hanging man.
"He thinks he deserves this."
"Excuse me maam?"
"He thinks all of this is his fault. I should have told him about his father a long time ago, but as he grew up I thought it was all just a dream or something like that. Now poor Edward carries the weight of the world on his shoulders." The smaller woman began to sob. "And now I can't help him, can't make him hear me. He's so tough, but his heart is so vulnerable."
Kaki looked at her, heard her sobbing, and made a realisation: What she was seeing was both extremely real, and not at all real at the same time. There was something about this man that was chained, and he needed someone to help him. At the same time, there was something strong and pure about this man. Kaki knew instinctively that this man was a person who she wouldn't be able to hurt by accident. And he needed her help. Kaki made a decision.
The younger woman entered the cell, touching the small woman on the shoulder "I'll try to help, if I can." The older woman turned to look her in the eye.
"Why would you do that? It will be dangerous. Very few people would do that."
"It's…I think this is something I need to do. I've never been needed before. Not like this."
"Thank you. Tell him he doesn't deser-" Kaki blinked, and was back in her car.
That was two weeks ago. She hadn't seen the mystery man since, but she was somehow certain she would.
Kaki left off her reminiscing and parked at the Meewasin trail lot near the weir. Just as well, since the heater had shut itself off right before she parked, and the car was starting to get cold. She got out of the car and was stretching her legs for the run, when she heard a rustle in the snow-covered bush off to her left. Kaki whirled, and saw something hideous raise up from behind the small bush.
Its limbs were bent in odd places and directions, and its face was all strange angles and shapes. Looking at it gave Kaki the impression that it wasn't something that could, or should, exist in nature. Its features were cruel and edged like the spear and small sword it carried. As Kaki watched, the creature drew back its arm and let fly with the spear.
"Bǎohù"
Kaki reached out her left hand, fingers spread wide, and the air before her shimmered. When the spear met the shimmer, it burst into flame. Kaki was sprinkled with a small amount of white ash, all that remained of the projectile. "Yes!" The young woman said, glorying in her power. Then she wasn't glorying in anything much, as a second creature behind her hit her over the head with a short oaken stave and everything went black.
Kaki woke up in what seemed to be a cold icy cellar of some kind. The ground was hard, and there was something soft piled around her on both sides and on top of her, and for some reason her left leg was asleep. She opened her eyes, and saw nothing. She raised her left hand, fingers cupped, and concentrated. "hikari." A small ball of flame appeared over her hand, shedding light all around. The softness piled around her was a trembling mass of people, no fewer than 15 or 20 of them. Several of the closest ones scrabbled away from her when the fire appeared, their faces filled with fear and hate, reflected in the light. They didn't stop trying to get away from her until they bumped up against the icy walls of the glacial cavern, not paying even a small amount of their attention to what must have been brutal cold.
Looking around, the young woman noted some interesting similarities: They were all young, all fit-looking people, and they were all dressed in variations of winter jogging outfits. They all had a rope tied brutally tight around their left calf and thigh, holding the knee bent so they couldn't straighten their legs. A look at her own left leg confirmed that she was similarly hobbled. 'Well,' she thought to herself 'That explains why my leg is asleep.' She concentrated again "hi." A small ember formed on the rope hobbling her leg, growing until it snapped when she flexed. "Now let's find out where we are, ok?" She looked to her fellow captives for a nod, or headshake, or any kind of response at all.
They didn't give her one. They stared at her blankly.
Once she had massaged the feeling back into her legs she decided it was high time she figured out what was going on. She got to her feet and set out down the corridor, sending her little ball of fire before her to light the way.
By the end of the third hour, Kaki had learned two important things: First, that this cave was actually a complex of several caves carved from ice in a shape somewhat reminiscent of a massive modern home. Second, that it was a lot easier to maintain her guiding light than usual. By now, she should have had to stop for at least one or two breaks and even so she should have been exhausted. Very soon after that she was distracted from these facts because of a third important fact: The creatures that had captured her were having a feast.
They were alike only in that they were misshapen and terrible to look at, but different in every other way. Short, tall, one-armed, four-armed, and so on. They were gathered around a four foot tall table, eating without utensils from a mass of meat that had once been a young man. The five of them tore at the remains with their hooked and barbed claws, gnawing at them with their jagged teeth, and slurped at the blood that oozed and sprayed. One even got down on its knees to let a stream of still-warm blood flow into its mouth from an imperfection in the tabletop.
Kaki fumed. This was unacceptable. After how much she had agonized over the possibility of being a danger to innocent people, seeing this put things into perspective: She might be an accidental monster, but these were reveling in it! She burned with her fury, feeling it sear her from the inside out until all of her mind, all of her being was consumed with flame and the need to burn. She looked around. There were no humans in this cavern except the now-dead victim…not even her. She was an avatar of flame. And then she knew: She WAS an avatar of flame. Flame to punish the guilty. Flame to protect the innocent. She would never be a small glow, safe in the hands of the weak. She was the raging flame of war.
Kaki turned inward and joined herself to the fire inside her, accepting it and understanding it for the first time in her life. The world turned cherry-red in her vision. She whispered a word, her voice that of a lover speaking the name of her beloved. "Dìyù."
Fire filled the chamber.
Kaki led the surviving captives out of the cavern and into the light of a cold winter day. The mouth of the cavern let them out onto the meewasin trail pathway a small distance down the riverbank from the spadina parking area. She led them to the parking area with smiles and cajoling words, and then she stepped into the street and flagged down a passing car. The startled man driving with his two daughters was surprised by the young woman appearing in front of his car, but he heard the sincerity in her words, and placed the 911 call she asked him to. He ran his eyes sympathetically over the crowd of former captives, and by the time he looked back to their young savior, she had disappeared.
A young woman with asian features and long dark hair comes home to her small bachelor apartment carrying a bundle of mail over to the couch to sort it.
"Let's see here…phone bill, power bill, water bill, huh?"
There was a man sitting in her living room, on her couch, reading a book. He looked up when she came in, seeming almost as if he was looking through her, judging a translucent crystal and seeking flaws.
"Ah, Ms. Yukimura, I presume?" He was not tall when he stood up and offered to shake her hand, about 5'8" or so. He was dressed in a charcoal three piece suit minus jacket with a sky blue tie. And he was old. At least thirty or forty. Kaki couldn't put her finger on exactly what, but there was something…odd…about this guy.
"Why are you in my house?" Kaki did not take his hand. She settled herself in a defensive stance, and readied her power. She would not be taken again!
"No need for that, Ms. Yukimura. I'm quite harmless. At least, I mean you no harm." The strange man settled back into the couch, moving very slowly and keeping his hands in plain view. "I wouldn't normally have invaded your space like this, but it's been very difficult to find you, and I needed a chance to speak privately with you. Frankly Ms. Yukimura, I'm looking for weapons against the dark, and I'm hoping that you are one. Are you?" The man gave her that weird look again, like he was looking for something inside her. And he didn't meet her eyes at all.
Odd.
"What are you talking about? I'm not a weapon." But even as she said it, she had a sinking feeling that he knew something she didn't.
"Do you know what a wizard is, Ms. Yukimura? They are people who can bend the laws of nature to their will, at least to some degree. This power is often passed down through family lines. I think you might find this interesting." He reached slowly over, and tapped a finger on a manila folder laying flat on the coffee table in front of him "May I?" Seeing her nod, he passed it over to her.
Kaki opened the folder, and saw a diagram of a family tree…a very familiar family tree, but with branches she had never seen before. "Who are these people? Kaen Yukimura?" She looked at him, and narrowed her eyes. Now she was SURE that he knew something she didn't know.
"You're a wizard, Harry." The man said with a small self-amused chuckle. "My name is James. James Tyveck. Those names that you don't recognize are the members of your family that your mother wouldn't let your father tell you about. They're—what?"
Kaki's narrowed gaze had turned murderous, and the file in her hands was blackening from the heat emanating from her hand as she clutched it.
"You. Talked. To. My. Parents?" This old man had never been closer to death than right now. "What did you tell them?"
He looked strangely unperturbed. Very brave, or very stupid? Could have been either, or both.
"I told them that I was doing a project for the National Post on immigrant families and their experiences in Canada. Once I got your licence plate number from Mr. Danvers, I've been on the lookout for you. That plate brought me to your parents."
"Mr. Danvers? But I don't know anyone named…" Kaki's voice trailed off as her mind flashed back to the flayed man on the highway. Was that his…? No. But…? Maybe.
"A man you helped. He's a member of my task force. I would like to add you to the team. Would you care to have a seat, so we can discuss it?"
Kaki thought about it a minute, eventually taking a seat in an easy chair across from the couch. If he knew the man from the highway…
After the man had left, Kaki made herself a pot of tea, a little bit bemused. As offers go, it was a pretty good one: A chance to learn about her heritage, a chance to come to terms with her power, a chance to meet the man from the highway again, and a chance to make a difference. And the cost? Trusting that this Tyveck guy would be pointing her at evil and not at good people.
But can he be trusted?
By the end of the second pot of tea, Kaki had made her decision. She picked up the phone and dialed the number on a small card the old man had left behind. When an answering machine answered, she said eight words and hung up:
"I'm in. If you're evil, I'll burn you."
And then she looked at the family tree, drinking in the new names, new family, that she didn't know she had. And they were all like her!
Today is a good day.