And so began a dangerous relationship between Sylvia and fire. In the years that followed, there were many attempts to set things on fire. At first, she'd gather up a big pile of leaves and branches in her backyard and light it up with a match. In seconds, every leaf in the pile would be alight and her mother would be clutching the back door frame, screaming for her to put it out.
This happened at least twice before she wasn't allowed access to the matches or lighters, but she found ways around that.
When she was eleven, she smuggled her brother's spare pair of glasses from his room one morning before school. During recess she collected every leaf and branch on the school field into a pile big enough to feed a small bonfire. The other kids watched her from the other side of the field, their fear of her not dampening their curiosity.
Sylvia stood back and pulled the glasses from her pocket, raising them up to the sun, positioning them this way and that until she got the perfect angle. Before long, some of the leaves started to smoke. Grey wisps danced in the crisp autumn air above the pile. It was beautiful, she thought.
By the time the kids realized what she was doing and ran to get a teacher, the pile was ablaze, Sylvia standing back and laughing as she watched the branches crackle and pop which, to her, looked and sounded just like fireworks.
By the time the teachers evacuated the school and alerted the fire services, half the field and several classrooms were burnt to a crisp and the surrounding buildings narrowly avoided the same fate. The thick black smoke permeated the air for the next several days.
Sylvia was promptly expelled. She never returned to another school. No one would take her.
Her family kept an extraordinarily close eye on her after that.
The Peacekeepers, originally under the assumption that Sylvia was just a foolish child who didn't fully understand the gravity of what she attempted, hoped that threatening to send her to prison if she so much as even looked at another match would scare her straight and she wouldn't attempt anything like that again.
Sylvia obeyed them for a few months, until she just couldn't help herself and tried to set fire to the neighbour's apple tree using a stolen lighter. Amidst the screams of the neighbour and the smell of burnt fruit, the Peacekeepers stuck to their word. They came by and took Sylvia away as she thrashed violently.
No trial of any sort was needed, in the eyes of the Peacekeepers. She'd already proven herself to be dangerous. Her age didn't matter either. She was deemed a menace and thrown straight into a dingy stone cell shared with three other girls, all in for robbery. They pressed their backs against the wall as they slept with one eye open, keeping their distance from her.
The other inmates didn't care for her either. "The creepy fire girl" was how they referred to her. Sylvia didn't much care for them either and simply ignored them. She often spent what little free time she had gazing out the window to the treetops beyond, daydreaming about being surrounded by fire; glorious fire eating away at everything in sight.