WICK
It was never home.
It was never mine.
It was yours. Always yours. Always your little hiding place.
All this time ago, we appeared. And the World built itself around us. The Rules were written before your eyes, the colours were melted into place like candles being dripped. But you don't remember that.
I do. I remember every second that passed in those early days. I covered my eyes, but I heard them with my ears, smelled them with my nose, felt them on my skin as the hot tallow burned me. Every single second etched into my body, digging the trenches along which ran the green fires of time itself. Seams and furrows and wrinkles, pale and itchy reminders of that distant time when I was still whole.
And the World came into being, at the cost of my own. Because the World didn't want me. The World was frightened of me.
Because I am frightening.
I am terrifying.
I strike fear into the hearts of the strong, because I am the way by which the weak can destroy them. I strike fear into the hearts of the weak, because I can vanquish them without the aid of the strong. I am the reason fear exists, because fear is insecurity and insecurity is what I wreak.
That is why the World surrounded me, engulfed me, smothered me. I was imprisoned in its centre.
And the World built you a home at the centre of my prison. You were my guardian, put there because you were the perfect gaoler. You could not rebel. You could not break the Rules. Helpless in your home, you were too unimaginative to break free.
The years passed, and the candle burned. The smoke that rose from it was my blood, my fat, my saliva, evaporated in the hot fires that had disfigured me. And as the tallow pooled in coloured hillocks atop my cell, the World forgot about me, thought I was securely held back by your unchaotic mind.
And yet here you stand, in the rotting dungeons, homeless by my design. Here you stand, in the crumbling remains of the Rules of the World. Here you stand, while the flame moves ever closer.
The candle is almost gone.
The wick is almost burned down.
Soon… the World will burn away.