Burnt

There was fire everywhere.

Down every alley, every street, every path.

The flames lept from one reed-roofed building to the next, consuming all in the blaze.

Alexandria was burning.

The Romans had come.

His nostrils stung with the smell of smoke and charred flesh His heart pounded in his chest so loud he could scarcely hear the screaming of others around him, the panicked footsteps as they tried to flee from the blaze.

And his hands, they shook, barely able to keep a hold of the scrolls he had saved from the library in one hand, and with his other, he grasped his wife, heavy with child.

But this is why he knew he would escape.

He had more reason to live than the men, women, and children screaming, burning, and dying around him.

Frantically, he looked for a gap, any street where the fire was less intense.

There! Up that stairway! With an urgent plea to his wife, he stumbled forward, barely keeping the scrolls in his arms.

But he wouldn’t let them go. Not these scrolls.

They were his way out.

He was a learned man, and these were from the vaults of the Library. If he could find a break, a spare moment, he could use them to open up a clear path to Memphis, or maybe to Athens.

He and his wife clambered up the steep stairways between the two buildings. If he was right, this should lead to an alley that lead directly onto one of the main avenues.

He was wrong.

It lead to a roof-top patio which showed the whole of Egypt’s capital burning before him.

The sky was an angry red and choked with soot and smoke. That majestic library, where he had spent so much of his life, was now a hollow shell, this wisdom of countless ages lost to the casual greed of war.

And all around him, fire.

This was it, wasn’t it?

This was how he died.

No! No, he still had the scrolls!

Desperately, he spread them out on the ground, forming the symbols that would invoke the gods. Hermes, Hecate, and Khonsu. Safe travel through the spaces beyond.

He ignored his wife’s pleas, warnings that the fires were getting higher. He knew. He could feel them around him. But this was the way out. The only way out.

He reached into his belt and took out the powdered bones of hawks and camels, the proper focus for such a spell of travel. Carefully, he began to chant and spread the fine powder around himself.

The ka began to flow through him, that vital spark of life, that essence of the powers supernatural. He began to shape it into a path through the smoke, through the fire, to somewhere safe, anywhere safe.

It was then he heard a crack beneath him. He looked up and caught his wife’s terrified eyes for one second before the patio broke beneath them, and they crashed into the house below.

His legs shattered as he smashed against a table on his way to the hard stone ground below. He screamed, but the pain was only the beginning, for the fire had already consumed the supports, and the ceiling was crumbling. He watched through bloodied eyes as a flame-wreathed beam tumbled from above, to land on the splintered pile of the table and his legs.

And the fire began to consume him.

It wasn’t a fast burn, because of all the blood, but he did burn nonetheless. The pain was beyond description as the fire seemed to seep into his very veins, pound through his heart and his soul. He could scarcely think, let alone act.

He tried to claw himself away from the blaze, to pry his broken body free, if only to give himself a second of respite before he met the gods. And then his hand brushed against something that crinkled at a touch.

One of the travel scrolls had survived.

He didn’t have time to plan or to even think. He poured everything he had into it. His passion. His desire to live. His draining ka. His fear. He unshackled the potential in the scroll, and it ripped open into a dead void before him. An emptiness with no fire, no heat, no burning.

Nothing.

Dimly, he thought he heard his wife cry out, say that she was coming for him. But in his panicked state, he didn’t listen. He wouldn’t listen.

He had created a way out of everything.

And so he slipped through, into the void.

Abu Rigl Maslukha opened his eyes with a heavy sigh and looked down at his legs. Broken, charred stumps, forever leaking ash, and burnt blood.

It had been seventeen centuries, and the burning still hadn’t stopped.

But at least he’d gotten used to it.

He’d gotten used to a lot of things. The smell of smoke and charred bodies. The angry red sky of a city on fire. The screams of men, women, and children as they burnt to death.

It was his punishment, after all, for his hubris.

To think that he could ignore his masters, and stop the Romans.

Well, for better or for worse, he was now the master. The last teacher of Alexandria.

Among other things.

But Alexandria was far away from here. He lifted his dead, grey eyes to the horizon. There stood a city, a gleaming city. Even in the dark of night, it blazed with light.

When he was a young man, this city had been a wildness inhabited by nomads who had never even heard of Alexandria, or Egypt, or Rome. And yet they too respected fire respected the blazes that could consume miles upon miles of scrub and forests, whipped up by the hot, dry winds of the place.

In Egypt, they called the winds resetyu , the south winds, the desert winds. Here, they called it Santa Ana.

The time was right, the conditions set. It was time to remind people to fear the flame, the fire, the blaze, the inferno.

Abu Rigl Maslukha reached forward a charred and withered hand and let a drop of his burning blood hit the ground. Moments later, the dried twigs and grass sparked and smoked.

He had gotten quite good at this. He was there in Constantinople. Rome. Hangzhou. Utrecht. Oslo. Chicago. Halifax. The Blitz. Stalingrad. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Vietnam.

And now, it was San Diego’s turn.

The bogeyman of fire turned back to the shadows, and let them embrace him as they did so many centuries ago.