Worlds on Fire: Taken in the Night

[x-molten.livejournal.com]

A kidnapping, a long walk, a sacrifice gone awry.



When they came for her in the night, she was reading "Gone With the Wind" in bed by candlelight. Curled up under a blanket, she had just started reading about the siege of Atlanta, with General Sherman burning his trail across Georgia. Then she heard it, a faint rustle outside her window. She put down her book and crept out of bed, candle in hand, to investigate. Hands reached in and grabbed her, held her arms fast, stifled her screams.

Like so many other girls that night, she was taken from her bedroom and dragged across the city to their temple, a place of rumored horrors and imagined nightmares.

*

Many girls all in white, anointed with oil. They had given each of them something to drink, thick and sweet, the taste lingering in her throat no matter how many times she swallowed. The incense, the syrupy liquid, the torchlight, she felt heavy and confused, like her head was stuffed with cotton and her limbs weighed down with lead.

They were led out of the temple and onto a mostly overgrown path that snaked its way through the rain forest, up into the rocky hills. She dimly recalled her father's warnings to never go into the hills, but she was powerless to stop her feet from moving her forward. Around her, beyond the knot of girls, people chanted in strange tongues, their ominous words echoing in the otherwise empty forest, for not even the smallest insects inhabited this area.

A cave rose into view. The girls were ushered inside as more torches were lit, revealing cave walls painted with grisly scenes of death and haunting images of their dark goddess. Down one cave and another, a maze of tunnels and rooms, the repetition hypnotic. She tried to clear her head, tried to turn around and run, tried to speak, but her body refused. Around a corner and then she began to feel heat coming at her in waves. The white robes molded uncomfortably to her skin and her hair hung before her face in bedraggled strips. Another corner and the heat grew oppressive. One more room and she saw it: a pit of roiling molten lava.

*

She doesn't remember what happened next. Later, it will come back to her in nightmares. But right now, some chanting, maybe. The terror that clawed at her heart. Flickers of light and shadow. Swirls of color, reds and yellows. And then a swift shove that sent her reeling over the edge and into the heart of the sun. And distantly, a thought. She was not burning. She was not burning.

*

Fire rippled along her body and her body instinctively mimicked that form. With a thought, she pushed herself up from the magma while the earth began to tremble. She reached down and pulled, and the earth responded. The cave transformed into a miniature volcano, lava spilling up and up and out, splitting the cave's ceiling. The ground shook under the stress. People screamed and fled for safety as the cave system began to collapse and fill with lava.

Suddenly exhausted by the effort, Amara followed the lava flow up and out into the night sky, directing the molten river to deposit her somewhere safe, somewhere *away*. It left her unconscious fifty yards from the sacrifice site in a small clearing, and then it ran on, heading for the city.