Spoiler! :
He had been there for forever.
People tried to kill him. He remained.
People tried to ignore him. He remained.
He did not know heartbreak or disease. He was young and strong. Every time the people came against him, he stood firmly. Even while they raged against him and turned his own words around. Nothing could move him.
Not that the humans hadn’t tried.
First, while he was young. They had thought to sneak up behind him, clobber him over the head, and be done with it. They were wrong. He heard them coming and snuck away to a different place, only returning when he was sure they had forgotten.
Then when he was old enough to understand. He hid again, though this was not a time for playing games. He taunted the humans with bits and pieces of what he could do. He left them threatening words written on a threatening page by a hand other than his, and that marked a dark time in human history. Soon, though, he returned. His humans were adorable; he couldn’t let bad instances get in the way.
Now they were at it again. He could feel the flames licking at his heels even as he skirted around the ideas, full of fire and hatred and laughter and games that meant the end of the world was coming. They always did this when they tried to hurt him; they always acted like they were the invincible masters of the universe, and he wasn’t sure how they came to that conclusion.
No, if anyone was the master of the universe, it was he. He, who held the power and the light out to the people who turned away from it and created their own light. They made an evil light to contrast against his good one. Ugliness and beauty. He didn’t understand how they could compare.
So he was hiding from that ugly light, that fire that had engulfed part of his home already and was burning in a steadily-increasing circle – outwards, outwards, ever outwards. He was curled up in a corner, nearly buried in a pile of books that were inherently safe. All of them had the same title, the same face, the same binding; they were anything but priceless, but they were a haven in this time.
Oh, God, how he needed a haven. How he needed safety. He would give up everything – this stupid curse, this stupid existence – just for a chance to be beyond the reach of those fires that burned his soul.
They inched closer - he could feel it - and he shuddered, holding one of the books to his chest as a kind of shield. A shield for his heart.
Perhaps, though, it would be smarter to let the fire slay him. Damn the humans! They never stopped before it became unhealthy. This obsession with fire could never lead to anything good. He had known that ages ago, but he had opted to hide, as he always did. He always hid away from the fire that lit up his dusty, well-worn face. He knew that when the flames tickled his nose, they were too close, but he never extinguished them.
He didn’t have that power. It was the Almighty’s realm to extinguish these flames, and perhaps He did, but the boy never saw anything like it. Sometimes the heat would die down for a few years, but it always started back up – in a different place, this time; in a different world with different ideals. The same place was never safe twice.
How he wished for safety, or at least that the humans could make up their minds on what was dangerous. Then he could clear it out of his home and let it be burned, let it be destroyed without extending so far as to scorch his back like it had this time. This time, he had been caught off guard, like every other time. They always started with a big fire, always a bonfire, never something small like a stove or a kitchen. Always something to scare him into running.
Give me a warning! he screeched in his mind, but no words came out. No words ever came out, no matter how many times he cleared his throat and tried to hum that melody the humans concocted so pleasingly. Language was his curse, and he couldn’t even command it.
He shook his head and curled up into a tighter position, the book positioning itself uncomfortably against his ribcage and legs. He couldn’t let it go, though. It was his shield. His safeguard. The pages of its twins rustled around him, like they were jealous, but he knew he couldn’t pay attention to all of them at the same time. He never could. There were simply too many books to carry them all.
His back was pressed against the cold wall of the marble room. His arms were scrunched up in front of him. His shoulders scratched the paternal bookcases that watched over him, though whether to save him or kill him he had no clue. If only he could get to the coolness of the light by his chair, then he would be safe and comfortable and he could look at this book that grew increasingly warm against his skin.
To get there, though, he would have to pass by the fire, and he wasn’t quite sure how far it had spread in the time since he’d run from it. Perhaps it would be too long, too wide to jump across, with no way around it; then he would be trapped in this half of the room until the danger died down to a smouldering in the pages of the recovering books and started up elsewhere. But that could take years, his mind protested, and he pushed those thoughts to the back of his head.
No, not years – not years the way this room measured them, in any case. Humans died quickly, and this fire would be out before a week was up. Yes, then the fire would be out and he could get to his chair and curl up and sleep, and maybe find a few books to sort. He never read the books, never thought of it, but he loved to sort them by the colours of their spines. Sometimes he would make pictures on the bookcases, or words that he found inside the books and couldn’t comprehend.
Once he’d made a word that read like Summer. He thought it was a pretty word, even if he couldn’t say it. The way it looked was like sunlight on green and brown and gold and life, glancing off of everything. He didn’t understand what it meant in a physical sense – he didn’t know the language; it was utterly unfamiliar to him – but he knew what it meant in the sense that it was real.
He didn’t think he had done it justice, though he’d attempted to keep the shades he used for the lettering the same, and today the fire had started on the floor by the bookcase where he’d made it. First a few books had caught fire, and then it was a roaring beast that faced him, not small-scale destruction. The word had been consumed and spit out in whirling tendrils of smoke.
The boy shook his head and shrank further into the corner he’d chosen as a hiding spot, dark hair falling over bony knees that shook and shivered like wintertime. He wished for the fire to die, not to come an inch closer to melt him; he was made of snowflakes and wishes, and collapsed in the light of anything warm.
He would wait for the fire to pass, and then he would hide and curl up in the cushioning home of his chair. The books could rejuvenate themselves; he wanted nothing more than to avoid the next fire, if it would be as violent as this one.
A week, he promised himself. Seven times the sun would rise through the only window. Then things would be safe again, and these humans would be dead, their spirits echoing in the earth. Only a week: They were butterflies to him. Oh, how lucky he was, to be able to watch the world go by without a care in the world. Oh, how lucky he was, to have a home such as this.
The boy waited for the world to end.
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