Soundtrack: REM, Oddfellows Local 151
The phantom slipped away from the ring of smoldering coals, its limbs shifting in slight shadows of starlight, here barely perceptible and there vanishing completely. The shadow’s arms extended into bundles of shadow and fire as it burglarized the smoldering fire of the sleeping scouts.
It was a female phantom, seeming just at the cusp of womanhood. Her fingers were the bindings of two bundles glowing firewood.. Her feet settled into the coniferous carpet almost silently with each step. A wary ear might have heard, but not the ears of the sleepers, who perhaps dreamed of footsteps, but their rhythmic respiration silenced the crumplings of the carpet to whispers inaudible to the conscious ear.
At some distance from the camp, the burglar laid down what sticks she had here and there, perhaps every hundred yards or so, as she made more distance between herself and the sleepers. She would lay the coals down in a nutritious salad of pine needles or a yellowing, folded vermicelli of meadow on a dry ridge. After she laid down the last coal, she sat down and faced it, like a child with a wounded bird. In a moment the creature began to revive, its fiery wings not yet unfolded, as it was aroused by the nourishment and fresh air all about it. It arose and straightaway took to feeding. Another withering spirit snatched from the brink of death.
She watched it breathing, eating, and chattering, as its red and yellow wings unfurled. She watched it give birth to embers that would float off into the air like hatchlings into the sea, to begin lives—however brief—of their own.
Being but a burglar, she’d carried no matches. No Creator, she gave birth to no new fires, but only burglarized. Nor either Prometheus, for she burglarized for no client but fire alone. Her calling was the tending the fire, and she was faithful to it.
It would not do to merely feed it. She could not chance to visit the fire ring throughout the night. It would finish feeding too soon, and starve against the stone walls of the ring. The creature’s need was to be liberated from the stone prison of the ring. If it had been smothered by the campers, she would have had nothing to free. She was no more than a breeze that scatters embers, but without the life-giving air so endowed by the wind. She merely opened the corral gate, and led the hungry embers to open pasture.
Once the creature had grown to its dragon form, the burglar backed away from it, turned and betook herself to the shelter of the black maw of a giant sequoia, like some fugitive Jonah fleeing into the belly of a whale. Of course this red giant was much larger—and far more elderly—than any oceanic whale, but it was a leviathan no less. As the oceanic whale is adapted against the cold of the ocean, the red whale’s bark is so much blubber against the fires of the Igneous Range. And like the oceanic whale, this giant had its own pod of red, arboreal leviathans. In its resistance to fire, it tended its own fire-nest, a dark, silent cave that permitted little other life but fire and giant. It laid scaled eggs that would open only to fire, and hatchlings that would thrive on the naked minerals of postpyrotic soil. In its alien way, it depended on the fire that would happily consume it, just as the whale depends upon the very water that would gladly drown it.
Such an alien was our burglar, or rescuer, if you will. Not the kind of denizen one might expect to find among a pod of sequoias—an alien and an exotic, to be sure; but well-adapted nonetheless, like a mammal gone to sea, or a tree whose companion is fire.