The Heartless Divine by Varsha Ravi

Author:Varsha Ravi [Ravi, Varsha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781703493900
Published: 2019-11-27T22:00:00+00:00

15

Enesmat

Kiran was burning. It was an odd feeling, more so because he knew what flames felt like when they wrapped around someone—had grown up gorged on the feeling—and knew instinctively that what he was feeling right now was something fundamentally different. It ripped him apart, tore skin from flesh from bone and seared his blood, turning it to something corrosive and alive. It was different, because he could not see it.

Curled on the floor of the temple, he struggled to raise his hand, stared at it through slit eyes. His skin was untouched by fire—and then he blinked, once, twice, saw it wreathed in blood and wreathed in flames, and then simply his bare skin again.

He knew, logically, that these were just visions—illusions pressed on top of one other so that they tangled into something new and frightening. The fire, too, was not real—at least, real as others would define it. It was not a fire of flint and air; it was one of blood, and it had ignited the moment he had opened his eyes in the flames of his birth, and it would never cease, never die—not until he did.

Kiran was distantly aware of his own screaming. It was a shrill sound, ragged from exhaustion. But he could not truly feel it—not his raw throat, nor the tears wetting his cheeks. He was lying on the floor of the temple, knees shunted to the side and hands curled uselessly against the stone. But there was another version of him that lay aside, a version that wasn’t dead because it had never truly been alive, and this dulled, incorporeal Kiran was on fire.

A figure knelt beside him. He felt a watery kind of surprise, as if he were at the bottom of a deep, dark lake and the emotion lay untouched at the surface. He had endured these alone for longer than he could remember—there had been a time, years, nearly decades, ago, when someone had sat beside him. But he could not remember their name, could not remember their face. The longer he thought of it, the less real the memory seemed to be, fading and fading even as he stretched his hands forward to hold it tight.

There was a light pressure on his hands, a touch that broke through the pain of the fever momentarily. For a second, he felt his own body, felt the stone beneath him.

Visions addled him, pulling reality out of focus. Ghosts crowded upon the figure in front of him, tilting them into those he had lost. He murmured their names in a nonsensical string, a prayer he knew would go unanswered. The figure shifted beside him, said something blurry and far away—too far away for him to touch.

Then they pulled their hands away slowly, letting his own drop to the stone. His chest tightened with some abstruse, unknowable ache, and he reached forward again. He could not think, could not form words—at least not in the language of mortals, the one he had learned and loved and had now lost to the flames.

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