The Fires of Farek-Hi

2018/07/16

Every living being has a light inside of them, this fact all children of Farek-Hi knew well. And conversely, all light are life. When Arha was born, her parents told her, they had taken the still baby to the field of Lifewings, or what in your tongue might also be called Fireflies. Then they sat and waited. Some families only had to wait minutes, some waited days. The field was always alight with Fire, but not all of them are ready to be reborn. Arha’s parents, though she was not called Arha then, waited for two hours before a firefly came to them. It shone bright, brighter, in their eyes, than all the lights around them. It spun around the baby, its light steadfast and unblinking. When it entered her body, and she started to cry, and her tiny arms and legs had moved for the first time, her parents knew what to name her. Arha means the Steadfast One.

Seven years after she gained life, Arha witnessed death for the first time. Her grandmother had gone in her sleep. Her breath went out and her body had stayed still. There were grievings, to be sure, but mostly, Arha remembers preparations. Her family had hurriedly changed out her grandmother’s clothes, and then they carried her, with elaborate movements, to the pavillion at the center of the village. A crowd soon gathered, most of whom she knew. It was not a large village, and half the children had gone to the same teacher as she had. They watched, and as it was the first time she had seen such occasion, Arha asked her mother what they were watching or. They were waiting for the sky to take her grandmother’s Fire, her mother had explained, because it would be torture to have the Life attached to a body that cannot sustain it.

More questions formed in her young mind, but soon they were all answered. Her grandmother’s body burst into Flames, and as the people had readied wood around it, the Fire rose high into the sky. It was like nothing Arha had seen before. The Fire burned bright for hours and hours until one entire day had passed. By the time the Flames died, most of the people had returned to their own matters. But Arha, she waited and watched and she was there when the Flame circled back down and erupted within itself. From the ashes, a small mote of light flapped its wings and flew away, rejoining its kin in the field of Lifewings.

Every life is Fire, and when they die, they become Light. Later they will find a body and be reborn again as Fire and the cycle will begin again. Arha had asked her mother, what of the beginning? Is there a moment before there were Light? And her mother could not answer, but her teacher, when she asked him the same question, had smiled. He told her of Ifre, the Fire tree, of how one seed from its infinite, intertwining branches had fallen and congealed with the cosmic dust of the universe, creating the first life of Farek-Hi. From there it splintered and flowered and grew, creating more life than itself. From the dust, was created the ground and the woods and the bodies of creatures in which Fire could be more than Light.

Arha listened with rapt attention, but soon a new question gnawed at her. If the seed came before life, and the seen had come from the tree Ifre, where did the tree come from?

The teacher told her of the great turtle Deidra, from whose shoulder the world trees grew. Deidra swum in the ocean of the cosmos, spreading the world seeds throughout the universe.

Arha pondered this for a while, then she asked, how does the turtle came to be? If Fire was made out of the seeds of Ifre, does the turtle, coming before it, has no life of its own? Will the turtle not die? Will it not burn into Flames and emerge as Light and be reborn again?

The teacher opened his mouth to explain, but then he thought about it, and realized he did not know the answers at all. He only knew what was told to him, what the cosmologists and the fire-mages and the watchers of the sky had seen and suspected and guessed. Finally, he explained, there is more to this universe than our own. That Farek-Hi is only the result of one seed, out of countless others that hat fallen from the four trees on the world turtle’s back.

It was all that her teacher could tell her, and what he knew was more than even her mother knew, but Arha was not satisfied. At night she laid awake, watching the flickers of the light globules, and she wondered if perhaps not all light was life, and not all life was light. Quietly, she padded out of bed and out of her house and out to the starlit night. There was a saying, she had heard, of how the Flames from the best of heroes had risen so high up the sky that they became stars, guides in the night. As she watched those flickering lights she wondered if, perhaps, they weren’t heroes at all, but the lifeless lights of other worlds.