Levels of Importance

"Manaforge Cinder" image by Izzy

© Wizards of the Coast 2008

She'd always been taught that when people died, they laid in wait until they were resurrected in flame. Since she'd been a tiny girl, all the way through her young adulthood, early motherhood, and through the day of her death, it was a given that her body would be turned to ash, and her soul resurrected by the great fire that gave life to all. 

Clandee was from a small town, but typically what's interesting enough to tell a story about in a small town is how it became a big town, or how one girl or boy left it, or the way that girl or boy came back and stayed, especially if it was for family or a lover. None of that was interesting about Danidale. Clandee lived a simple life, not particularly interested in leaving or in the outside world. She'd listen to stories, but she never heard them the same way that the special people in stories hear them. She had no thirst for knowledge. The relationship she shared with her fiancee was nice, certainly, but nothing worth mentioning, as love never feels but truly, quite often is. She was ordinary enough to have quirks (a great love for summer berries and the color of August grass, one whose favorite task was quilting, but she wasn't the best and the village only needed so many quilts. She liked to talk, but didn't love it and wasn't the best at it, and while she enjoyed making bread for people, she was no Marterean, the baker's wife who baked most of the village's bread), and because of these quirks, she wasn't interesting by her lack of depth and, by extension, her applicability to readers and listener's lives as an everywoman was near nothing. The best readers could do would be to equate her own mundane tasks to those in their own life, but Clandee liked her mundane tasks, in a way that perhaps twenty percent of people do, but the majority of those twenty percent like mundane tasks more than Clandee did. For all intents and purposes, you shouldn't be reading about her at all, or listening about her if someone is reading this to you. Listening about her, that sounds quite awkward doesn't it? In any case you simply shouldn't -care-. That's where the fire comes in. 

The fire is the real interest here.

Fire was certainly what resurrected her, but not in the manner consistent with the religion in that land.

They believed that fire resurrected people in the end times, that the entire world would come ablaze and all souls strong enough would burn in the fire for several lifetimes, in a pleasant way which kept them whole until they burned out, the time of which would depend on the purity and size of the person's soul. A fairly logical religious belief, if an arbitrarily decided one. 

Before this religion had been popular long (perhaps one-hundred years. No more than two-hundred fifty), men in the surrounding countries decided that if it could happen in the end times it should be able to happen now. They worked to make it happen, trying to set aflame the souls of the dead, and sometimes the souls of the greatly infirm, as emergency medical treatment, and even, when they could manage it, "tried" on the souls they did not care for, claiming them to be unworthy for resurrection when the souls did not burn in one of the many rituals designed to set souls aflame, most of which involved setting the body aflame in some way. For the most part, it was benevolent intention to continue life and avoid the loss that haunts humans.

A method did come that set souls aflame. It came all at once, but it was not clear how the method worked exactly or why it worked or why it worked sometimes and not others. There were explanations but for the most part the explanations were nonsense and all that mattered was that by lighting a pyre under a full moon with cedar wood and after drawing the sign of the great pyre on the forehead and breast of the one to be set aflame, the soul did come to flame, and the person either returned to life or transferred to new life. In a manner of speaking. I say in a manner of speaking because the Returned were selectively cognitive. They held very few memories and even fewer thoughts. They were fairly submissive, but occasionally backlashed when their feeding was interrupted. Clandee was the first of their kind. 

She had been sick for a number of weeks and her fiance was beginning to worry. They sent a rider for a medicine man from a village three villages away, as he was the nearest they knew of, and she had been delivered and helped through the pox by the same man. He claimed that she was not long for the world, though she was not contagious. He did not know what was wrong, but her glands were more swollen than the old man had ever seen, and that, the medicine men all knew, was bad news. In clinical terms, he told her and her husband that she was "doomed". He mentioned a special treatment, but suggested they not try it until she actually died, because he was something of a spiritualist, and believed in the great fire, and had had some success in the past which emitted several violent shakes from a dead boy. This time, he had convinced himself, he must use cedar instead of oak, and place a mark on the forehead as well as the breast, which, as you know, was correct. 

When she rose, she rose without much thought. She knew her fiancee and her doctor, but her fiancee was not faithful, and she burned him by her touch. She, in her feeble minded state, was griefstriken by this, and by the rebuff her fiance gave her. She knew her doctor, and came to him, though she was intelligent enough not to touch him as well. She followed him for several years, though she was not much use. In the end, he had boots made that let her avoid setting the forest aflame, taught her to carry a torch, and gave her the simple instruction to patrol the roads, helping travelers with her newfound strength and bright-shining self. After being a traveler so long, it was the least he could do to donate his best possession to the roads, and while he did not consider it, in a way she was suited to the work. She was kind enough, and her soul was strong enough that her flame did not go dark for many, many years. For some time after the Soul Wars, the road she traveled was feared by those who had never met her, but she continued to tend it, and in a way, she was more than she ever could have been. 

"Levels of Importance" Flash Fiction © Ben Clardy V

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