Fire: Demons, Dragons & Djinns

by Rhonda Parrish

  When the Prince strikes the final blow and takes his lover’s hand, every kink and fray in time draws itself inexorably straight, and they are thrown through the maelstrom one last time. They have changed history, written magic and immortality out of it, drawn truth and equality in.

  The Soldier’s magical heart no longer beats, as inert as if it never had.

  Jinn cannot escape the vortex of time no matter how hard she flies. The Ifrit fades, flakes away as she tries to hold onto the Titan Arm, her grasping fingers burning parallel grooves into its palm. The tears that fleck into space as Jinn loses her grip are molten pearls. She is sucked into the eye wall a half second before him. Every heartbeat is composed of two parts; push and pull, life and absence. The emptiness that pulls them apart is the end of magic itself.

  4.

  I SHIVER. IT’S cold up here, and the end of the story you read in most libraries is a lot nicer than that. The heroes all go back to their own times, except for the Prince and his one true love, of course, who stay and get married.

  “I can’t imagine myself doing that.”

  “If you’d seen how the world ended you could,” the veteran says. “You did.”

  “I’m sure I’d remember that,” I say, although I’ve had nightmares that contradict me. “Besides, there’s no apocalypse in the legend.”

  “Of course not. The world didn’t end. The Empress never got a chance to get bored with it.”

  That makes an illogical kind of sense.

  “Well, at least in your version they still win,” I say.

  “We did. Though dying for what you love is hardly the difficult part.”

  5.

  SPAT FROM THE void, the Soldier opens his eyes with a start and says the Ifrit’s name. He is staring at a wall covered in names. There are flowers leaning against the base, and the monument stretches far in either direction. Citizens are walking along it, heads covered against the drizzle, fingers tracing for names as though they were despondent children drawing in sand. The rain is so fine it’s almost mist, but the peak of his uniform cap keeps his face a little dry.

  He coughs, almost retches. Alive. Resurfacing in a world he helped create but has never seen, thrown back out of the well of time. A wave of residual anguish washes over him. He looks down at his hands. The right is calloused and strong, the hand he remembers. His left arm is loose in a drab regimental sleeve, the hand a skeletal claw supported by a crosshatching of fine wires and tiny cogs. It has three fingers and one thumb. When he flexes it there is a tiny creaking, the squeal of metal bathed in rain.

  His heart would beat hard now, if he had one. The thought invades his mind and he reaches the living hand to his chest. Finds a hum under the brass buttons. Be still. Think. He breathes while his heart hisses along with the wind. Finally, he reaches up slowly to touch his left eye. Finds nothing but a hard patch. So that is beyond this new world, he thinks, and finds his good eye hazy with tears.

  One of the memorial’s attendants, black-clad and carrying an umbrella stops by his side, glances at his uniform.

  “Are you well, Captain?” he asks. A train clatters and exhales steam in the distance.

  “Alone,” he says, “that’s all.”

  6.

  I SIT UNDER the tree and listen. The veteran is an unconsciously talented narrator. He tells the story better than anyone I’ve ever heard, and the tale of waking up in a new world gives an ethereal sense of shifting currents in time. The grass trembles less than his voice, and when the Mammon Machine shudders so do I.

  “Honestly, it never occurred to me that I’d survive,” he finishes, and the strangeness sets back in. “No soldier ever imagines what comes after war. I came here to stand on the edge and wait for you. I knew you wouldn’t come. I was sure that magic died with you. With us. We fell into the vortex less than a heartbeat apart and you beat me here by twenty years.”

  “You really believe this happened.” I try to make this a question, fail.

  “I do, and this is the second time you’ve shaken my faith,” he almost laughs, “another one of your habits. Don’t look at me like it’s so strange. Do you know why you come here? What exactly do you have faith in?”

  The question curls my lips. Surprising bitterness.

  “There is one God, one prophet, one world,” I say. The profession ends there, but I can’t stop myself; “one, or so they say. One sky and one earth and one life and one history. One of so many things I’m not sure I believe.”

  He smiles. Really, this time.

  “There you are,” he says, and I’m not sure if he means her or me.

  7.

  JINN FINDS HERSELF, every morning, in the position of the sultan who must decide whether to kill the story-teller. As days pass on the long road to the Empress’ palace, she decides not to burn the Soldier.

  It’s not an easy choice; the scales dip and rise, almost even. On one side he was, until recently, a servant of the same dark forces that nearly exterminated her entire species. On the other, he did his part to free her from her crystal cage, or at least failed to stop her. Balance. This isn’t really Jinn’s kind of dilemma, but it is better than being drained of her soul and turned into a lapel pin. She loves the rest of her companions, and the Frog’s accent makes her laugh. They accept what she is without fear. Around the campfires she starts for them, familiarity opens her heart, and she tries not to set anything important ablaze by accident.

  Their friendship makes hiding from men in the age of technology a game, and watching the world end a call to arms. Jinn finds reason to believe in something, even if she isn’t sure what. She ignores the petty details of what they’ll destroy. What it is they haven’t said. The Empress and her machine are worse than the cage. Worthy of risk. Worthy of sacrifice. Worthy of her. There’s a difference between abandon and losing control.

  I EXHALE AND there’s a hint of frost in the dying afternoon air. When I was young, I would pretend I was a dragon breathing smoke.

  “The way you tell it, it’s not a love story anymore.”

  “I think it is,” he says, “listen.”

  THE HEROES TRAVEL to the distant past, even further back than the misty middle age of spirits that Jinn calls home. The Doctor, Jinn’s former captor, seems to have survived their first encounter. Just as well; he built the Mammon Machine, and might know how to break it. The Empress should never have let him out of her sight.

  The men and women who inhabit the golden age that gave birth to sorcery understand magic the same way Jinn understands heat. Their art and science are indistinguishable, and even their ruins are cities in the sky.

  Among them, perhaps for the first time in her life, Jinn feels at home. Courtiers blush and fawn over her hair rather than run to their huts to pray. They reveal the Doctor’s plan with the unconscious simplicity shared only by children and artists. He wants to reactivate the Titan of legend, give himself a new body that no one will ever be able to harm again.

  When Jinn and the Prince and their friends discover him in the Titan’s mausoleum, it is already too late to stop the ancient golem’s resurrection.

  8.

  “YOU’RE LEAVING SOMETHING out. We don’t live in a fairy tale and people don’t abandon everything they love to go running after the Evil Empress. No one sacrifices themselves for someone they just met. Why would you follow her? Why did she even let you?”

  The soldier seems taken aback. Like he’s surprised that anything isn’t that simple. That he can’t just say it and make me believe him.

  “Well,” he says, “you know how the Soldier got his arm.”

  “From the dead Titan. They found it in the city in the sky. The evil Doctor who made the Empress her machine got there before them and tried to take control of it. During the battle, the Soldier was hurt and the Prince saved him with ancient magic.”

  “Is that all the legend says?” He scowls.

  “You’ve never read it?” Anger builds in me like steam.

  “I’m not
the reading type. Besides, they got it wrong.”

  “So the Prince and the Frog didn’t cleave the Titan to pieces, then?”

  “They did, but you’re right─something has been left out.”

  9.

  THE DOCTOR BRINGS all of his cruel knowledge to bear in preparing for them. He knows the Titan is only almost invincible. He has to kill the Ifrit, who could heat its armour to the point of softness, electrocute the Frog, whose sword could break it, and confuse the Prince, the only one with the courage to try. He plans to accomplish all of this in a single stroke. Trust is his enemies’ primary weapon, and their only weakness.

  “Ah Captain, we meet again,” the Doctor’s voice booms from his seat in the Titan’s breast. He has knelt to speak to them, left the plates of the golem’s chest open so they can hear him. “You have done well bringing them to me.”

  Jinn’s fists clench into fireballs. Faith is not something she has ever pondered, but she finds hers shaken by the Doctor’s taunt. She vibrates with something that’s either rage or mind consuming anxiety. Maybe they’re the same thing.

  They all glare at the Soldier. He can’t still be one of them, can he? Did he manoeuvre them here to end the quest, not complete it? It is the second time Jinn has tested what tiny patience she has watching him decide.

  “I sometimes wish you’d been born human,” the Soldier says, almost grateful.

  He shoots the Doctor in the same spot as the first time, low, and the trap goes off in his face. The Doctor hasn’t exposed himself just to talk. He has armed the Titan with some of the same nets the Soldier himself once used. Their electricity will serve equally to neutralize the Ifrit and the Frog. The Soldier glances back at Jinn. He owes her a life.

  Everything changes. The salvo of crackling gossamer disintegrates the arm the Soldier raises to shield himself, one eye and, as it wraps itself about him, his heart.

  Jinn experiences a sensation of profound cold. The siphonings don’t compare. Not even being torn through time leaves the same chill. As the incoherent madman closes himself into his new body, the Prince and his companions charge.

  They dispatch the Titan together. As clever as ever, the Prince’s one true love reasons cold will serve just as well as heat. Her icy magic paralyzes the Titan while the Frog leaps from pillar to pillar and the Robot throws the Prince high into the air. They come down at angles, flashing blades carving a deep cross into the armour over the Titan’s breast. The hulk thrashes and staggers.

  The Ifrit flies a wide arc, gathering momentum and incandescent fury. Her friends have marked the spot for her. The Titan’s heart. There are few limits to what she can do, but this might be one.

  Jinn strikes the Titan like a meteorite, blasting herself through the weakness with a sound like cosmic hammers striking steel. For an infinitesimal instant there’s stillness, then the Titan blows apart at the joints in a concussive holocaust.

  Impact. Rebirth. Save him or fail. Live or don’t. Ascend, or fall, or both. The Ifrit corkscrews wildly from the Titan’s sundered spine.

  Jinn skids to a halt on cold stone. Her eyes open and she coughs up little clots of molten spit. She regains the air, and as her agony fades, exultation remains. It may never leave. Her friends look up as one to watch the Titan fall.

  Afterwards, while the Ifrit flits about in anxious spirals, the denizens of the golden age save the Soldier. They are the Empress’ citizens, theoretically; prototypes of the idle elite who will enjoy leisurely immortality as her subjects, dreaming away centuries under a corrupt aegis. They delay death the way fate delays trains.

  They return his sight, give him a magical heart, and take one of the Titan’s arms to replace the one he lost. They do this not in gratitude, but because every dream is too precious to waste.

  10.

  “SO THE GOLDEN age was true.” This fills me with hope. I love what I do and who I am, but it always feels like a lot of work. I enjoy the idea that there was some point when it was all easy, that there was a garden before the flood. I also like the Ifrit blowing everything up; the story is better that way.

  “Entirely true. They stopped time to save me. They gave me a ten-thousand-year-old arm that was as tall as my body, and I swung it as though it weighed nothing.”

  “How much did it weigh?”

  “Everything, as far as I can tell.”

  I’m getting sucked in. The legend has sharp hooks. I feel angry for so easily abandoning objectivity, then angrier still for being mad at something that makes me happy. Does that make any sense?

  “We didn’t all fight because we believed in the Prince and his quest. I see the Ifrit and the Soldier as a pair, like the Frog and the Robot. I think he did what he did for her.”

  He’s having trouble talking about this like it’s just a story.

  “Jinn inspired that much loyalty in him?” It feels odd to say her name the same way I say mine.

  “She did,” he says. “You did. From the very first time we met.”

  “Would you stop saying ‘you?’” I say, though I’m not sure I want him to. Not sure it would be accurate if he did.

  11.

  JINN HATES BEING confined. Born flying, it is impossible for her to imagine just how much she’ll loathe being dragged to earth until someone locks her in a cage.

  Captivity is the history of spirits like Jinn, of her gender, of her species. Endless flight from those who wouldn’t let them live in peace. Less is written about what happens when you give them a chance, even the shadow of a chance, to break free.

  The Soldier rounds the corner to a crowd of grim faces. The atonal disharmony of annihilation booms at his back. Everything behind him is burning; men, an empire’s certainty, his own faith. The cacophony sets every one of his fellows on edge.

  “The Ice Wolf escaped,” he roars, “get the flamethrowers!”

  Something far worse than noise pursues him. Jinn carves her way through the factory with pyroclastic finality. She turns her prison into a fountain of ash.

  The Empress’ men hear the monster come. As it arcs into sight they bathe it in fire. Its eyes are dark embers lost in the flames, and for a moment they think they’re winning. Only when the liquid blaze starts to spin and weave does fear quicken their hearts. Not for long. The Ifrit burns them until their cries echo even in the smoke.

  Jinn’s rage has the straightforward trajectory of sparks falling into oil. The conflagration scarcely satiates her soul-deep craving for the immediate and total immolation of everything that has ever hurt her. The sweet release of it cools her aspect just enough to grant the Soldier provisional permission to live. He lied for her, after all. It’s something.

  They escape on the ore carts the wretched facility once used to supply its chambers with prey. Spring wind rushes past and makes Jinn’s hair flicker and spark.

  “Well, you avenged your brothers and sisters. What about me? You’ve burned everyone else.”

  “Not everyone,” Jinn says, and her breath shimmers the air, “not yet.”

  She calculates, balancing the complexity of what she is owed against what she has given, against what has been taken away. Before she arrives at an answer, the cart finally creaks to a stop.

  Behind them, in the distance, a column of smoke billows skyward like the plume of a volcano. On the platform is a handsome young prince, a beautiful girl in pure white, and a giant talking frog dressed as a knight.

  With infinite caprice, and perhaps to delay decision, Jinn abandons her newly won freedom and takes on a hopeless quest instead. Mutely, the Soldier takes his place at her back.

  12.

  ON IMPULSE I take both of his hands and turn a professional eye on the left. The workmanship is excellent, but it isn’t magic. Nothing is. “It seems a shame to have lost all that.”

  He talks to hide how uncomfortable he is.

  “Perhaps, but everything said about the Empress’ thirst for power is true. What she wanted to do with magic makes me glad we destroyed the machine. This w
orld feels like an empty cage most of the time, but immortality doesn’t bring corruption, it is corruption.”

  I run my fingers along the intricate gears. What does it mean to believe in magic? Not my kind of question, but try it anyway. That world either is or it isn’t. Will or won’t be. Was or wasn’t, though I’m leaning toward was. Soaring toward it. One day someone will use a machine to fly, and I know how they’ll feel. What do you think the difference between knowing and believing is?

  “You’re saying that you are him. Not that you’re like him. And that I am her. Literally.”

  “Yes.”

  Now we’re at the heart of it. It’s time to choose, though I don’t think I get any more choice than the sun does when it rises. You can’t believe in just part of someone. Love is everything or nothing at all. We’re as powerless before it as paper before flame. The question, I have come to think, is not what will convince me that the legend is true, that I am part of it, but whatever convinced me that I wasn’t.

  That decided, I laugh at him.

  The sun has nearly set, and this would be a good place to stop. There is more to the story, though, and we both know it. I know how it begins, but I want to hear him say it.

  13.

  THE IFRIT TRIES to remember her name. She awakens each day as a test subject, a sacrifice, a prisoner in time. She has come to understand what it means to be fuelled by hate. The scientists and academicians of this late age certainly don’t know how to feed her, but that isn’t the point of the facility. It is not a zoo. None of them are going to make it out of this colossal lattice of metal and stone alive. Magic is weakening in the Empress’ iron epoch, and she bends time itself to get her hands on what remains.