Private.

     It hadn’t been that long, but the concept of time was starting to lapse for him. Days and hours were meaningless, and sometimes eternity occurred in mere minutes. He judged time by cigarettes and sunlight, and often woke in the dark and knew only that it was late, or perhaps early. Everything slowed down in the winter. Even the sunlight seemed to slow, trickling down through the trees and filling the world in heavy-white haze that often was more blinding then he could imagine. Perhaps this was what Laruku saw, in his blind haven, each time he shut his eyes.
     Ahren saw other things. He saw fire. Except when he opened his eyes, the fire was still there. He remembered then, what had happened. Going to the city, finding the kerosene. Stumbling in the snow and falling hard once, cutting his arm against the concrete. His head was pulsing too, and he was aware it had been bleeding. He must have struck it falling. He remembered coming back here, to this empty world, and dousing the buildings. He remembered striking the match and throwing it into the slick, sweet-smelling liquid.
     Now there were only flames. It was hot enough that where he stood, just outside of the live zone, the heat blew back his hair and melted the snow as it fell. He had no doubt the smoke would draw someone, but it didn’t matter. Perhaps this would confirm that he had started that fire over the mountain, though he had not been chosen for that task.
     Secretly, he wished he had been.

     Ahren had a curious ache in his blood, a desire that had been with him for years. There was no purpose in these fires as there had been for the Khalif, for his step-mother and her kin. All that belonged to him was brush-fire, madness, red-eyed laughter and drowning black holes. Just after sunset was his time, in the autumn where the leaves burned and everything died.
     He heard the boy over the talking flame, heard it over the voice he alone understood. The taste of smoke and fire was long since familiar to his throat, long burnt into his very being. A question made his mind flip, made him switch back to a time long ago, another child, another fire.
“Wer sie sind,” he half asked, half stated. Shaking his head slightly, he broke his gaze with the fire and eyed his son quietly.
“To wrought the ghosts from the floors,” he offered, black-blonde hair falling around his face.

     He could recall, however vaguely, the night in which the ghosts had come. Perhaps it had been a dream his son had made all too real. Perhaps it had been nothing at all but the heroin and the diseases in his skull. Flicking an ear towards the boy, Ahren smiled in a curious way that did not meet his eyes. “Seeing is believing,” he offered cryptically.

    A beam collapsed in one of the buildings, crashing through to the ground in a heap. It sent fireflies rushing up to the dark night sky, vanishing into some empty abyss where all the fading visions went. He stared ahead, captivated, unable to break his gaze with the living, breathing element. “You’re here, aren’t you,” he added, unaware he had spoken aloud.

     He heard the name, heard it but did not comprehend what it meant. Ahren remained still, fixated on the singular act that he had committed. This was not the first time. It would not be the last. As with murder, these were addictions, impulses, things he could not control. His tongue moved in his mouth and he felt steel, tasted it as he had been doing since he was a boy, and wondered about the hostile nature of the universe.
     “It’s an expression,” the blonde coughed, pushing his hair out of his face with one scarred, ruined hand. “There’s nothing here.” Nothing but broken buildings and the remnants of a pack that had vanished in the fall, as so many others had. He had lost everything, this much he knew. All that remained was the desire to erase all trace from the world.

     Ahren’s face changed suddenly at that question. Why? Other men had asked him that, bleeding to death in dank alleyways. Only a few, though. After he had learned how to silence them, there had been no questions. Of all times, to remember that now, it jarred him. There was no reason for his actions, and he could not justify them, but he remembered them. Suddenly, vividly, and without reason. Why? A soft voice, one that was not unlike his own, answered. All that we are not stares back at what we are.
     Jasper’s voice broke his thoughts, and he blinked, saw flames, and then turned to the boy. The moonstone, burning in the bonfire, held nothing and everything. His good eye mimicked this gleam, though in the shadow of his own face, was dark. “I don’t know,” he said, as he had told Laruku, as he had told his daughter. He turned his face away, hiding that bad eye, and once again was captivated by the flames. When he spoke next, he was smiling in a way that did not meet his eyes.
     “Sometimes I think I want to watch the world burn.”

     He could remember, as a boy, seeing fires. He could remember the way they sounded and what they looked like. He could remember as he grew older watching different fires. It might have been an outsourcing of his other addictions—those which come to all men, weak-spirited or not—and if that was the case it suited him. From his right that voice came again, that murmur of a question that sounded like it could have belonged to him in another life.
     Ahren’s voice was nearly a whisper. “No.” Another beam collapsed, and this time, took a wall with it. A great whoosh of air sent more sparks into the black night and sent fireflies spiraling up into a cloudy darkness. “This is just something I have to do.”

     His eyes turned over the smoke and the fire, catching that light, holding it steadfast. They were two marbles of liquid flame and ruby, though one was more moonstone then this. A fire had taken that eye not seven months ago. It had been more then enough time for him to contemplate his own death. He had done this longer then he had thought about killing the boy beside him, or the man starving himself to death in the northern forest.
     Not once had he broken his field of vision with the fire, for fear that if he did such a thing, it would truly bring about something he could not control. Hot air rushed by him, obscuring his vision, and he blinked at the cinders and the white-gray smog that was close to, but not quite, the same color as the snow. He heard the voice above these things, above the second voice he alone heard, above the third voice of the fire, and could not bear to look his son in the face. “I’m sorry, Jasper,” he finally said, then without turning his head, held out his scarred hand. He could offer him nothing beyond that.