consumption
Burn, flame, burn. Tick, clock, tock.
Eyes alight, Noah watches yet another funeral pyre suck all the oxygen from the air, itself gray with ash and smoke and blood and stench. Only because the bodies of the troops have more or less completely left, in one way or another, has the silence set and the air, otherwise, cleared.
The flame of life, all-consuming, is here yet again. Mark its presence well; though soldiers from both and all sides have learned to ignore it, to tune its stationary crackling hum to a lower, less important frequency, it is still there. They cannot simply ignore it in total.
It is ever-present, flickering even with and within their irises glowing rainbowed to the sky. It never stops, never never never ever stops.
To Noah (to everyone?), it feels inhuman - unhuman - to be living by these signs. The perpetuation of their own lives is only a matter of brazen oxygen, harsh and metallic in the wind.
The saving of others and others', both long gone, meanwhile, is impossible. One might as well call it the flame of death, because that's all they're ever celebrating, when they play these damn flutes.
Somewhere along the line, the past few months...Noah has felt his own lung capacity lessen, the length of time for which he can sustain his own mournful untrilled notes waning away more and more with every concert.
So he's useless, if he cannot be as constant - not to say steady - as the fire. So being an off-seer for so long (long enough) has caused him to start seeing himself off, breath by breath.
What a waste.
He brings the flute down from his lips and surveys the barren field. Lanz and Eunie are somewhere behind him, probably giving him his space because this is no longer just a depressing process and duty, it's downright maddening.
If he squints, he can see the Agnusian soldiers in a similar formation, one by two.
He wishes he could hate them. He wishes he could scorn so righteously the other side - other, other, other, but aren't we at all the same, aren't we all humans- no, people, in the end?
In the end. So what if I...?
Unsquinting, letting his eyes go lazy and crossed, Noah sees the flames in his eyes now in front of his face, floating and expanding in an incessant radial pattern.
(That's not what fire looks like. That's too fake.)
And if he raised his right hand, the one that controls the trills, the grace notes - graceful, ha! death is not graceful, not on Aionios - and the flickers that imbue life into the plaintive whistling birdsong, into the fire, what would he see?
Would the fire consume him? Would it lap gently, licking like a surprisingly docile giant feline, taking tastes of the once-youthful flesh? Would it swallow him alive?
Life should be so instantaneous and gripping. Life should be so exciting and all-encompassing.
Life should be so alive. But not on Aionios it's not.
Life, day to day, hardly feels real anymore.
The flame needs oxygen. Needs it, and needs it, and needs it. If people didn't keep fighting the war, the war wouldn't be able to sustain itself. And if the war is all that Noah has ever known, maybe the people running it, willing it, don't know anything else either.
Still...likely they once did.
What if it were Lanz? Would he melt, hinges combusting and two-tone of his face becoming one, almost like he were molded of pristine plastic, a babe in the arms of a creator god?
Would Noah slide out from beneath his façade just the same way?
And what of Eunie? She'd curse at the bite of the fire, but before long it would scorch away her wings, blacken them with that very same smokey ash, rip them out of her skull and disalign her entire spine.
We're powerless to stop it.
Noah bets it's the same with the other three, across the dividing line.
Appendages are easy targets - he knows that, as a soldier. So for the leader, the girl with furry ears on her head, those would be first to go. The ribbons on her skirt would catch, and the flowery frills of her dress uniform would be torched soon enough.
The strategist always half-sulking behind her? His scarf would trip in without question. He's almost begging to be caught with it, one way or another.
And the girl with the hammer? Well, her hair is already half on fire. Maybe she'd like the flame.
Maybe she'd like being immortal within it. Maybe she'd like never having to wonder about a baser truth underneath.
Maybe.
Of a sudden, Noah feels the contents of his stomach - brittle rations, it feels like now, though the packed mess had been fine enough when he'd had it - overflow and transport themselves into the fire.
Something licks at his boots; he's standing too close. For him, it would be his own ponytail. His last remaining scrap of individuality.
Of course the war could destroy even that, even while he is still standing to take the change.
He could kick his leg in, then drop to his knees, bow to a nonexistent god of destruction for his sins - what sins? Cogitation inside the brutal machine? Senseless ideation for and of something fuller?
They all need a distraction. So Noah turns silently away to go sit with Lanz and Eunie, listen to them bicker amongst themselves about what the shapes are that come curling up into the hushed dusk's half-light.
How long had he even been standing there, contemplating?
It had felt like an eternity. As does every dawning day.
Tick, clock, tock. Burn, flame, burn.
You'll die before you'll ever truly go out.
Or...no, no.
You'll die only after you ever truly go out.
It is requisite, after all.
A flame that is never smothered, never lives to be smothered, is not a truly admirable blaze at all.