The Fire’s Curiosity

1 BTFOM – The Fire’s Curiosity
 
 
It began not with desire, but with curiosity.
 
Flarereen was not a goddess — only a spirit of fire and freedom bound once to a lamp and now tied to the mortal who had freed her. Her magic burned bright, but her understanding of mortality was still dim. She had seen countless mortals come and go, their lives brief sparks against eternity. But Damian… he stayed. He endured.
 
He laughed, mourned, and cared in ways that made no sense to a being who had never truly lived or died.
 
One night, as he worked by lantern light, she asked him,
 
“Why do you still grieve for those who have long turned to ash?”
 
He answered softly,
 
“Because if I stop grieving, I stop remembering. And if I stop remembering, they die twice.”
 
That answer haunted her. For the first time, the fire spirit wondered what it might mean to feel as mortals do — to ache, to love, to lose. Curiosity became yearning.
 
When she appeared before him that night, her form shimmered between smoke and flame, her eyes reflecting the desert’s dying light. Damian didn’t command her, nor did she tempt him. It was something quieter — two lonely beings meeting halfway between their worlds.
 
Their union was brief, but real — a merging of warmth and will. And when dawn came, Flarereen found herself trembling, her flame flickering with uncertainty.
 
“You’ve changed me,” she murmured. “I thought myself eternal, yet now I feel time pressing close.”
 
Weeks later, the truth revealed itself. A pulse of warmth beneath her hand. A spark growing stronger each day.
A child.
 
It should have been impossible. Genies did not bear life. They were echoes of raw creation, not part of it. But somehow, through the link they shared, a new flame had kindled.
 
“If I bring this one into the world,” she told him, “others will see it as defiance. My kind will not forgive it.”
 
Damian smiled, a weary kindness in his eyes.
 
“Then let them be angry. I’ve lived long enough to know that anything truly good begins in defiance.”
 
And so, in the secret warmth of their desert home, Suuna was born — a child of fire and flesh, her heartbeat glowing like a soft ember beneath her skin.
 
Flarereen could not remain. The balance that governed her kind pulled her back into the elemental realm, her presence fading like a storm into calm. When she vanished, the cuffs she once wore fell into Damian’s hands — no longer symbols of servitude, but of connection.
 
He held his daughter close, the sand glowing faintly beneath them, and whispered,
 
“You are my greatest rebellion, little flame.”