Ember had storm-dark eyes. He looked out to the horizon and his bones felt a storm coming. He felt himself getting torn apart by the storm. He felt himself getting stripped down to the bones. Yet still he went on. Still he lived. Eyes heavy. Heart heaving with floodwaters.
His mother was sick and he knew she didn't have too long left. Across the street the neighbours had lost a daughter to the screaming sickness. Two houses over the neighbours had lost a father to the hot summer sun. The house over on the other side a grandmother was gone far before her time due to having weary, weary bones that couldn't go on anymore. At the end of the street a mother and a newborn son had both left the world in the moment new life was supposed to be brought in.
Ember was a from of screaming. His name meant burning. And he was burning, burning, burning.
The lands were screaming. Screaming, screaming, screaming. The people had their flesh constantly torn and stripped away by the storm winds. The people had their hearts constantly scraped by hail. They had their lungs constantly flooded by rain. The people had their souls scattered and thrown upon the ground. The people had hurt.
In far off lands somewhere other people had comfort and luxury and warm houses and sweet cream.
Ember never had anything sweet. His people didn't. They were shining candles in the midst of a hurricane. And though the sea washed up plastic and fishing nets over them, they never lost the flicker of flame that shone forth from them.
Every day Ember had to trudge his unwilling feet out into the dust. And he had to descend down, down, down into a crater ripped from the earth. And he had to rip prices of the earth away from itself and collect valuables for those people so far away.
He hated stripping the earth of itself, and stripping himself of himself in the process. He knew people died in these great holes when the earth could no longer stand up above them. He knew people died in these great holes for innumerable reasons. But he couldn't let the children in his community starve.
So at the end of each unending day he trudged home to a place where the children went to schools that did not have the resources to teach them anything. And he wept inside to see their heart-large, shadow-dark eyes.
And when the sun was pulled up from its slumber by the wires of the world it all started again.
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