Not Human, Not Yet Sure What

"You keep saying 'prophecy' like it is supposed to explain anything." I had stop pacing and was now standing with my hands on my hips in frustration. "Prophecy about what? About who? Where do I come in?"

"I’m getting there." Orion said calmly like we had all the time in the world to talk like a sloth.

"Get there faster please. My parents are dead, Orion and might I remind you that I watched it happen. I don’t have room left tonight for soft talks and no sense of urgency." I could feel my temper rising.

"Aurora." Cillian said lowly, his hand raised halfway like he wanted to reach for me and had thought better of it. "Breathe."

"Don’t tell me to breathe." I snapped at him. It came out sharper than I intended for it to.

 "Sorry. I’m sorry” I apologized  and took a deep breath. “It’s just……. I just……. I need one complete sentence. Just one. I think I’ve earned one." I breathed and ran my hands through my hair again.

"You have, Aurora," Cillian said quietly. "You’ve earned a great deal more than one."

"Then give it to me."

He looked at Orion. Orion looked back at him, some silent argument passing between them. If the situation was different, I might have found their little act cute but not today.

"Whatever this is," I said, quieter now, some of the fight going out of my voice, "I’d rather hear it from someone looking at me than people looking at each other over my head."

"Fair," Orion said, and turned fully toward me for the first time since I’d stood up. "You’re right. I’m sorry."

Orion took the book, then set it down almost immediately like it had gotten too heavy to hold.

"There is a bloodline," he said, "believed to have gone extinct a very long time ago. A line of beings capable of a kind of fire. These fires are no ordinary flame creature can produce. Not just the kind of fire that only destroys. A kind of fire that can also, under the right hands, remake."

"Okay?" I edged him on, still trying to get the head and tail of this matter.

"The prophecy says the last of that line will wake at the moment Elaria needs saving the most or needs an ending. Both outcomes live in the same verse. It never says which."

"That’s not a prophecy, that’s a coin flip with extra steps." I tried to make light of the matter.

"I understand the impulse to make it smaller than it is." Orion didn’t smile. "I promise you, no one in Elaria who has ever read that verse has found it funny."

"So what? I just wake up one day capable of ending an entire world? That’s the thing I’m supposed to understand about myself tonight?"

"You’re supposed to understand that it hasn’t been decided yet," Cillian said before Orion could answer. "Whatever you become. Nobody gets to decide that except you."

"That’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one who just realized that your whole life has been a lie and you can transform into something you don’t even know yet."

"No," he agreed. "I’m the one standing next to her anyway."

My hands had started shaking but I didn’t pay attention to it. I didn't notice the fire until Cillian did. His eyes dropped to my fingers and widened.

"Aurora.” He said carefully and backed away from me a little. "Look down."

I looked down and my hands were on fire.

They were not burning, they were just lit. Orange flames licked gently at my knuckles like it belonged there, like it had been waiting twenty-five years for an invitation, and it didn't hurt. It didn’t hurt and that was the terrifying part.

 It felt strangely comforting, like coming home to a house I hadn't known I'd been locked out of. I turned my hands over, watching flame trace the lines of my palms, and somewhere very far away I heard myself make a sound that wasn't quite a laugh and wasn't quite a sob.

"I’m on fire." My voice came out very small. "Why am I not screaming about being on fire?"

"Because it isn’t hurting you," Orion said, and he’d gone very still, very focused, watching me the way you’d watch something both miraculous and unbearably dangerous. "Because it’s yours."

"Make it stop." I was starting to panic. The flame had climbed to my wrists now, gentle, patient, entirely unbothered by my panic. "Orion, make it stop, I don’t know how to make it stop……"

"You don’t need me to. It will settle once it believes you’re not afraid of it. It can feel that you are, right now, and it’s trying to comfort you the only way it knows how." He looked at me, amused.

"That is the least comforting sentence anyone has ever said to me." I looked at him in panic but he didn’t move. I looked towards Cillian and he gave me a small smile.

He moved towards me and gently reached out for my hand. I tried to move my hands away to avoid hurting him but he wasn’t having it. He clasped his hand around one of mine and surprisingly, the flame didn’t touch him.

It didn’t so much as warm his skin, and some small, useless part of my brain filed that away too, next to everything else I didn't have room to understand yet.

"Say the word." I looked up at Orion, and something in me already knew, had maybe known since the moment I touched that sigil in the back room and saw fire behind my own eyelids. "Whatever it is. Say it."

Orion held my gaze, and for a long moment the only sound in the room was the small, impossible crackle of flame that wasn't burning me.

"Phoenix," he said. "You’re a Phoenix, Aurora. The last one. And I think that book found you on purpose."

Nobody said anything after that. Cillian's fingers had laced through mine somewhere in the last thirty seconds, fingers laced through fire that didn't touch him either, and I sat there in the ruin of every ordinary thing I'd ever believed about myself, and let the silence hold all three of us at once.

"Say something," I finally told him, because his silence had started to frighten me more than my own hands. "Please. Anything."

"I don’t know what to say that won’t sound small," Cillian said quietly. "You just found out you might be the most important, most dangerous thing in an entire world, and I’m sitting here thinking about how your hands look exactly the same lit up like that as they do in ordinary sunlight. That seems like the wrong thing to be thinking. I can’t seem to stop."

The fire along my fingers guttered, softened, and for the first time since it had started, I felt it settle rather than climb. It was like something in me had heard him and believed, for just a moment, that it was allowed to rest.

"That’s not the wrong thing to be thinking," I said, unsteady. "That might be the only thing anyone has said to me tonight that made this feel survivable."

Orion cleared his throat, gently, the sound of a man giving two people a moment he had no intention of interrupting further than that.

"We’ll talk about what comes next in the morning," he said. "I think tonight has asked enough of all of us."