Charred at the Edges, Still Holy

The foothills were already breathing smoke again.

Enya stepped off the transport with her boots hitting the red dirt like war drums—slow, deliberate, scarred. The air tasted like cedar and mourning, like something that had already burned and was waiting to do it again. She paused at the edge of the fireline, staring out at the treebones curled in silhouette. The sun hung low behind a veil of ash. Everything was golden and ghost-colored.

She didn’t flinch when the wind kicked soot into her face. She’d been kissed harder by fire.

The others unloaded behind her, voices clipped, gear clinking, boots crunching gravel. Someone laughed too loudly and it echoed wrong. It was always like this before the flames touched down—nervous, human. But Enya didn’t speak. Not yet. The fire tower loomed in the distance like a spire of judgment, blackened at the top, half-swallowed by fog. She tilted her head, and for a moment, she swore she saw herself standing up there. Or someone shaped like her. Watching.

Her fingers twitched. She needed to sharpen her hatchet.

The regional commander waved a gloved hand and gave a too-cheerful welcome, voice filtered through radio static and sunstroke. Assignments would be on the clipboard. Water stations marked. Perimeters flagged. It all sounded like white noise to Enya. She was listening for something deeper—something older.

The fire, if it was awake, hadn’t spoken yet. But it would.

She shouldered her pack and headed toward the staging area. The chapel ruins came into view just off the ridgeline—what was left of the Hollow Bell, its bell tower collapsed, the steeple pointing like a crooked finger toward the sky. Locals still left candles there. Pieces of ribbon. Once, a braid of someone’s hair tied to the gate.

Enya didn’t look too long. She wasn’t sure what she’d see.

The younger crewmembers called the region cursed. Said they felt weird dreams here. That the wind said their names wrong. Enya didn’t correct them. She just dragged her gloved fingers along the chain-link fencing as she passed, sparks crawling under her skin.

Her boots found the blackened trail without hesitation. She could walk this terrain blindfolded. She had. Once. Before the first fire. Before they started calling her a monster. The nickname hadn’t stuck. But the land remembered.

She knelt beside a scorched pine stump, placed one hand on it like a confession, and exhaled slow through her nose. The bark was still warm. Not from sunlight. From recognition.

“You remember me,” she whispered. The wind sighed.

Behind her, someone called her name. Not Enya. Her old name. The one the court used. The one that belonged to the girl who lit a match and watched a chapel scream. She stood slowly. The fire wasn’t awake yet. But it was stirring. And this time, she might not stop it.

The wind hissed her name again, but it wasn’t Enya. It was the name on her court documents. The name she carved into the chapel door before the first match was ever struck.

She turned slow, expecting to see someone from her crew. But there was no one—just trees split like ribs and smoke rising lazy from a long-dead stump. Her vision swam. She blinked, and the forest was on fire. But no one screamed.

The flames didn’t roar. They sang. Low and wanton, like they knew her. Like they’d been waiting. The pine needles curled into letters at her feet—gibberish or sacred scripture, she couldn’t tell. Her boots left prints in the ash, each one glowing faintly at the edges like embers.

She’d been here before. Exactly here. A different year. A different body. The same fire. The chapel burned like it had agreed to it.

That’s how she remembered it: the wooden cross folding in on itself, the cracked altar table catching first. She hadn’t meant for it to spread. Not like that. Not past the window. Not into the pews. But the flames had moved fast, like they were dancing just for her. She stood barefoot in the aisle, sweat dripping from her collarbone into her shirt, and she moaned.

It wasn’t sexual. But it wasn’t not, either.

The fire had pressed up against her skin like a lover. It curled into her open mouth and kissed her teeth. Her blood felt holy—boiling and blessed. For one second, she saw herself in the chapel mirror, half-reflection, half-ember.

“You’re not forgiven,” she whispered. “But you’re mine.”

The fire shivered. It liked that.

Later, she woke up in the woods with soot in her lungs and someone else’s blood on her hands. She’d never remembered where the blood came from. They told her it was an accident. The chapel had been abandoned. No one was supposed to be there.

“Then who screamed?” she asked the detective.

He didn’t answer. He just wrote psych eval needed in the margin of her file.

Now, the fireline ahead of her shimmered—smoke rising where there shouldn’t be smoke. She stumbled forward, disoriented. A deer crossed her path, its antlers charred, its eyes smoking from the sockets. It didn’t blink. It just stared.

“Do you miss me?” the fire seemed to ask. She didn’t answer aloud. But her body did.

Her fingers flexed. Her thighs clenched. Her breath came in hitches like she was being touched by something invisible. She smelled herself—sweat, metal, pine sap. Her hatchet burned hot in its sheath. She gripped the handle like a prayer.

“You came back,” the fire sighed.

Yes. She had. And she didn’t know if it was because she wanted to stop it or because she wanted to kneel before it and beg to be consumed.

A branch cracked behind her. Reality lunged. Someone from the crew called her name again. The new one. Enya. She straightened up like a deer caught in headlights. Ash streaked her arms. Her eyes stung. The flames were gone. The chapel stood black and silent on the ridge, not burning. Not yet.

“You okay?” the voice asked.

It belonged to the new girl—rookie, maybe twenty-three. Sharp, gentle eyes. Curls pulled back under her helmet. Her name tag read Marisol.

Enya smiled too wide.

“Yeah. Just… remembering something.”

Marisol didn’t press. But her gaze lingered. Behind her, the trees creaked. The fire wasn’t visible, but Enya knew—it had heard her again.

Marisol walked beside her in silence, the crunch of gravel under their boots the only tether to the present. The smoke in the sky thickened as the sun climbed, turning everything piss-yellow and apocalyptic. Even the birds had stopped singing. Enya adjusted her pack and pretended not to glance sideways—but she felt Marisol watching her. Not with suspicion. With curiosity. Like Enya was a page she couldn’t stop rereading, trying to make out the handwriting in the margins.

“How long you been on firelines?” Marisol asked eventually.

Enya’s mouth twitched.

“Longer than I should’ve been. Not long enough.”

Marisol laughed softly. “What does that mean?”

Enya didn’t answer. She was watching the trees again. They swayed just slightly out of rhythm with the wind.

At base camp, they refilled canteens. Ate high-calorie food packs that tasted like chalk and ambition. Enya sat cross-legged under a scorched oak and chewed slowly, eyes scanning the ridgeline like the fire might blink.

Marisol joined her, dropping down a little too close.

“People say this place is haunted,” she said, unwrapping a protein bar.

Enya snorted. “Only by the truth.”

“What’s the truth?”

Enya’s hand stilled over her canteen.

“That the forest doesn’t forget what you feed it.”

Later, on perimeter walk, they hit a section where the trees had burned into hollow columns, like old cathedral bones. Blackened trunks stretched skyward like prayer candles, and the silence was thick.

Marisol slowed.

“It’s beautiful, in a terrifying way.”

“Yeah,” Enya said. “Like a lover who bites.”

Marisol blinked at her, a little startled. Then:

“You really feel it, huh?”

“The fire?” Enya tilted her head. “It’s a voice. It’s a want. You just have to get quiet enough to hear it.”

“And what does it want?”

Enya looked up. Her pupils were wide.

“Sometimes it wants you.”

Marisol didn’t laugh. She just nodded like she understood something she hadn’t meant to understand.

A branch cracked overhead. They both froze. Enya lifted her hatchet instinctively. Not because of a threat—but because it felt good. Natural. Like the weight of it answered something her skin had been asking. But nothing fell. No animal darted through. Just silence again.

“Do you hear it?” Enya asked, her voice low now. Almost reverent.

“What?”

“The breathing. The trees. The waiting.”

Marisol took a step closer.

“Are you okay?”

Enya smiled slowly.

“I’m always okay when something’s burning.”

That night, the wind shifted. The line blew out wide on the east side. Small spot fires leapt from ridge to ridge like it was choreographed. A storm was building somewhere far off. Radio chatter crackled like static-laced prophecies. Enya laid in her tent, fully awake, fingers curled around the haft of her hatchet like a child clutching a dream. Marisol’s silhouette moved outside. She was on late watch. The fire cast her in flashes—gold and shadow, gold and shadow. Enya’s breath hitched.

“You see me,” she whispered into the dark. Not to Marisol. To the fire.

“You always did.”

The fire broke containment at 3:47 a.m.

It was quiet at first—too quiet. Then came the shift in the wind, sharp and sudden like a blade unsheathing. Radios screamed to life. Someone shouted “spot fire” and Enya bolted upright in her tent, already lacing her boots like she’d been waiting for the call.

The sky was no longer sky—it was amber with blood vessels, pulsing with heat. Embers danced like star-babies, landing in the brush, on tents, on helmets. The wind had fangs. It roared against the ridge line like it knew their names. And her’s most of all.

Enya grabbed her hatchet and sprinted into the chaos. Marisol was already on the line, hose in hand, eyes wild, hair soaked with sweat.

“East flank’s going up!” she yelled.

“I’ll take the chapel ridge!” Enya shouted back before she could think.

“That’s suicide!”

But Enya was already moving—boots pounding ash, lungs begging for mercy. Something was pulling her.

The Hollow Bell chapel blazed like it had been waiting all year for this moment. Its blackened bones were lit from within, like the fire had grown a soul. The collapsed steeple throbbed in rhythm with the flames. Candles melted on the old altar. Smoke curled around her boots like cats. The pews were gone, but she remembered them—remembered the shape of the ash where she’d laid her body down the first time.

She stepped inside. Everything blurred. A hand on her jaw. A voice in her ear: “You lit me once. Will you finish the prayer?”

The fire twisted into her own shape—a woman made of coals and breath, draped in smoke. Eyes like sunspots. She touched Enya’s cheek and Enya gasped.

“You called me a monster,” she whispered. “But you were the altar.”

The flame-woman smiled. Enya sank to her knees.

Outside, the firestorm grew teeth. Trees exploded. Sparks rained sideways. Radios cut out. The crew fell back, screaming orders no one could hear. But Marisol climbed. She found Enya on the chapel floor, her hatchet smoking beside her. Her eyes were closed. Her lips were moving.

“Get up!” Marisol begged. “We have to GO!”

“I’m so close,” Enya whispered.

“You’ll die!”

“Maybe that’s the tithe.”

A window shattered above them. Fire licked the doorway.

“You’re not a god, Enya. You’re not a saint. You’re not hers,” Marisol said, eyes glowing with fear and fury.

“Then what am I?”

“You’re a woman who survived. And you can do it again.”

Enya looked at her. Really looked. Then she grabbed her hatchet. And she swung—not at Marisol. At the burning altar. Wood split. Flame screamed. Again. And again. She hacked the thing down like she was breaking up a body. With each blow, the fire fought back—hissing, curling, spitting. The chapel groaned. Enya howled. Then the roof collapsed.

She woke up in the dirt. Marisol’s hands pressing on her chest. Sirens in the distance. Someone calling her name.

No—not her name.

The old one.

The inmate number.

And then—concrete. Fluorescent lights. Metal cuffs.

EPILOGUE

There was no wildfire at the Hollow Bell. Not officially.

The region report listed dry lightning, unverified. The chapel hadn’t stood for years. No one could confirm what had burned. No one remembered the girl who went missing the first time.

The old case file—State v. Enya Reyes—sat in a cardboard box in the basement of the courthouse. Arson. Property damage. Psychological evaluation. Probation revoked. Transfer to state facility. Final note: Inmate reports recurring dreams of fire and a girl named Marisol. No record of this individual exists.

In her cell, Enya traced shapes in the concrete. Ashes bloomed behind her eyes. Her fingers itched for the phantom weight of her hatchet.

Sometimes she still heard the sirens. Sometimes she still smelled pine and blood.

But most days, the fire didn’t visit. Until one night, the overhead lights flickered. The air tasted like ozone and cinder. The moon burned orange through the bars. And in the corner of her vision—

A silhouette. Boots. A glint of sweat at the collarbone.

“Enya,” the voice said, low and bright. “Are you ready?”

The fire had returned. Not to punish. Not to forgive. But to finish what they started.