Taper

 “I'm going to put your life in a box, and put that box in a candle. And the wick will run through all your body, like stuffing on a bear. The first of you who burns through the wick and the candle, they will live. Yes. And the rest of you, having become worms in my eyes, will die and line the earth with your abnormal bodies. When there is not a single flame alight, the game will end.”

That's what the magician said, that day, to all of us. The words that changed it all. And like that, she lit someone and vanished, leaving us to our own devices.

None of us had ever played a game like this. Many of us despaired and cried, and more than a few took their own lives whithin the week, having sunk into visions of pain. Into the claws of fire.

I lit my flame on a sunny thursday morning.

Half a meter of cord hanging from my forearm. Burning, steadily. It was nerve wracking, at first, to see the flame crawling ever closer to my skin. Feeling the heat as the wick swayed.

Twenty hours later, with only a few centimeters left to go, I laid on my bed. From there on, I wouldn't get up again. The risk to the flame would be too big, yes, once it was invisibly crawling inside me.

The other contestants- if one could call these miserable souls that- all exchanged messages with one another. Even the hardiest among those people was terrified. The pain. The anxiety. The fear of death. By now, a few of them had burned to the skin. Those people, they all stopped messaging immediatly, preoccupied with the agony of their ordeal, feeding into the collective expectations of the most torturous time of their lives.

And then, like that, someone posted about me.

“She's younger and smaller than anyone else. Isn't it obvious that it doesn't matter if you try to burn through your taper? She has an advantage and has been burning for a while, too. It's hopeless. She will just win. We can kiss our lives goodbye. Might as well spare ourselves the suffering.”

That's right. I had honestly just been waiting for someone to point that out. By then, my flame was crawling inside my arm, leaving dazzling paths of bubbles and char, filling my nose with horrid and delicious smells alike.

I wonder who it was that broke into the house. If it was the same person who made the post. One of the many angry commenters. A lurker. They were tall and shaking. Must have thought I was somehow sleeping or that at least my pain would make me unable to see them.

Wrong on both accounts, naturally.

I saw them. The axe. Even the sweat on their face and the quick rising and lowering of their chest. Their wick, coming from a hand, burnt whitin ten centimeters of their skin, but no more. In short, a coward.

“You must hate me, right?” They dropped the axe in an instant, its clattering resonating in my ears. “Or maybe, you fell in love with me. Did you see my pictures online? Someone took them through the window the other day. I think they wanted to capture my pain, but I just made the smuggest expression I could muster.”

Stepping back.

“Are you going to run away, when you have come so far? Aren't you going to make me hurt, at least? I can feel the fire inside me, you know. But you can always make it worse.” It was my joy and my joy alone to speak like this. “You can chop me into bits. Snuff me out, or my candle. You can suffocate me. Or just bash my head against something until it's mush.”

Their eyes were fixated on me. On my waning shape.

“You lot don't get it at all.”

That person was back, the next day, in the afternoon, accompanied by two others. They had burnt their wick more, until it was flush against their blistered skin. But only that much.

Earlier that day, news had come of someone among us who had requested the wicker surgically removed. By the time the operation was done, the person was basically mincemeat. There was just not enough 'person' between the loops and twists to survive.

People, one by one, were snuffing out their light. And when they did, they would come to me in the afternoon. A silent vigil. Gathered. Helpless. Staring. And I would look, yes, with a vicious expression of triumph.

One day, someone in the crowd opened their trap to spit out garbage.

“...You know, kid, she is not going to heal you after you are done.”

I laughed. God, how I laughed. Someone must have had to hold me down, because I felt charred bone break and unimaginable pain along my dead arm and dying shoulder.

“Do you think every kid is a dumbass or is it just me, huh?” I sneered. “Look at yourself. I bet you never burned an inch of that wick. Coward. But you know the truth, don't you? You know how much stuff was inside that person. Can I hear it? From all of you. Now.”

The murmuring. The uncomfortable words. Two hundred and thirty seven kilometers and thirty three centimeters.

“That would have burnt for years. For so many years. Hah! Ahahaha! I'm smaller, aren't I? But that barely matters. I'll be agonizing, unable to die, for a slightly less stupid amount of years. And you lot will frolic around your lives, without having to worry about this game, until the day comes when you can die easy.

That is why you are here. Because I'm your savior. I'm your goddess.” I snickered. “You look at me with so much pity it is just like devotion! This is a funeral! You are all attending my funeral and I am the VIP, standing above all you pitiful demons! I'll win, you'll lose. You'll all lose. And you'll crumble, in this room, and the box with my life will open. And I'll be- I'll be... ah...haha...”

I looked up. At the ceiling.

“I'll be debris. The most beautiful debris ever. I'll be sickeningly beautiful, yes. Like a punch to the gut. Like wringing your neck.”

My gazed moved. Looking for them. The two of them. The ones.

Mom. Dad.

“You'll look my way. In death, you'll be unable to look anywhere else. It will be your curse. Because I was made to be the kind of person that can go this far, I will have deserved all the glories. And you, maggots, vermin, crawling things. You will lift me. And my first act as a new witch... because, because this, this is just my egg. And you are all yolk. Yes.”

It hurts. It really does hurt. It will keep hurting forever. There is no escape, only victory.

“I will select a bunch of the most sorry idiots I can find. And a child that was never saved once. And I'll tell them. I'm going to put your life in a box, and put that box in a candle. And the wick will run through all your body, like stuffing on a bear. The first of you who burns through the wick and the candle, they will live.”

They looked down at their feet, one by one.

As each went home, as the sun set that evening, they left me a headless paper crane and ran their nails against my skin, causing me to wince in glorious agony each time.