The Jinni

The Fire

                 

The pain Padore had felt when the blade cut into her throat was nothing compared to the agony which suddenly seized her. This pain was deeper, sharper, hotter, like smoldering iron tongs closing on her. It was a sensation felt not with flesh but with her very soul. It was like being skinned and then burned alive. Fiery teeth sank into her and wrenched at her, tugging, ripping. She had no breath to cry out. She had no eyes to leak out tears. Her body was gone—a dead, hollow shell. It would never feel anything again.

But she remained.

She felt herself being pried from her skin, her soul torn, inch by inch, from the inside of her body. The claws which snared her were fire and bone, and they were relentless. The pain consumed her. It was all she knew. It was existence.

Then, all at once, she felt a terrible tearing, and then she was pulled free from her mortal form. She didn't feel as if she were on fire—she was fire. She didn't feel pain—she was pain. Panic and bewilderment pounded through her, and over it all rumbled the Shaitan's laughter. His laughter was the furthest thing from human—it was the rumbling of a volcano on the verge of eruption.

Powerless, Padore could only endure. She had no other choice. Her consciousness was forced upon her, awareness a prison with no escape. She had been unmade, and now she was being remade, reshaped, knitted into something terrible and new. She was red-hot iron battered by a hammer on a smoking forge. Hands of fire pulled her apart, searched her innermost parts, turned her over and cracked her open, stretched her, burned her, molded her. She had no sense of sight or smell or hearing, only of pain, pain, burning pain. How she longed for darkness! How she wished for death!

And then it was over.

The hands released her and she drifted free, her senses gradually awakening.

First: smell. Smoke and fire and ashes. The horrible metallic scent of her blood cooling on the stone.

Then: hearing. The crackling of the Eye with its tunnel to Ambadya still swirling with jinn fire. The Shaitan's laughter, louder and sharper.

And finally: sight. She saw not with eyes, but with some other, sixth sense, an awareness she had never before possessed. She saw with a sensation like feeling, not much different from the way she had heard some blind people could "see." A combination of all the other senses, coming together and bringing to her a picture of the world that was somehow more complete, for it saw not only the image of things, but the meaning of them. She first saw her own corpse, cooling on the altar, stained with blood, but now she saw not only its form; she felt its emptiness. There was no life left in that body. Those eyes saw nothing, that heart lay still. Those hands, which she had known so well, which she still felt the echoes of, were limp and cold. How she had taken herself for granted, she realized. How mundane her own body had seemed. How could she have been so foolish, not to appreciate the preciousness of simply being alive? What a cruel world it was, that the true value of a thing could only be understood after it was lost.

"Welcome, my daughter," she heard the Shaitan say, and she turned to see him standing just as he had been all along, all shadow and flame. But now she saw him with her new sixth sense, with eyes that saw deeper than the surface. To her horror, she realized she was more aware of him now, that they were connected in a way she feared she understood all too well.

"What have you done?" she gasped, finding that she had a voice.

"The human dies and the jinni is born," he intoned. "Curl-of-the-Tiger's-Tail, I name you, and Smoke-on-the-Wind and Girl-Who-Gives-The-Stars-Away." He spread his hands wide. "Look upon yourself and praise me, for I have made you anew."