A Jani empress does not haunt me, but she plays one picture in the fire for me too. I do not think she knows I am there, watching. Because her famed rage and need to eradicate magic doesn't face me from the flames, a yellow-near-green shape growing at the base of the coals.

I don't want this fire, magenta claws reach out to me but the empress rises to take his place. Her rhythmically flickering form sits in a field of yellow-green flowers, sloping a hillside, she picks blossoms to rip their petals.

This fire-death, readers, is a different kind of death. A death of self. A death of cities and nations.

She was born a runner, this yellow-near-green empress. As soon as her toddler legs could walk, she knew to run from parents oblivious to their children. She never ran for long, never a whole night, a yellow-green toddler couldn't run that far, just down the hill beside her house to the beach then back home.

She was a runner; as soon as her child self knew better, she ran from city fights with the gangs of orphans unwelcome to her. She ran from her first heartbreak, crying to a field of flowers outside the city, and there a friend came to comfort her, run with her.

The fire shows this friend in sharp orange, bright as a fruit, all lanky limbs and layers of clothing. The empress and this friend ran and tumbled through the hills, grumbling about their ignorant families, planning to disappear into the jungles and live on wild meat amidst the trees.

The Jani empress was a child once. As all children, she had something of innocence about her, tearing fire-flowers to shreds, chasing animals through city streets to yank their tails and squeeze their paws.

She was a child, more soft yellow than thorny green, until she and her friend drifted to sleep hidden in the city's loneliest tower, where their parents could never find them, legs and hands dirty with ancient dust. They fell asleep and her friend was actually a mage, secretly. Or, secretly, until nightmares or fright or accidental movements set the whole secret free.

The crackling of the yellow-green fire pantomimes tumbling buildings, hissing smoke, and when the scene settles the loneliest tower has toppled, to crush clay buildings and crack stone streets.

The friend and the Jani empress ran free of the lonely tower, fled the townspeople branding them wicked mages. Her parents didn't even wake when the city mob came knocking on their house, came knocking on the Jani empress and the friend hidden in her bedroom, vowing to not abandon each other. Surrounded, they ripped the back door off the house to bludgeon through the crowds armed with knives and farming tools and the friend didn't make it. One door shield was too small to cover two people. She escaped on wounded leg, sledding on the door down the slope to the beach, and they chased her, cursing, yelling, hot red with fury for their crushed tower. Wicked mage, murder tally of one.

She took the beach's only canoe and cast off into the ocean, there was only one canoe because she and the friend had planned escaping across the ocean as a backup to running into the jungle.

The next town she found a healer. Of sorts. The healer of sorts couldn't help the infection in her wounded leg, had to remove the limb from the knee down and trained her to hop around and crawl about with her arms. The healer of sorts could do nothing for the thorn-green of her heart.

The healer died to a winter vortex. The empress lost her remaining toes to a frostbite and that woke her to the storm. The town lost their leader in the blizzard too and the one-day empress had the townspeople burn the dead's houses for warmth. The rest of her foot succumbed to frostbite that same night, half-running across the town to hack the dead's houses to pieces.

She survived. She had nowhere to run.

The fire glows a soft yellow, growing near green, clawing with thorns.

Summers later, she returned to her city with an army of townspeople, and slaughtered the mob who called her a wicked mage, chased her to the beach and threw curses after her canoe. Her parents didn't answer when she knocked to ask if they were proud so she had her army burn that down too.

They left a city of ash in their wake.

She thought if her nightmares quit telling her to run from that place that had forsaken her, she would not crave the whipping motion of her own legs running through the hills, sprinting across the jungle, racing up stairs of a lonely tower. She thought if the place that had forsaken her existed only as bad memories, slowly eaten up by a creeping jungle, she would no longer crave her own legs existing as more than a creeping itch eating up her once-good memories. Feet tickling with cold water. Knees scraping sharp grasses. Thighs pumping liquid speed. If the place she needed to run from in her nightmares no longer was, then maybe she'd no longer need to run.

The nightmares stuck, feet flashing through grasses and blossoms, and she woke in tears to the useless nubs of her body.

The fire sparks violet with the void, the fire sparks cyan with the crave to fill a void, she subsumed herself in the hunt of new cities, the calculated arc of arrows descending into her prey, tactics of flanking and front lines and twisting city towers into flaming traps rather than strongholds.

And still a void, ever waiting, ever wanting. Her army grew. She wiped a whole continent clean and left a hungry jungle to drown the blackness of ashes.

What could be harder than conquering a continent, begun only with the seed of regular townsfolk?

She sought out the Raiyli next, a nation of islands, she built a navy, and the first battle she staged turned into utter defeat. The Raiyli mages summoned a storm to sink her ships, she lost half her crews that day.

The genius of the Raiyli was how a group of scattered islands formed a unified nation. Across any distance, the ruling mages--dimensional mages--could warp space and appear wherever their magic linked to. Communication, transportation, it all became irrelevant how far apart the islands were, since every one was closer than a footstep.

She burned the islands up one by one, small ship crews sailing under darkness to avoid attention, lighting fires in the fruit groves and villages then disappearing in the chaos. Over mere weeks, she and her army hedged in the mages to a shrinking territory. When they finally came forward to fight her, she ignored them, sailing away from the storms their mages summoned, disappearing into the ocean and burning weaker islands before the dimensional mages could track her down.

The mages stationed defense groups on their handful of unburned islands. They attempted to rebuild shelters on the ravaged islands. Little efforts, too late. Her army had advanced in mere weeks, they couldn't rebuild shelters fast enough. The stationed mages couldn't see boats approaching in the night, and were often ambushed and left to burn with the rest of the island. The genius of the Raiyli crumbled before her.

She used no magic to communicate with her fleet across a vast ocean. Only signals of shimmering mirrors, pale birds with coded notes, thrumming drum beats spread across still water.

When she could hide no longer, she threw her ships at an island stronghold, a palace of stone where the mages trained each other. Her fastest ships cut above the reefs and the mages summoned a storm to catch them, but when the storm arrived they brought the fury of their own magic down on themselves, so rapid were the approaching ships.

She lost a few ship crews that day. The mages lost their whole palace.

The fire shows the lucky mages escaping, hisses and crackles of exits beneath jagged tongues of lightning. The luckiest of the lucky had somewhere to hide, a distant continent their particular magic linked to. The rest had only ever trained to reach now-wasted islands.

Her armies marched from the beaches into the shattered palace, passing the bodies of mages strewn atop the broken ramparts, robes torn by hails and winds. In the fire, these dead mages sob for vengeance, pale orange, weak.

She rode a palanquin and observed her soldiers setting torches to the wood doors, the fine rugs, the lavish dining halls. A fire scorched within a fire. She declared herself the Jani empress; ruler no-ruler. Ruler to destroy all other rulers.

And what is magic, the fire of her thoughts roared, if not power used to rule over the weak?

The yellow-near-green shapes above the coals bleed into common orange and red. Sounds of war fade into crackling fire. The ruin of a palace leaves acrid smoke in my nose and I dumped jittering rippling water over the flames.