A Spark Neglected

by Firebrand

The concept of being "cleansed" by fire is ancient, but it is foolish. Fire does not cleanse, but instead leaves charred, blackened ruination in its wake.

Firebrand entered the library and headed to the front counter. "I'd like to return a book."

The mare behind the counter responded tiredly, hardly looking from the magazine she was reading. "Just drop it in that slot over there."

"Okay." He walked over to the slot and reached into his saddlebag. He made a point to rummage around in it for a moment, as if the gargantuan tome could be hidden under a scrap of paper, and then withdrew and shrugged grandly, looking at the librarian with a timid grin.

She rolled her eyes. "Just bring it tomorrow."

"Will do!" he said, and then scampered off among the shelves. He wanted to spend some time here, to familiarize himself, in order to ensure that there weren't any bottlenecks or isolated areas where a pony would be likely to be hurt in case of a fire. Nobody wanted that. Also, knowing the layout of a place made it all the better to watch it going up in flames.

---

Icarus entered the library, nodding to the librarian as she passed by. She picked out a couple of books, mostly at random—a romance, a war thriller, and something about birds—and took her usual seat in the corner. It was quiet here. She liked that. She could just sit and read and the whole world would go on by without her. It was magical.

She grabbed the top book off of the stack—The Destriers— and opened it to the first page. This one had been made into a movie, and she wouldn't mind going to see it, but she always liked to read the book first. It was about a small troop of highly-trained soldiers who were sent behind enemy lines to terrorize and demoralize them. It was bound to be bloody, violent, and full of drama and tension. Not her usual fare, but sometimes an adrenaline-pumping book like this was just what the doctor ordered, so to speak.

The novel opened with a dire-looking in medias res action sequence that was equally off-putting and enticing. It was brutal, but mystifying. Just who were these mysterious masked soldiers, and how did they know where the Destriers' camp was? The squad was in serious trouble, surrounded on all sides by troops attacking them in the middle of the night, when suddenly, Bolt, the brave, young, new recruit, charges the brunt of the enemy formation with a live grenade in his jaw, and then—

"Howdy, miss." said somepony just in front of her.

She jumped, abruptly ripped from the violent reverie the book had cast her into.

She peeked timidly over the cover, and beheld a light yellow stallion—probably about her age, maybe a year or two younger—with multicolored, orange-red hair which looked like fire. He was wearing a light brown robe or cloak or something which obscured most of his body and his cutie mark.

"Are you aware that this building is not equipped with a fire alarm?" he asked.

"I…" she stumbled, hiding behind her book and avoiding eye contact with the intruding stallion. "No. I didn’t know that."

"If there were to be a fire, you probably wouldn’t know about it until it was too late."

What the heck?

"Thanks... for the concern." she said, and then ducked back behind her book, willing the strange colt away.

Instead, he reached into the saddlebag hiding under his coat, produced a book, sat down at a nearby table and began to read.

Icarus tried to return to her book, but found herself distracted by this new presence. She constantly found herself reading lines multiple times, and eventually realized that she had progressed several dozen pages without even taking in more than a few sparse details of the plot.

She was too busy thinking about that small, slightly ominous quip that the stranger had made. A fire? Why would there be a fire?

Icarus looked up at him, sitting there in the chair and reading. He glanced up and met eyes with her, causing her to flinch, fearing that he might have taken the eye contact as an invitation to flirt, but he only bobbed his head once, acknowledging her presence, then went back to his book.

She returned to her book, continuing to half-read it for another ten or fifteen minutes, before she shut it and placed it back on the stack of books next to her, and retrieved from her own saddlebag a small leather-bound journal with gilt-edged pages and a pen. She had waited so that the fiery-looking pony sitting across from her wouldn't think that she was writing about him. She was cursed, it seemed, with an exaggerated awareness of her effects on other ponies' lives, and she always calibrated even the most inconsequential of movements like these so to be inconspicuous, regardless of whether inconspicuousness was a consequential or even desirable thing to have.

Icarus began writing in her diary, writing about this stranger she saw today, who seemed unduly obsessed with fire safety. She wrote in her diary every day, but she spent most of her time sitting right there in the library, so there wasn't much to write about except for all the different ponies she saw come and go each day. Thus, her diary had become a sort of catalogue of strangers. She described them physically, how they moved, what they read. She had spoken to some of them, and others not. She tried to figure out as much about these strangers as she could just by writing about them and seeing what turned up. It probably wasn't accurate, but she didn't care.

It was an exercise of sorts, to help her create believable characters. According to her cutie mark, she was a writer but, since that single book of heartfelt poetry so many years ago, she hadn't felt the same spark in her pen. She tried, though, and tried, and always ran into trouble of some sort. She was now on her third draft of the same book she'd been working on for five years, and she had only recently learned that she didn't how to create believable, consistent characters. And so, she had begun writing these fictional biographies of strangers she'd seen, trying to profile them as best she could.

Yellow coat and fiery mane, she wrote. He warned me about the lack of fire alarms in the building. Concerned with fire safety, evidently. Maybe a firepony (in training, given his age). Cutie mark obscured by coat.

She penned a few more lines, and then shut the book. She put it, along with the three other books she had picked out, into her saddlebag, and then headed towards the front entrance. Class tomorrow. Gotta be home soon, or Dad'll be mad.

---

Firebrand watched the mare go, thankfully not making eye contact this time. After the start he had given her, he could practically feel the timidity radiating off of her. She had abandoned her reading after about ten minutes to begin writing something, a habit pointed out by her cutie mark, a book which lay open with a quill resting across it. She was a pegasus, with a stunning deep purple mane which stood out against her drab blue-gray coat like flowers blooming through ashes.

He looked at the clock. It was getting a little bit late.

He closed the book he'd been kind-of reading for the last half hour, and left it on the table. He slowly made his way to the exit, careful not to show up too hot on the mare's tail. He nodded to the librarian as he passed by the front desk, and she rolled her eyes in response. He slipped out, and made his way down the slightly-frozen road towards the cheap apartment complex he called home.

His mother wasn't home—she had an interview for something or other to go to today—, so he retreated quietly to his room, hung his bag on the wall, and laid on the bed. He just wanted to go to sleep now, to wake up tomorrow and be one step closer to his magnum opus of arson.

---

Icarus ducked and weaved through alleys as she progressed, moving towards the veritable manor her parents owned in the midst of the slums. It was easily among the largest buildings in town, dwarfing the dilapidated shacks that surrounded it in both height and width. It was surrounded by a tall wrought-iron fence with ominous barbed tips, to dissuade intruders.

It looked palatial in comparison to the squalid huts it stood over. Her family had repeatedly come under fire from their neighbors for perceived greed, which was not entirely untrue. Her father was, as it were, quite prudish, and simply detested those he viewed as lower than him, namely the poor.

Icarus stood outside the fence, staring up the at the towering turrets and ostensible battlements. She felt kind of guilty for living in a place like this in the middle of a such a poor area, but there wasn't anything she could do about it. She sighed and pushed through the gate, locking it behind her before turning to begin advancing up the considerable staircase to the front door.

As she reached up to open the door, it was pulled open from the inside. There, her father stood waiting, tapping a hoof impatiently. He was wearing his iconic dark green smoking jacket, which clashed awkwardly with his mild lavender coat and mane. As soon as their gazes met, he spoke, his eyes narrowed.

"The library again?"

Icarus gulped and nodded.

He huffed. "Do you have any idea what time it is?" She hadn't stayed out any later than she usually did, but that didn't matter to him. "I don't want to see you outside of your room for the rest of the night, got that?"

"Yes, sir." she muttered, hanging her head.

Her father stood aside, ushering her in whilst pointedly not looking her way. She made her way up one of the large stairways in the fairly grand entrance hall, and down the left-side hallway to an elegant, solid wood door that stood out from the decor of the rest of the hallway. Her mother had destroyed the previous door in a fit of rage against her for what turned out to be a misunderstanding regarding a colt Icarus had met at school and, as recompense to her daughter, had replaced it with this massive, hoof-carved slab of exotic wood. Icarus didn't like it, though. It was too heavy, and swelled and shrank with the seasons, so it tended to get stuck in its frame.

She switched the side that her bookbag hung from, and leaned hard against the door. It creaked and lurched a small amount, and then worked loose, swinging open violently and slamming the wall. It took an equal amount of effort for her to close the door, forcing it to fit back into its frame and eliciting a subtle shriek of protest from its wooden supports.

For the time being, it seemed she had dodged a bullet. It wouldn't be a shock, however, if her father came up to her room later to yell at her some , or even to hit her, though he hadn't done that since mother left.

She shuddered, threw her bookbag onto the bed, and then threw herself down right next to it, her wings splaying to either side as she faced the ceiling and sighed deeply.

This is what she came home to everyday. Angst and uncertainty, abuse and neglect. Her father was an esteemed inventor and socialite, but within the walls of their home, he was terrible. He drank round-the-clock, and was prone to fits of rage at the slightest trigger. The servants always startled whenever he demanded anything of them, and would work franticly to avoid displeasing him. Despite his high status, he wasn't above simply striking whomsoever upset him. Icarus had overheard rumors that her parents' first meetings were less than cordial, and that her own birth had been under circumstances that were shady at best and statutory at worst.

And her mother... Icarus didn't have to worry about her anymore. After Icarus' birth, she had become detached: at first, she would slip in and out of fugue states, wandering around the estate for hours at a time, not speaking. By the time Icarus was going to school, her mother was experiencing severe delusions. It was only in the last year that things had reached a head, when she slashed one of the servants whom she'd mistaken for Icarus' father. She'd been committed then, and her condition seemed to only be worsening.

Icarus rolled onto her side and stared wistfully out of the large window next to her bed. The sun was on its way down, casting the tenements below in elongated shadows. The small town's skyline was dominated by her one sanctuary: the town library, a large, palatial building that had once been a mission, and now served as the primary landmark for the town founded around it. Nearly every day, she would go there and spend hours, getting lost in whatever she pulled off the shelves, exploring other worlds, learning new things and, most importantly, hiding from her father. The librarians all knew about her situation, and so wouldn't let her father within fifty feet of the entrance. In the library, she was safe and, sometimes, maybe even happy.

---

Firebrand awoke groggily as the light from the sun fell over his face. He knew from experience that this meant it was around noon. He rolled out of the bed and lurched over to the desk. There, the large book lay open, inside of which lay the dense coil of fuse and the hoof-sized packet of powder. The fuse was of a special type, featuring an outer layer of dense insulative material, resistant to significant amounts of heat, and a core of braided strings soaked in various chemicals which burned agonizingly slowly. The huge bundle inside of the book—a thousand feet, give or take—would take a little over twelve hours to reach its end.

He grabbed his trusty lighter and gingerly held the flame to the exposed wick at the end of the fuse. The flame took, and he gently shut the book and slipped it into his saddlebag, threw on his coat, then slipped out the door. His mother sat at the counter, perusing an employee handbook. She looked up when he exited his room.

"Just where do you think you're going?" she interrogated.

"Going to the library again." he said, moving towards the door.

She grinned as though she had him cornered. "You didn't forget to return your book, did you?"

Firebrand tried to act offended. "What? Me? Of course not! I just want to... read some things..."

His mother's face changed at once from a smirk into a sober, almost sad-looking expression. "Just... don't get into too much trouble, okay? I..." she sighed heavily. "I worry about you, Citrus. Some of the things you do... I just don't know what to make of them."

Firebrand stood at the door, stunned. His mother was usually as sarcastic and happy-go-lucky as he was, so to see her so serious, frankly, scared him. She looked down at her book for a long while, then looked up at him. "Don't let me keep you." she said, waving him off.

"I... okay." he stuttered as he pulled the door open behind him and slipped outside. He walked slowly down the stairs to the ground floor, hanging his head. Did she know? She didn't come in his room, of that much he was sure, but she seemed to know something. And why had she called him Citrus? She knew that wasn't okay.

He shook his head, clearing his mind as she pushed open the gate and made his way out into the alley behind the building, which connected to one of the main roads of the town. The library was only a few blocks away from his home, so the walk didn't take very long at all.

He stepped into the library, up to the counter, and produced the large book from his saddlebag.

"Got it." he said, placing it gently on the counter. He looked on nervously as the librarian turned the book over and opened the front cover. She stamped the card inside, then set the book aside and looked up at Firebrand.

"Three bits." she said.

Firebrand let out an emphatically relieved sigh. "I thought it would be more." he explained as he reached into his pocket and produced the money. He then turned around and ventured off into the library proper. He made the same sweep as before, checking the side room and halls for bottlenecks and throttle points. Nothing had changed from the previous day, of course, but he wanted to re-evaluate. It was a less than ideal situation. He didn't want anypony to get hurt. He just wanted to see some fire.

And again, in the same tucked-away corner as before, he found the bookworm pegasus, whittling away at a stack of books.

She looked up as he came out of one of the aisles.

"Here to warn me about fire again?" she asked with a smirk.

"Nah. Just... readin'." He grabbed a book off the shelf at random and sat down in the same spot as before.

She retreated into her book, and he into his, for at least an hour. He glanced up once or twice, and caught her doing the same at least once. It was obvious to Firebrand that his presence was making her uncomfortable, but he wanted to stick around.

"I don't think I got your name." he said, breaking the awkward silence and causing her to jump, dropping her book on the ground. She reflexively dropped down to grab for it, then looked up, blushing sheepishly.

"Icarus." she said.

"Ah. Like—"

"Like the story, yes." She smiled warmly and retrieved her book, retook her position on the seat, and attempted to dive back into her reading.

"I just read that story, actually." said Firebrand. "I think old Grequine myths are neat."

"Really?" She looked up from her book. She must have had him pegged for a non-reader, which was not necessarily false; he had read the tale while hollowing out the pages of the large tome it was contained in, a painstaking process that took him several weeks. "I don't like my name, actually. I think it's... ominous."

"Eh, I've got it worse. My name's Firebrand, of all things."

"Really?"

"Well, just a nickname. You see..."

The two conversed on and off for hours, bouncing off mutual interests, daily life, and sundry, disconnected subjects. Finally, the librarian came around and told them that the library would be closing soon.

As the pair gathered their belongings in preparation to leave, Firebrand turned to Icarus and said bluntly: "I like you."

This prompted Icarus to freeze in place, tuck her head against her breast, and turn red-hot. "Really?"

"Yeah. I don't get to talk to too many ponies. You're nice."

---

The library was dark. Everpony had left. In the back, on a shelf, sat a large tome, The Metamorphorses by Hoofid. Between its hollowed-out pages, a long, slow-burning fuse neared the end of its considerable length. At the end of this fuse was a large wax-paper packet densely packed with a yellow-white powder. As the fuse reached this, the entire packet conflagrated in less than a second, blowing a small hole through the back of the book with a diminutive belch of flame. The hole began to grow larger as the fire within the hollowed-out book was fed oxygen, and soon the entire book was engulfed in flame. The fire quickly spread to the wooden shelf and to the adjacent books, and from there grew tall enough to reach the ceiling. By now, there was a telltale orange glow visible from the windows, which was already starting to grow brighter, both in color and intensity.

From an alley across the street, a bright yellow stallion looked on.

Comments

[Kaiser change name]

Icarbrand. Theirs that ship preparing to sail