The Threshold

You stand in a dark room. Your wax is heavy with waiting. Every refusal bought another day intact. But the wick is yellowing; the wax is cracking where it meets the air. The match hovers, its heat arriving before the light. You must choose how to meet the end: consumed, or unspent. You could refuse the flame. You could hoard your wax, preserving your pristine form in the unbroken dark. But the wick says yes. To this room, this dark, this hour.

The Way

The match strikes: what is lit cannot be unburnt. The burning begins with a hiss, blue at the base of the wick. Fire, before it learns to lie. The first instant is violence. Your edges run; the self you guarded dissolves. You mourn the shape you were, and then you see it – the darkness retreating. A cracked stone wall, older than anything you remember. Faces emerge from the dark, one after another. The room was always full. Soon, you feel your own warmth – heat you had carried all along, unaware. Even as you thin, even as the wick chars, you understand: you were never the wax. You were the light, waiting inside it.

The Shadow

The Ardent watched the eyes. In the early years, the room was full: his wife at the front, his daughter beside her, friends who came for the warmth and stayed for the spectacle. When their eyes drifted, he made his flame leap. When they stared, he dimmed to a near-sputter just to hear them catch their breath. One night, his wife's hand rested on his, warmer than his flame. He could have been still. He reached for the next flare – not for the room, but because his own silence felt like death. His wife looked away first; then his daughter. One night, mid-flare, he looked down. Empty chairs. He burnt brighter – reflex. The warmth had always been real. So was his hunger to be seen burning. ❖ The Reverent saw what happened to her mother – wick lit for every stranger, every cause, every plea. By the time she needed light, her mother was a stub of wax, too short to hold a flame. She had written conditions for the worthy dark: it must be absolute; it must contain no one who could ever leave. Every room failed her test. One night, small fists on her door. The knocking came in bursts – desperate, then quiet, then desperate again. The rhythm of a child who had not learnt whether to be angry or afraid. Please, a voice said, it's so dark. She pulled back behind the door. The child would grow, leave, and forget; the darkness was not permanent enough. She saved herself for a darkness that deserved her. It never came.

The Cut