The fire doesn’t touch me at first. It sings around me, a choir of colors I have no name for — blue that tastes like metal, red that smells like breaking teeth.

Then it slips inside my skin.

The world fractures into layers — skin, blood, muscle, thought — each peeling away, blistering, boiling. I can see the steam rising off my arms, but my arms are already gone, already someone else’s mistake.

Breath becomes knives. Each inhale a jagged rake across the throat. Each exhale a scream twisted into smoke.

The ground underneath me is a drum, beating in a language only fire speaks: burn, burn, burn, burn.

I hear the bones crack, not inside, but outside — as if the universe itself is flexing around me, reshaping. The sky drips downward, melting into the fire, into me, into the wet sound of flesh forgetting how to exist.

Time folds. I burn a thousand years in one heartbeat. I fall through the ribs of the world, each bone a torch, each torch a new hell.

Memory catches fire next. Faces liquefy. Places warp. Names vanish into ribbons of white heat.

I reach for something — a hand, a god, an end — but my fingers are smoke, my hands are dreams.

There is no end. Only more burning. More shattering. More becoming something smaller than ash, something thinner than regret.

In the deepest hollow of the pain, when the body is long gone, when even thought itself screams into cinders,

there is only a flicker — a single, small thing — laughing.

Not a scream.

Not a prayer.

Because somewhere, deep down, some part of me understands:

I am not dying.

Laughter. I am becoming fire.