By Emily Allen, aged 16

Far, far away, a fire roars.  A bonfire blazing with the bodies of broken boys.  Their soft flesh peels away, leaving them empty hollows of walking ash.   

            It’s not your armor that’s burning away, it’s your husk.  Your useless chaff flaying itself off of your new frame.   That’s what they told you.

            The boys howl in a shared, screaming agony.  You listen, remembering the solace of having nothing left to burn, the fire releasing you a new man of walking ember.  Strong.  Mighty.  The last wisps of flames biting through you, reminding you of who you were yet to become.

            The fire was a mother to all those boys without one.

            You had joined the ranks of burning boys, giants of ashes marching through the endless plains.  Setting fire to the world around you. 

            You marched and you marched, praying to the words of the men and the flame that had sculpted you.  Burning for them, hurting for them.  Winning for them.

            Day after day, the burning boys had dropped away, left behind, smoldering in a field of red and grey.  Weak, you had been told.  But you are strong.  You will never burn out.

            They had said that to everyone, you realized eventually.  But by the time you realized that, no longer were you a burning boy, but a cloud of forgotten ash.

            Day after day you fought the creatures of smoke that plagued your vision, the demons hiding in the bodies of men.  The fire whispered words of hate that snaked through your ears like serpents, losing their meaning and twisting into banshees of terror that wailed through your heart. 

            The creatures came and the creatures died, just like the burning boys marching at your side.  The day you saw the creature’s eyes was the worst in that constant stream of days.  You were a boy with the eyes of a man, staring into a man with the eyes of a boy.  The fractured mirror of who you were meant to be.

            That day, when you tore your fiery claws through everything he was, you remembered, for the briefest of seconds, what you were before the fire.  Before she drove her madness into your mind like a stake, permanent and weighted with what you used to be.

            Without hesitation, the fire twisted her stake and the men twisted their words, and your doubts were singed away.  You are strong, they had said again.

            You are strong.

           But you didn’t feel strong, now, shattered on the ground.  Flames like the bonfire had swallowed you alive, but these were instant.  They were cords of death that wrapped around your bones and drove them deep into the ground, out of the fields and away from the burning boys.  For a fleeting moment, you remember, you were a man of walking ember.  Now, you are a cloud of powdered ash.

Because boys that are sent to war fight as men

and die

as children.