Conflagration

With the dusk light fading in the West, smoke rose in ever darkening blankets from the floor of the valley filtering the twilight and rising still higher into the stratosphere. The ash fluttered upward to be carried away on the endless aerial currents to settle in regions and lands unknown. This smoke carried away the death of the history of the earth to be replaced by the life of an unforeseen future. The setting sun shone dim and sharp, an orange half disc on the blurred edge of the world which was afire with yellow vaporous patterns through the rolling flames. The line of fire stretched across the ground North to South from one visible end of the horizon to the other.

Before the flames lay the untouched terra, where what was once a rich and fertile bounty of wild flora had become a seasonally dried mat of vegetation. Grass, flower and weed grown limitless and fruitful now decrepit against the soil. Behind the fire the embers of the dead lay cooling and would in time become the alluvium from which new life would spring. The fires writhed endlessly Eastward, crawling jagged and ceaseless towards an end undetermined. The light of the sun slunk backwards from its counterpoint on the land down the valley and crossed the line of fire at a comparable pace to the flames.

Across the base of the valley the fire had spread, from one ridged side to the other, a solid line of flame encroaching up its slight slope slowly and ceaselessly. From the line of fire, a thick dry white smoke billowed endlessly into the air, filling the vista of the valley. The smoke roiled white from the dry fuel source as the flames popped and crackled along the rim of the valley. Ever growing and spreading wider, no natural predator for this wild destroyer. Rising bulbous into the dusk light, the seemingly endless run of soot and ash was lit by the sun. As smelt bubbling brass roiling and folding, heated upon itself, being fired and formed by the chromatic line of flame.

And the wildlife of the plains were driven forward, dashing and scampering crazed in a blind rush ever faster attempting to evade that element which cannot be controlled. Clouds of insects chirping incessantly and swarming wildly in erratic arches through the air. A murder of crows pushed skyward as the fires kissed the base of the hedge in which they had been nesting, awaiting a spring which now would come elsewhere. The doe of the field sprang forward, eyes lit with alarm and the reflection of the flames which would herald the necessity for migration. All through the valley a peace had been disrupted and displaced for some time to come.

The setting light now retreated upward along the loftiest branches of the cottonwood trees which lined the small brook of the valley, decades tall, as ever closer the flames encroached about their trunks. The touch of sun faded into the sky, fading the branches and twigs barbed and layered but now barren. The craggy cadmium line of fire crawled crackling towards the stand of trees in which the debris of falls before lay upon the ground in heaps and mounds. Leaves, sticks and the dead animals of seasons passed were strewn about the area and were quick to light in the dry heated air. What was a slow low burn now caught up in great heated waves with its newly discovered kindling.

Fueled by the detritus which was blanketing the valley floor the blaze began to replace the falling light with pulsing rays of a wilder sort. Brush piles fired instantly from the radiating heat. Explosions echoed up and down the valley, one after the other in a pattern reminiscent of the great thunderstorms which seasonally filled the valley and surrounding plains. Great conifers standing ageless and evergreen in the woodland range being roasted past the point of containment and boiling over into steamed cracks of heat and light.

A thousand shades of light cast an infinite number of trees across the walls of the valley. Great monstrous visions of trees struck out from the glade, flashing and vanishing, pulsing and dissipating. Stretched long from the valley floor, up the slopes and ridges these ghostly shapes appeared. Meanwhile, at the heart of the flames, the jagged bark of the cottonwoods charcoaled and cindered. The heat and fire caressing the great trunks and lower branches of the stands, wood split and fizzled. The humidity infused in the wood boiled over until from the core of the trunks steam erupted in an ever increasing number of hisses.

Now the heat and flame, having consumed the available materials and scalding all deciduous plant life about the valley’s brook, continued upward towards the ragged line of the valley creek bed. Even this natural impediment of flowing water would not obstacle the ever swollen torrent. Moving swifter now up the valley rise with enhanced vigor the flames leapt briskly in several separate bounds across the liquid span, not hesitating long enough even to acknowledge the potential end. This was an unimpeachable fury.

As the sunlight left the trees and slunk slowly up the far slope of the valley, the brush fire stoked higher and higher about the low lying area in which the small glen resided. The sunlight finally dissipated, catching fast lastly on the high limestone ridge which capped the top of the valley walls, a uniform rock outcropping from millennia past running the length of the valley on all sides and crowning the wonders which lay below. The setting sun lit a brighter fire in its last dying gasp along the valley cap in protest to the crazed flames taking up its role below. With the death of the sun the fire birthed a throbbing core of light at the center of the valley, a source which seemed to engorge and expand as more and more the plains fell under its reign.