The Moth and the Flame

They all come to me eventually.

The desperate.
The disillusioned.
The ones who ache in silence and don’t know why.

They cross worlds and memories to find me. I do not call them, yet they come.

They think I am salvation, or punishment. They fall to their knees and beg to be healed, or ruined, or remembered.

And I do.
I burn them all.

I am no god. I am no monster.
I am the Flame.

I was lit before time, before names. Born from the last breath of a dying star and anchored to the mouth of the Everveil. I do not move. I do not sleep. I do not forget.

I burn because I remember.
Because I wait.

I have scorched queens and cowards. Lovers and liars. Once, a prophet threw herself into me because she dreamed of a man she could never find in waking life, and thought he lived inside my fire.

He did not.

Still, I burned her gently.

But none of them lingered like she did.

She didn’t fall. She stepped.

No devotion. No terror. No demand.

She came to me barefoot beneath a moonless sky, her feet bloodied from thorn and ash, her breath catching in a throat that had wept in too many lifetimes. Her eyes, gods, her eyes, held the weight of stars that had collapsed for love.

And on her shoulder?

A single lunar moth.

Soft green wings veined in pearl and silver. Its body pulsing not just with life, but memory. It clung to her like a twin soul, and I knew, I knew, it was part of her. The winged echo of all her longing.

The Veil quieted as she approached.

Even the stars held their breath.

She stopped just beyond the reach of my flame and stared into me like she knew me. Not as myth. Not as legend.

As lover.

I did not ask her name.

I never do.

But she spoke anyway, her voice low and ruined like it had called to me across centuries. “You always look away first.”

I said nothing.
Not because I couldn’t, because I dared not.

She stepped closer. My fire flared, reflex, warning, instinct.

She smiled. Not with mockery. With sorrow.
“I died to remember you,” she said. “And I would do it again.”

The moth fluttered its wings once. A pulse of moonlight. An ache I felt down to the core of my flame. She wasn't mortal. Not anymore. She was transformation incarnate. The soft, luminous death before rebirth. The ache in the belly of becoming.

“I have crossed oceans made of salt and silence,” she said. “I have been ash and womb and widow. I have been burned for loving you too deeply in every form I’ve worn.”

“And still,” I rasped, “you come back.”

“I always do.”

“And I always ruin you.”

A breath. A beat.

“Then ruin me.”

And she stepped into me.

Her skin met flame.

And did not recoil.

It welcomed me.

She arched, like prayer, like surrender, like desire finally answered, and let my heat pour into her. Her throat bared to the stars, her chest rising as my fire traced her bones like it had missed them. Her dress turned to smoke, and still she did not run.

She moaned, low and broken and holy.

“I am not afraid,” she whispered. “I am home.”

I should have resisted. I should have pulled back. But I was not the god they thought I was. I was the ache that remembered her. The hunger that knew her shape before the stars were born.

My flame wrapped around her hips. Her thighs. Her spine.
It kissed her ribs like it had written them.
It licked her throat like it had worshiped her name before language was made.

“I remember,” she gasped, fingers clawing at air. “Your hands on my hips. Your mouth on my name. You, inside me, like fire in my blood.”

“You begged me to leave you,” I choked. “In the life where you drowned.”

“You begged me to stay,” she said, “in the one where you burned.”

Her body trembled, light pouring through her like prophecy.

She didn’t burn.

She bloomed.

She became firelight and shadow. Wings and skin. Devotion and ache.
The moth took flight, circling us, glowing with more than magic, with memory.

I kissed her with flame. She answered with soul.

And in that moment, she was not a woman.

She was the feminine itself.

The sacred pull of moonlight on tides.
The pulse between pain and pleasure.
The thing every flame is drawn to and fears.

“You always choose me,” I whispered.

“And I always die,” she said, with tears on her lips and hunger in her voice.

“I can't lose you again.”

“You already have. Every time.”

She kissed me, not with lips, but with desperation. With remembrance.

And I shattered.

For a moment I was not fire, I was man.
Ruined. Reverent. Hers.

But all stories return to silence.

And she faded like a dream that hurts to wake from.

No scream.
No ash.
Only a single green wing drifting down through the smoke.

The moth is gone now.

But it always returns.

And so I wait.

Wherever a moth brushes against flesh, I feel her.
Wherever love becomes unbearable, I burn brighter.
Wherever someone chooses ruin over reason, I ache.

Because she is the wound and the balm.
The echo and the vow.
The one I remember, even when I forget myself.

And when she returns again, and she will…
I will burn for her all over again.

Because what is flame without the moth that dares to love it?