He passed unnoticed over Mars, as its denizens, (immortal constructs locked in perpetual conflict by masters who had long since perished), fired flame-lances at each other and bathed in the motor-oil blood of their slain foes.

  It was in this manner that Phlogiston Kane, travelling at impossible speeds, was hurtled across the stratosphere of good old Earth and crashed into the continent that its people called Europa, within the borders of the Polish Empire, in the city of Prague (capital of chemical and scientific research), in the middle of the Zlata Ulicka during rush hour.

  Thus, Phlogiston Kane smashed into the paved road. Reacting to the massive trauma, the immortal flame that powered him flared up, commencing the process of healing wounds and mending broken bones. Had Phlogiston Kane taken this into account, perhaps he would have stopped it before it reached critical mass.

  His momentary lapse in judgment caused the simultaneous death of a thousand people, as the immortal flame rose in intensity, until it rivaled that of a star’s furnace-heart. There were no screams of anguish or cries for help. There was only a flash and then a thousand shadows imprinted on storefronts and walls.

  Phlogiston Kane realized it a minute later, as he rose from the crater in which he had become embedded, with his legs ankle-deep in boiling mortar. His eyes caught the sight of shadows descending into the slag as the phlogiston aura that surrounded him melted stone and steel alike. He fell on his knees, splashing white-hot iron around him.

  “Not again. Not again!” he moaned, shedding greek fire tears.

  *****

  By the time Gravity Lass had reached the Golden Lane, the white-hot conflagration could be seen for miles. There was a pillar of perfectly white flame reaching up to the heavens, endlessly spinning, and churning. Beneath it, the rest of the city of Prague was screaming; its people were retreating, leaving behind their chemical laboratories, their clockwork workshops, and their factories, which slowly burned and crackled as the fire swallowed wood, stone and glass alike.

  Gravity Lass pushed a button on her rod, switching the direction of her Gravitron field downward, gently reasserting Earth’s pull toward her. She landed in Kaprova street, near the Maesuv bridge and watched the torrent of men, women and children that trampled each other as they crossed the Vlatva river. The pillar of flame belched once as it swallowed a chemical workshop. The combustible materials held inside bruised the white-hot face of the flame.

  Up ahead, an Order Officer waved at her to move, go away. He seemed almost comical, his strained, panicked expression behind the fire-resistant visor of his asbestos armor making him seem like a man drowning in taffy. Gravity Lass approached him; he shouted above the screaming:

  “You need to leave the city! Everything west of the Vlatva is being evacuated!”

  “I know. I saw the fire. I’m here to help,” Gravity Lass said calmly. The Order Officer looked her over, recognized the insignia on her chest and said:

  “No offense, miss, but this is not a matter that can be solved by witch-doctors. We have notified the Kafka family and are expecting them any moment now.” He gave her the kind of smile a man might give his daughter, upon finding her wearing her mother’s heels.

  “The Kafka Family are stuck on Venus, fighting the Colonials and Ivory Eagle is stranded in Universe 6-A. I am very sorry, Officer but I’m the only hope you’ve got right now.”

  The Order Officer’s smile died immediately. Somewhere behind him, a locomotive factory screamed as its girders (now little more than molten pools of slag) gave way and its ceiling rushed to meet the ground.

  “This is highly unorthodox, allowing an unauthorized superhuman into a Crisis Zone,” he insisted, but the crowds now smashed through the security posts, scattering his men on the river bank, forcing his hand.

  “There was an explosion, half an hour ago. Our aetheric matrices picked up an unidentified object as it entered the atmosphere and crashed in the middle of Zlata Ulicka. We have been unable to pinpoint the cause of this disaster, but we know it is nothing we’ve ever encountered before,” the Order Officer explained, pointing at the pillar of flame. “So far, we only know that there is a certain point of origin in the disturbance, but every attempt to identify it or otherwise measure its size and composition has met with failure. The thing burns with a ferocity that we cannot even measure!”

  “Sounds reasonable. It is phlogiston, after all.” Gravity Lass explained, as she compiled the evidence: intense flame, burning without shedding smoke or heat. Clean, bone-white flame.

  “Phlogiston? Are you certain?” The Order Officer stuttered. “Is this an act of terrorism, then? Are we under attack?”

  Gravity Lass measured the situation. Phlogiston, the essence of combustion, had been a highly sought-after chemical element. It existed only in the space of moments that caused the ignition of materials and had been scientifically proven to be nearly impossible to contain or control. Even weaponized instances of phlogiston only produced miniscule amounts of the element and even then, such weapons were not capable of sustained destruction.

  No force on Earth, within or without the borders of the Empire, could ever hope to create a weapon which could cause destruction of such magnitude.

  “No. Go back to your men, Officer. I’ll take care of it,” she calmed him, as she twisted a series of knobs in her Gravitron field that would allow her to take flight across the river.

  She made sure she was halfway across the Vlatva before she allowed herself to begin considering the ramifications. Phlogiston was an element that burned. It caused ignition, but it could also sustain it. Should it come into contact with any material, be it solid or liquid, the phlogiston would immediately burn it, thus perpetuating its own release ad infinitum.

  Should this pillar of flame remain unquenched, the fire could envelop the entire planet.

  Tilting her field, Gravity Lass accelerated toward the Zlata Ulicka. In her mind, she was running through every possible scenario that would allow her to approach the phlogiston source without being turned into a cinder herself. Somewhere along Chotkova Boulevard, an entire neighborhood disappeared, engulfed by the flame.

  She thought of what could generate and maintain such an amount of the phlogiston element. Her mind raced through all known cases in both the applied sciences of alchemy and in the obscure field of physics. Even though the latter did not acknowledge the existence of phlogiston and supported wild, unproven claims (like the gravity theory that powered her rod), it could provide a solution to the problem.

  Gravity Lass reached the periphery of the conflagration, which now approached the old House of Senate, swallowing the city’s allies with its hungry maw. Extending her rod to unveil the hidden working of gears and miles of coil beneath its surface, Gravity Lass slid her thumb across the controls, interfacing with the artificial mind underneath. The quartz crystals that comprised its higher brain began to vibrate, setting the cogs and transistors in motion, accessing caches of knowledge as it looked for answers.

  Twenty seconds later, with the House of Senate now blanketed in phlogiston fire, a plan had been hatched.

  *****

  Crossing hidden paths down his mountain home, the caretaker prayed a soft, short litany, connecting his perception with that of his master. Seeing through his eyes, he noticed paths that radiated out into impossible directions, toward unseen destinations.

  In a few moments, the caretaker found the one he needed to follow. Without hesitation, he followed it, crossing the borders of the path and moving vertically down the sheer rock face, each step taken without thought or acknowledgement.

  The creature in the lake willed him to turn, suddenly, and follow another path, which led him into a crevasse, long since covered by snow. Without an inkling of doubt, the caretaker jumped inside and let his body sink inside the ice, unfeeling of the cold. He slid and fell down into the depths, his body grazing against rock, yet unharmed.

  He fell for a long time until he reached a place without light or sound. His master gave him another mental tug, pointing him toward his appointed direction.

  Without fear or question, the caretaker followed it.

  *****

  The scientific theories concerning phlogiston support that the element can, in and of itself, ignite any solid or liquid it comes into contact with. Furthermore, phlogiston cannot be generated or maintained in the void or in pockets without air.

  With that in mind, Gravity Lass modified her field, moving it from its default position around her body, to the tip of her Gravitron rod. In order to make her way across the wall of fire to the center of the object that generated the element, she needed first to make a path across the flames.

  Taking a deep breath, she thought back to the words of her father:

  “Gravity, Liesl, is a force similar to aether. It exists between bodies of matter and in between the spaces that separate the Solar System. It keeps the humors in your body in their respective places and keeps your feet on the ground. But it is also the mortar that holds these things together.”

  Gravity, her father had taught her, kept everything in its place. It had been his lifelong dream to invent a tool that would allow him to shape it, to use it. He dreamt of turning gravity into mankind’s greatest asset, thus turning superstition into applied science.

  Had he been there to see Liesl that day, perhaps he would have died a happy man.

  Manipulating the field around her with gentle waves of her rod, Liesl broke it into four quadrants, setting each of them to her front, back and sides. With a very gentle modification provided by the quartz brain in her rod, she then altered the shapes of each quadrant, changing them from spherical fields into funnels that pointed around her and upward.

  Taking a deep breath, Liesl adjusted the dial that would increase the acceleration of her gravity funnels. She felt the tug of the invisible forces around her and saw the ground crack beneath her feet, but remained unharmed. She existed in a pocket of standard gravity, surrounded by killing fields. The world around her slowed down, grew dim. She needed to hurry.

  Taking a few careful steps toward the wall of fire, Liesl watched the virgin-white wall of flame leap at her, slow down and finally stop. She closed her eyes and pressed a button, praying.

  The very next moment, the gravity fields pulled the molecules of air apart, scattering them back toward the wall of fire. There was a roar and a sound like the final intake of breath from some great beast, as the blaze subsided.

  Liesl opened her eyes and smiled. She was going to make it.

  *****

  Inside the bowels of the Earth, across paths that twisted and turned in ways that were incomprehensible to human understanding, the caretaker walked. Above him, he felt the pounding of ten billion feet on sidewalks, the slow, ragged breathing of mountains and the gentle song of the oceans, whiling away the time as they slowly swallowed the continents.

  Around him, he felt the endless coiling of tree roots as they hailed their brothers and sisters and plotted against their despicable mammalian oppressors.

  Beneath him, he felt the pulse of the interior sun, life-giving and peaceful, as it shed its light at the unknowable civilizations of the depths.

  And in his mind, he heard the gentle, kind voice of his master, whose mind (older than the continents) struggled to keep his body alive. He felt a cluster of his master’s hearts give way (pumping once, tolling like a hundred church bells at the end of the world) and he picked up his pace.

  He wouldn’t be long now.

  *****

  Liesl walked across the barren, molten wasteland that had once been the very heart of Prague. She saw the husks of cathedrals, their bell towers now shaped like vicious claws that sought to wound the skies. She noticed the outlines of shops, their fronts melting like sealing wax, the glass running down the street like honey.

  Stepping on a puddle of molten silver, she let out a yelp as the soles of her boots caught on fire. She stamped them down, gripping her Gravitron rod until her knuckles hurt. Around her, the gravity funnels flickered for a moment and the phlogiston-borne conflagration rushed in.

  With a touch of a button, she reasserted it. The fire had singed her but hadn’t had the time to cause any further damage. She walked on, blinking against the blinding brightness.

  *****

  Inside his fiery womb, Phlogiston Kane was reaching out his hands, seeking to grasp the flame, to contain it. Exerting his mind, he sought to coerce the immortal fire that had caused this disaster, but found that it had grown far past his ability to control it.

  He knew his attempts had been futile. This disaster was not new to him. He’d burned worlds before, by accident rather than intent. The chemical flame inside his body had been released before and grown until it enveloped a world and burned it to a cinder before it died out.

  He’d wanted to make himself immortal, so many years ago. He’d looked for a way that would give him access to the secret fire that Paracelsus had promised: the flame that Prometheus had stolen from the gods; the light of Allah, which had birthed the djinn.

  It took him decades of research and dangerous experimentation, yet he had never come closer to achieving his goal. And he never would have, had his work not been noticed by a greater power. Unbeknownst to Kane himself, his attempt to generate the fire of the gods had been noticed by the very intelligence that had arranged for his return to Prague. It had been his determination, his resolve that had drawn it to him and allowed it to make contact, to ignite the secret furnaces inside his mind and make the transmutation possible.

  Subtly governed by that almost-divine coercion, Kane used his own body as the alchemical furnace and had concocted the secret formula that slowly altered his humors, placing him into a coma.

  For thirty days and thirty nights, the alchemist that was known as Rudyard Kane slept, as the choleric humors in his gut rose to his stomach, there to mix with the melancholic humor in his brain. He slept, as his stomach subtly changed, aided by the chemical formula that would slowly transmute it from a digestive organ into a liquid tumbler. On the fifteenth day, Kane’s stomach ejected the strange new humor into his bloodstream, mixing with his sanguine humor. His body began to inflate like some living furnace pump; all his organs, except for his brain, were altered.

  By the twentieth day, Kane was little more than a chemical factory, clothed in human skin, directed by his brain. His blood vessels had become test vials and his heart a great pump that maintained heat. His stomach (now little more than a witch’s cauldron) turned and mixed and shuddered, maintaining the reaction. At that point the intelligence intervened, extending a fraction of its influence to manipulate the reactions within Kane’s body, to turn this unstable furnace that was sure to kill him into a chamber wherein the immortal flame could be generated.

  It turned the heart and twisted it into a shape that would regulate the flow of humors within his body, separating and maintaining the proper flow. The kidneys became bellows and the lungs centrifuges, to feed the ribcage’s crucible.

  It was on the dawn of the twenty first-day when Kane’s brain, now shriveled and near-dead, receded into his body, to add the phlegmatic humor.

  When the process was done and Kane was roused from his slumber, his body had become a machine of perpetual phlogiston generation, ever-functioning and imperishable. His skin itself, soaked in the same concoction, had become ivory-white, featureless and inalterable by age or harm.

  It took a paper-cut to reduce Kane’s triumph into horror.

  It happened as he sought to write his victory down in his journal. A miniscule, unimportant injury that made him bleed flame which overtook his notes, his room, the very building he had lived in since his birth. He was new to his power then and nearly burned down Prague before he could contain it.

  It took a leap, fueled by terror and guilt, to propel him into the heavens and into the vacuum of space. It took him nearly four centuries to master it, to contain it, to control it.

  But for it to spread and threaten to destroy his homeworld, it took but a moment.

  *****

  Liesl found Phlogiston Kane in the center of the disaster, beating his fists against his chest, screaming at the heavens.

  “Stop! Stop, stop, please…stop!” he babbled at the flame that ate away at the world. “Not again, not again, not again!” he screamed.

  Liesl felt the gentle quaking of her rod in her hand, knowing the strain that the Gravitron field was experiencing around her. She knew that she didn’t have much time. She could not contain the entirety of the phlogiston element, but she could contain its source.

  She hoped it would be enough.

  Pointing the Gravitron rod at the babbling, emaciated creature, she shouted a warning. It turned to her and screamed, as the field in front of her changed its shape, swallowing him, and the rest of them expanded outward, to shield her from its acceleration.

  “I don’t know what you are,” she shouted against the roaring of the flames, “but this stops now.”

  “Yes…do it! Do it quickly!” the pathetic creature that was about to burn Earth screamed back at her.

  Liesl increased the intensity of her front field by several magnitudes. The creature within it was distorted and driven to its knees, as the invisible force began to press down on it. It appeared as if it took the creature an hour to finish its very first scream; it suddenly stopped, as the intensity increased.

  Liesl felt the field increase in strength, the force of gravity pulling at the air molecules, driving them down and apart. Phlogiston could not exist in a vacuum and that was what she was going to create: a perfect vacuum with crushing gravity.