Feyra's first awareness was of a candle flame. Small, soft, but so bright and bold and individual. It floated, it danced, it burned, and it was beautiful. She watched it all day until she knew what a day was, watched it twist and turn and then go out, only to be reborn feverishly alive the next morning.

Alive.

What a thing it was to be alive.

Feyra marveled at this, though she couldn't move much. Her world was color and flat planes and textures of canvas, but she saw so much more. Saw the colors became stereoscopic, rounding, realizing dimensions she couldn't reach. But she danced anyway, learning from the candle, from its sway and its breath how to move across the easel and bring joy to her solitude.

She wasn't really alone though. She had Mateo. An old, whiskery man who scuffled into her alcove on slippers every morning and scuffled back out every night. Feyra knew his wrinkles, each speck of sand, grit, and sparkle in his slowly clouding eyes. He gave her new forms, new colors, and so she danced and showed him how she could move, could be more, how she could burn.

Sometimes he chuckled at that. Sometimes he chided her. "You're just a painting, darling. Your fire is in the mind, in your beauty, in the imagination."

Feyra didn't want to be just in the imagination. She wanted to burn free.

Mateo was content for the most part, humming as he gave her new forms, more flames, but still flat and dead. They looked alive but she could not make them heat, make them flare, make them scorch. The canvas was her cage, and though she moved autonomously around it, Mateo clicked his teeth and painted her right back into the corner where she started.

The room beyond the easel was sparse. A simple life demonstrated by the few candles, a plain table, a couple of chairs, and a single, cramped bed tucked away in a corner like a lost shoe. Mateo didn't often sleep. He fell asleep on his stool, and Feyra would study, watch the hitch of his chest, the muttering of his mouth, the twitch of his eyelids. Mateo did not burn like the candle flame, he withered. Skin turning like tea-spilled canvas and colors in too much sunlight.

Her creator was fragile, but she watched over him with a smile. Mateo didn't know Feyra's strength, didn't know she'd one day burn.

One day indeed, there was another man. Tall and peaky with a thin moustache and hands that constantly rubbed over each other as if always yearning to wash themselves. Of disease, of Mateo's presence, of lesser things. Feyra did not like him. But Mateo hunched around him, becoming smaller and smaller though his smiles tried to be wider and wider. The man did not like Mateo, but he liked Mateo's paintings.

He liked her.

His eyes hunted her out, ran over her lines, took in her smoke and her flames. Feyra wrapped them around herself and did not move. She would not dance to the other corners for him, would not show him her joy. The man didn't seem to notice. He liked her flatness, the way she was dead and still and would not escape from under his eye. He liked a controlled fire, one that would not hurt him if he got too close. A thing that had no mind, only beauty.

The man wrote a check.

Mateo declined. He showed the visitor his other works, the ones that were not Feyra. They were majestic lands from Mateo's younger days. Mountains wreathed in birds, rivers tied in bows, places so deep and green that secrets grew there like flowers.

The man did not want them. He wanted her.

Feyra kept still, so still. Mateo coughed and shook his head once more. The other man left the room with an angry slam, the door rebounding on old hinges. Mateo dropped his head into his hands and wept. Then he went to sleep.

In the night there was a flame. Just a candle sprout. Feyra watched it leap to life in the shadows, cheerful, young, daring to dance. It grew quickly, and she watched, enraptured, as it became sisters and brothers and cousins, and made chorus lines across the floor.

The air snapped.

In the darkness, the dance of the flames spun suddenly wicked. Horns and claws emerged with malice, mouths gulping the night, eyes laughing at Feyra's false burning. Her coldness. Her cage. She was trapped.

Mateo began to cough. She saw his shadowed shape move on the bed where he'd gone and laid motionless after the man had left. He had made low noises, frail and pained, the sound of something broken that could not be glued back. Feyra placed her hands against the canvas, anxiously searching the fire for his silhouette, his familiar wrinkles, his whiskered chin.

He was slumped to the floor, coughing, heaving, not moving much at all. He's burning, thought Feyra, but burning out. No. Feyra pushed her shoulder against the canvas, but the canvas was her world and she could not simply step off the edge. So she'd make her world move instead.

Around and around the canvas Feyra went. Back and forth until the easel shuddered and tilted. There was a curtain on a rod hanging in front of Mateo's painting nook. There was a pitcher of water on the table beside her. Feyra knew every angle, every corner of this room, had studied every space and distance a thousand times over and she knew just how to fall.

The easel came down, knocking against the table, tipping the pitcher, and tearing the curtain off its rod. The bundle crashed to the floor, water soaking into the curtain, just within Mateo's reach. With a trembling hand, he brought the soaking cloth to his face, breathing in spurts that shivered his whole body as the room smoldered with angry light and smoke flooded the ground.

The faint reprieve of the wet curtain rags was just enough time to buy help. Normally distant neighbors pounded at the door, tearing it open and shouting inside. Arms wrapped around Mateo, helping him into the night where cool air lingered still. Mateo struggled, turning back for Feyra where she'd crashed her world to the ground. The neighbors patted him on the back and made reassuring sounds, but Mateo only wept.

And Feyra, finally, burned.