Sometime Later.....

After the beautiful woman Nora and the strange growling man Jacob left him, the boy sat alone in the corner. His mind was a blank.

He felt very little. He knew little.

There was simply the instinctive sensation of breathing. There was constant hunger....and there was also the Flame crawling around inside of him.

The boy had seen a flame only once.

While being taken out of the white box, to walk the white tunnels...The boy had seen one of the Men in White standing over a large bowl. A bowl full of red and orange dancing lights.

The boy had stopped to watch, simply because the light caught his eyes, and as the boy watched

The man in White....had lifted some fluttering sheets from the floor and placed then over the lights. The boy watched as the hot flickering light, slowly consumed anything that it touched.

As if the warm lights were hungry...

Suddenly an unfamiliar voice cried out from the Man in White, and he raised his arms over his head. “I commit you to the fire. BE cleansed in the Flame!”

The stranger shouted. None of the words made sense....it was all gibberish....

But Flame and Fire?

For some odd reason....these two words stuck inside of the boys head. They became instantly synonymous with the flickering red lights.....and the hungry warm energy that the boy felt resting inside of his own soul.

The boy was soon ripped form his observations, when a hand struck him across the face, and he was pulled away and taken back to the white box.

But from that moment on the boy subconsciously thought of the enemy inside of him, the red orange lights and the Flame as all one and the same.

So after Nora and Jacob left...all he had was the flickering hot energy inside of him to fell.

The Flame and its desire to feed. To consume everything around him.

The boy sat and he sat. But as it happened every day, it wasn’t long before the boy was taken out of the corner.

The boy....who suddenly couldn’t resist thinking of himself as “Brandon” was visited by more men in White.

Brandon watched them move into the room, and felt an intense buzz of awareness in his body.

The Flame scratched and screamed beneath his skin....it wanted to kill these men.

It always wanted to kill. To feed.

The boy salivated at the thought of devouring their lives.....but Brandon knew....that he couldn’t actually feed on the White men.

He didn’t know why he could kill the food that they brought him so easily, and yet in turn couldn’t put a finger on the food that waltzed into the room every day.

But perhaps it was because of the strange powers that the Men in White possessed.

The black lights that they used somehow protected them from the boy....and his hunger.

But the Men in White were cautions around him as they always were. They took him from the room that he called home to yet another featureless White room....and in that room.....they tied him down.

They treated him with none of the care or attention that the strange man Jacob or the kind woman Nora had shown him. They struck him for no reason. They cursed him and angrily tied him down atop a cold silver table. Naked.

Brandon was used to the treatment by now. It was all he had ever know.....and when the men started using the black lights to cut him and slice him up.....Brandon stomached the pain.

It was a torture that he had to live through every day. Some days The Men in White took his skin or his digits, but they always took something.

With excruciating proficiency and merciless and drawn out attention they took from him.

This day the men used the Black lights in their hands to slowly and deeply slice into Brandon’s wrists. Once that was accomplished and his flesh was cut open and gushing fresh blood, the men in White turned their black hands to Brandon’s face.

Soon enough the men had removed his ears and nose from his face and the side of his head.

Using the same crunchy clear containers that the men always used. They sequestered his severed body parts away into the bags with the same dedicated and unhurried fashion that they always used.

As for the blood that flowed like a river from his body and face, the men in White collected this too....as they always did.

They left him like that for Hours. Bleeding. Dying on the table as they looked on and gathered his essences for some unknown reason.

But Brandon knew.....because this happened to him every day.....that he would not die of his injuries.

The Flame kept him alive.

The energy of the Flame saved him. And because Brandon was feed a new energy source everyday....the Flame healed him from his injuries.

The Flame replaced what was taken. Slowly, after long hours, it all started to regrow. From his nose to his ears....to the blood it was the Flame who healed him.....then he got hungry.... And the men in White brought him fresh bodies for food. His food screaemed and clawed at him, nails searing over flesh trying to cut out his eyes, but in the end they were dust in his embrace.