《Fireborn-Birth of Flame》


 Chapter 1-Prologue

    WARNING: This is my first time publishing and I am mostly experimenting with my style of writing, I will not have a set schedule for releasing chapters and there may be big gaps between releases due to work and school. Keeping all of this in mind I am open to criticism as I am working how to improve my writing. With that out of the way please enjoy my first rendition of Fireborn.


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    Chapter 1


    I can feel the calling even now, the constant call, the constant tug at the back of my mind. I want so much to just give into it and it would be so easy to give in, but I¡¯m too smart to do something so reckless and stupid. I¡¯m no god, no unstoppable being, I am simply another person in the crowd who is a little different from everyone else. My name is Jason DuCart, and I am just another person who is fresh out of high school and doesn¡¯t know what to do. In the beginning, I wanted to go to college but I just feel like I don¡¯t know what I would want to do, and whatever I would do would feel like a waste of my potential. So here I am sitting in a shack on my property drinking a cold beer and watching the flames of my forge. I am currently living in a very small home I made myself on a small piece of land in the middle of nowhere, literally I¡¯m in the middle of Minnesota and my property is at least 20 miles from the nearest city. I would live even farther away but every man has his needs and I need to at least be able to get mail and food.


    Ever since I was 5 I have been different then everyone else. I have been able to do things that shouldn¡¯t be possible, things that scared me for many years. When I was 5 I had gotten lost in the woods during the winter. You see I had followed a random trail deep into the woods and before I knew it I was lost among a plethora of trails in the forest. As it had dawned on me as a child that I was lost, I had taken to trying to find my way home but I only continued to get more and more lost. Before I knew it, it was already dark and only getting colder by the minute. Being the scared little child I had been at the time I cried my head off for a few hours before snuggling up under a tree. As it got late into the night I could feel the cold seeping into my bones, listening to the sounds of the night, of wolves and birds as my eyes closed wanting nothing but sleep. As I became cold and sleepy all I could think of was being warm at home, of wanting nothing more than to be warm, surrounded by the warmth, by fire. Before I knew it I was yearning only for the fire, not the warmth, but a primal instinct to create fire and have it. I yearned for fire and nothing else and with this want I suddenly found myself getting warmer and warmer.


    As I opened my eyes I looked to my hands and saw my gloves coated in flames. I was on fire and my first reaction was to put out the fire, but as soon as I thought of getting rid of the fames the fire was gone, like it was never there. I thought I was seeing things as I looked to my hands and my now burnt gloves. I thought I was going crazy until I began to get cold again and wanted the warmth and the fire back. Before I knew it my hands suddenly sparked to life and the flames appeared dancing over my hands and between my fingers. This time though I wasn¡¯t as afraid, as far as I was concerned the fire was a life all its own and it was my friend. It didn¡¯t wish me harm or want to take from me, it just wanted to be, to exist. During that long chilly night, I played with the fire for hours on end, absorbed in what I could do before falling asleep from exhaustion. The next morning, I awoke to a team of fire fighters and police that were combing through the woods. They were walking in an extensive line spaced out and yelling my name repeatedly. As I got up and walked over to them they seemed more surprised than happy.


    A child who was lost all night and should by all reason not be fine was just walking over to them like nothing happened. Long story short I was taken home to my crying parents and would have been given quite the scolding except they were so happy to see me that they completely forgot to, it was quite the exhausting day for everyone involved. After that life went on without a hitch around my house, although my parents did become a little overbearing for quite a while watching my every move. Though as time went on everyone began to forget the whole incident, everyone except for me. As I got older the want to do what I did in that forest only grew stronger, but I was never able to do it again no matter how much I tried. It was only when I was 14 that I finally had a breakthrough. It happened when I had gotten extremely angry after getting bullied at school. I had come home and went on hike telling my parents I would be out for a bit. I was so angry that I just had to vent it out. I took a few tools such as an axe, a knife, and machete out with me in a backpack. When I got far away enough from any trail I let loose chopping trees, slashing branches, and just generally venting it all out. As I got angry my axe got stuck in a tree and I switched to my machete which also got stuck in the tree, and even my knife eventually got stuck.


    With nothing else I just punched the tree until my hands went numb and my knuckles became bloody. As I continued to vent I thought about school and how I hated it so much. I wanted the whole school to burn down, to go away. I wanted to burn it all down, for it all to burn! As I thought this and punched the tree a huge boom occurred. Flames had blasted out of the end of my fist and directly hit the tree. As I moved my hand away from the tree the end of my fist had fire floating over my knuckles and the tree had a large chunk ripped out of it with burn marks all around it. As I stared at my fist and the fire I was overcome with a calming feeling. It was soothing to look at the fire, feeling that all I needed was the fire. What followed though was not the calm feeling I first felt, but an indescribable hunger for more, for the fire to consume and grow. I wanted to burn everything, for the fire to burn everything and grow.This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.


    I was luckily able to quickly stop myself and the flames disappeared like they were never there. I would have felt upset with what happened normally but I felt like I had actually gained something from this. I felt closer to the flames, like I could understand them and what they wanted. As I focused on the idea of controlling the fire I realized I was thinking of the fire as an object and not a living being. That was the key difference, fire needed to breath, it wanted to grow and cover everything, not be contained. It had desires and needs which I had been ignoring, and for some reason it felt close to me enough that it would not ever harm me, only protect me. That is why I could never control it, I never truly understood it in the first place. Leaving the forest that day I had found myself in a way that I never thought I could.


    After that day, I continued learning to control and guide the fire every day after school. I even went as far as building a makeshift forge behind my parent¡¯s house. It took a lot of convincing to get them to allow me to make it, so I ended up making a deal to apprentice with another blacksmith for 2 years before I could make my own forge. During all this time, I learned to make blades, nails, jewelry, and all sorts of things. Honestly the apprenticeship was the best idea I ever could have had, without which I would have had to learn everything by myself. As time went on I began to make my own knives and other items working on request through online forums, and even set up my own forge at home. I had turned out to be very good at making blades and made quite the reputation for myself online sending my blades to people. As time went on I even began having regular orders from some people.


    Soon I made enough to buy my own little piece of land in the middle of nowhere, 20 miles from the city of Grand Rapids. I even bought enough supplies to make a small house, closer to the size of a one car garage than a house. Then I built myself a workshop where I could make all my blades and other things. As I graduated high school I moved everything into the house and set up my own shop where people could order blades and any other type of thing they wanted from me online. I even let people requisition unique designs or go with a premade design for my knives. Of course, I also made many other things such as jewelry to keep myself practiced in most techniques and forms of forging, but more than anything I was now able to experiment with metals on my own.


    The thing that I wanted to do the most though was to forge the much harder to work with materials. Currently my goal was to be able to get some tungsten and forge a knife with it. Unfortunately, I need to find a supplier to get some as well as figure out how to forge such a metal as my forge can only get roughly half as hot as it needs to be. Usually tungsten being used for a blade or being forged in general is considered as impossible, or as a waste as usually people either ruin their equipment, as well as how hard it is to weld such a material. But with my talents I think it may be possible to make good reliable tools entirely from tungsten.


    In today¡¯s market tungsten is much more expensive than it used to be as it is a good material to mix with carbon and steel. It is usually used to make armor piercing shells, armor, and other military ordinance. Of course, it is also used for some of the most high-end tools around the world, with simple drill bits made costing upwards of $750 because of the tools durability and precision. Thanks to all of this it is both hard to acquire and to work with the material. In the end it will be a long time before I can make the material into something usable once I do get some, so for now I am making blades and testing some ideas.


    Today I made a stainless steel long sword that is roughly 3¡¯6¡± long. The blade itself makes up exactly 3¡¯ of the sword and the handle is 6¡± long. The reason I am making this sword is that I am using a specific type of stainless steel that is highly heat resistant and generally keeps its hardness and shape even at high temperatures. This is basically a practice for the type of blade I want to make with tungsten, with the exception being tungsten is much heavier and needs higher temperatures to forge. This sword itself was not too hard as I have handled roughly similar materials many times before. Because of this I fear I won¡¯t be prepared for when I need to forge the tungsten as it will be much harder. The leap in skill between this and tungsten is just too large. So instead I need to work on my unique techniques that I have been wanting to refine and use for years.


    Since I started to learn to forge, the first thing I wanted to do was to experiment with how to manipulate fire and how I could not be hurt by it to find unique ways to create things. Of course, this was not going to happen as I needed to be supervised a lot when I was first learning, and when I did get my own forge I wasn¡¯t able to stay up late or have much privacy with where it was set up. In the end I gave up on the idea until I could get some real privacy to try and learn these things. But now that I had time and privacy I could experiment all I wanted.

 Chapter 2

    Chapter 2


    Ever since I had my abilities I wanted to experiment and see what I could do with them. Of course, by the time I realized what I could do I had a sense of how bad it could turn out for someone to advertise having powers I have. I read enough comics and watched enough shows to know what could happen to me and my family. So I kept it a secret from everyone and I would always go deep into the woods whenever I decided I wanted to try out some things. Over the years I learned a few things about my powers, both good and bad. First of all I was immune to getting hurt by fire, but that wasn¡¯t all, I couldn¡¯t get hurt from holding anything that was on fire or was extremely hot.


    I tried to hold a kettle of water and used fire to bring it to a boil. The kettle felt a little warm in my hands but nothing else, the real test was to pour the water over my hands. My hand was shaking as I was about to pour out the kettle. I was afraid of what could happen, could I get burned? I was so afraid of what could happen that as I was going over it in my head I never realized that I had already poured it over my hand. When I saw the water flowing over my hand I was overcome with a sense of relief. Being able to not get burned by anything helped me feel safe, that nothing I did would get me hurt.


    With this I knew that I could never be burned or hurt by anything hot as far as I knew. I had not experienced anything over 500¡ã F so I was very tentative on how far my heat tolerance went. Although my heat tolerance was good I also was learning to manipulate fire on a base level. The biggest thing was that the fire was a little hard to manipulate and have certain things happen as I wanted. It was hard to control in of itself but the biggest problem wasn¡¯t the manipulation of fire, but the side effects.


    I could hear this voice in the back of my head whenever I tried to manipulate fire. I heard it only slightly at first, but as I used my powers over the years I began to hear it more and more. It was this voice that kept telling me to burn everything, that everything was only fuel for it to live and spread. This only continued over the years as I trained, and now I could feel this constant tug at the back of my mind. It hasn¡¯t driven me crazy or anything, but it has made me wonder what will happen to me as I use my powers more. Of course I want to figure out how to stop myself from possibly going crazy, but nothing I have tried has worked very much. The only things that have helped me is listening to music and meditating for an hour a day.


    Getting back to forging, I have always wanted for forge an item with my bare hands and little to no tools. Now that I was free I started with some 304 stainless steel which I heated up until I could mold it like clay. I was tentatively poking at the metal bar for a few seconds before realizing that even at roughly 2200¡ã F I am not getting burnt. Now that I have the metal to the desired temperature I began trying to mold it with my hands, slowly but surely drawing out the blade and making a back edge. Halfway through the process I decided that a bowie knife would be a pretty good idea for what I wanted to make. Going into the process of making the blade I had no idea what type of design I wanted to make. In the end I chose the bowie knife for its relative simplicity, but also its large flat sides and smaller edge, along with small flourishes along the blade.


    The finished result allowed me to try to straighten the material by hand and get a feel for assorted styles of curving the blade with my hands. What ended up happening was that the blade was relatively straight, but there were small inconsistencies such as how it has slightly narrower along certain parts of the blade. Otherwise the blade turned out pretty good, especially with me making the handle entirely out of metal being my biggest accomplishment. The entire blade and handle was one solid piece of consistent metal. This made the blade a little unbalanced, but I would be able to fix it in the future relatively easy. In the end I decided to use my tools such as my hammer press and such to straighten out the blade and make it consistent. I wasn¡¯t nearly ready enough to not use these tools, and I wasn¡¯t above using my tools.


    With the blade successfully fixed of its flaws I heat treated the blade in oil and let it sit down to cool. Being done with forging I went to my living room to relax and watch some tv. It seemed that there were some documentaries on emperor penguins running on national geographic, so I turned up the volume and headed over to the kitchen to make myself a quick burger while watching from the stove. Although I am good with fire and forging stuff, cooking is not my forte per say. I usually have trouble heating stuff to the right temperature and leaving food on too long so my food is usually a small bit burnt or overcooked. I think it may be a passive effect I have on the temperature of things around me but I have no proof as of yet.This novel''s true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.


    It¡¯s because of this that I am usually reliant on take out or delivery for most of my food. In fact, I am on a first name basis with a certain pizza guy who is the only person willing to drive all the way out to my place. I like to think it¡¯s my personality that makes him want to come all the way out here, but it¡¯s probably just the huge tip I give him every time because I feel guilty making anyone come all the way out here. My fridge itself is a testament to how much I eat out, being almost entirely filled with almost only pizza and Chinese food. I honestly waste too much money on food each month because of this, but luckily my knife requisitions and such give me quite a wide berth of expenses and income each month.


    After I finished cooking I ate my food and watched the documentary before heading outside to get some air. Going over to my open area near the back of my house I began doing some light yoga before setting up to meditate for an hour. Working with the materials and using my powers today took a lot out of me and I feel like I need to try and relax for a while. Before I know it its already 2 hours later and I have seemingly meditated for an extra hour today. Getting up from my sitting position I headed back to my work station and got back to working on my actual orders for the day instead of experimenting. After finishing 3 knives, a sword, and 2 necklaces, I decided to call it a day. I went back inside my house and watched a few YouTube gaming videos before heading to bed excited for seeing the final finished product of today¡¯s work.


    Waking up I made some quick scrambled eggs and ate before heading to my work station to see my finished knives from yesterday. Everything looks good so I am going to spend today putting the finished details on them. After I heat treated the knives and sword yesterday I made sure they were perfectly straight and left them to cool. So now they are going to need to be sanded down and brought to shape as I take off any excess material and start to really give them all an edge. After that I will put together the handles and inlay any engravings or other such detailed pieces. This is more precise work that I have to do now, whereas yesterday was most of the rough work.


    Now that everything that was commissioned is done, I can finally move onto my pet project. With some excess metal I had I made metal plates to finish the handle on the bowie knife, as I cut the plates to shape and riveted them together I had a solid piece of metal as the handle. I then did a little bit of sanding to the handle to shape it more to better fit my hand, and added a cross pattern texture to the handle to give it a better grip. When all was said and done I had a large bowie knife entirely made of metal which looked something like this, but with a metal handle.


    Now that everything was complete I could finally do my experiments with the knife. Now there was a reason I wanted a hard metal that could hold heat well, and to put it simply, I wanted to cut things with a heated edge. Mind you many people don¡¯t do this as the blade will usually transfer its heat to whatever its cutting until it reaches equilibrium, and the blade also loses its strength as it gets hotter. What I am planning to do though is heat the blade up to 500¡ã F so it will not lose much strength at all, while trying to manipulate fire to keep the blades temperature constant.


    The blade seemed to heat up easily enough as I got a temperature reader gun which kept track of the blades temperature as I heated it. I then got a small log out as I wanted to test the ability of the blade against wood. It cut in easily enough as I slashed into the side and through the bark, but it seemed to just stop an inch into to log as it seemed to be losing its heat. I began making the fire hotter and more compact near the back spine of the blade as it began to regain its higher temperature. I could feel the blade bend the tiniest amount as I put more force into it. As I was doing this I felt as though my blade kept losing its heat near the cutting edge of the knife no matter what I did. I saw that the spine seemed to glow a dull red color while fading into black as it neared the cutting edge. I didn¡¯t want to directly burn the wood, but have the blade do the cutting and burning for this test.


    As I struggled to try and find a way to keep the blade hotter near the edge, I had a strange epiphany as I felt the flames grow hotter near the edge. I felt as though I should be able to move the heat into the blade, and not just the fire I was creating. Thinking this I tried to focus on the heat and not the fire itself. As I focused on the feeling of heat I began to feel a phantom sensation within the flames. Something more primal than even flames, and life itself within it. As I pulled on this sensation within my mind and tried to move it, the flames suddenly disappeared.

 Chapter 3

    Looking where the flames used to be I could still feel something, so going on a hunch I used the temperature reader gun on the space above the blade, and what I saw was amazing. It was like there was a cloud of heat in the air above the blade just sitting stationary. When I looked through the area I could even see the distortion of light rays as whatever was between me and the cloud was having its image stretched and retracted around, like when looking at black top on a sweltering day. The distortions only helped to solidify that the air was extremely hot, and for some reason stationary.


    Going back to what I had felt shortly before the flames disappeared, I tried to focus on the feeling within the flames. I could now feel this same sensation in front of me now, except it was much easier to feel this time, like I didn¡¯t need to search for it. I once again tried pulling at the feeling and watched as the heated air in front of me began to move slightly, so I focused on the heat and began to try and move it towards my knife. I felt it easily move how I wanted now, and focused it near the back of the knife. It heated up again but it was seemingly the same as before with the heat within the blade dissipating near the cutting edge. Out of desperation I focused the heat into a smaller space and pushed it against the back of the blade again.


    As I was pushing on the blade with the heat I had something odd happen. The heat suddenly traveled directly into the blade and stayed there. I could feel the heat the same as before, but now it was within the blade. It moved around quite a bit slower now as I tried to move the heat within the blade, but I could still control it and feel it all the same. Having an idea I uniformly spread out the heat throughout the blade and evenly heated it from the inside. The results spoke for themselves, as the whole blade began to glow red and smoke began to profusely spew out of the cut the knife was making.


    In only a couple seconds the knife once again started cutting straight through the log at a rate of an inch every 3 seconds. It was having a lot of resistance from the log, but what was I to expect? It was a piece of wood so being able to move as fast as I did was amazing. I eventually cut through the whole log, but not without some problems. The knife I made was slightly warped and bent along the spine of the knife. I quickly took it to my work station and was able to salvage the blade itself, but it showed me that although it was possible to heat up and use a material, it would cause an increased rate of wear and tear.


    Thanks to the test I tried to do I now knew I could not only move and control flames, but heat as well. I wasn¡¯t controlling the flames as I did before, as there was no combustion, but instead I was able to create and control the movement of the heat I had taken from the flames. With what happened my head was swimming with ideas of how I could change my control of flames and heat. I could experiment with a whole new aspect of my ability, which was more exciting than anything I had done for a long time. Some things that came to mind was to manually heat things up by creating heat, like I could do with flames, except it would be more controlled and less flashy. But it would require practice again to be able to learn to sufficiently control heat, just like I had to do with flames. There was a lot to do, and luckily I would have a lot of time to experiment with different ideas.


    After I finished fixing the blade, I still felt really good and decided to just practice with my flames. I did some basic exercises with my flames, spreading them out to their maximum distance, as well as compressing them and other things. It was a good change to just do my exercises as they were a relative part of my routine that felt normal. I was rather surprised with how I felt controlling my flames though, as they seemed much easier to control as well as less draining. I should probably be having a headache by now with how much I have used my flames today, but I seem completely fine. Overall I feel great and don¡¯t really want to stop, so I decided to test an old technique I tried a long time ago.


    I immediately went to a secluded clearing as I needed space for what I wanted to do. Once there I created flames in a large circular area centered around myself. Following this I tried to make the flames more intense and hot until I felt myself unable to make it any hotter. Finally getting to the fun part I began to try and compress the flames into an orb in front of me. It was very resistant to compressing into a ball, but I felt like I could do it this time with my newfound control. I continued to strain as I felt the flames slowly drain into this small ball which was becoming brighter and brighter by the second. After roughly a minute of straining the flames all around me had finally been compressed into this small ball.


    In the end it was roughly the size of a softball, but it felt so much more dangerous than anything else I have done before. I could feel it lightly vibrating between my hands as I struggled to keep it controlled. I had a feeling that the longer I tried to control the ball the harder it would get, and who knows what could happen if I lost control of it. I decided to do a quick test by walking up to a tree and pushing the orb towards the tree. The tree combusted into flames when the orb came within a foot of it, and as I pushed the orb forward it slid right through the center of the tree with no resistance to be found. Now there was a large tree on fire with a large hole bored right through its center. I could see that the tree could cause quite the forest fire so after I was done I immediately willed the flames on and around the tree to be extinguished, all the time while also keeping some concentration on ball to keep it controlled.The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.


    Feeling that I had done enough practicing today I turned my attention towards the ball as I tried to figure out what to do with it. It was radiating a bright yellow, almost white, light and there was a constant stream of air all around the ball as it no doubt needed a great deal of air for fuel. As I contemplated what I could do with it I suddenly heard a large crack and squeaking behind me. Turning around I was face to face with a grey squirrel looking at me from the side of a tree. Looking at it I felt that there was enough damage done today and I tried to slowly will the intense ball of fire to dissipate. The release of the fire was much easier than creating it and was done very quickly.


    I then sat myself down to rest on a nearby stump, slowly breathing with my eyes closed taking in the sounds of nature. As I was resting focusing on my senses I began to feel something beyond my normal senses, like a tug at the back of my mind. It was very annoying at first like an itch that needed to be scratched, but slowly began to fade. As it began to fade I could only wonder what it meant. I decided to leave it for another day, too exhausted to try and focus on the strange feeling. Exhausted I hoisted myself up and walked back to my house to try and relax for a few hours. In all actuality I ended up passing out after an hour on the couch and woke up the next morning at 10 AM, not realizing just how draining what I did was.


    I immediately went back to my workshop to check on my knives and make sure that there weren¡¯t any final touches that needed to be taken care of before sending them to my buyers. I then went ahead and packaged my commissions that were finished and put them into the back of my truck. Although I normally don¡¯t like to drive into town I need to go to ship my packages personally, plus I can use this as a trip to go shopping and get anything I need, so after packing everything up I headed into town.


    The first thing I did was head to the Postal Service Building and send my packages to my suppliers. After that I went ahead and decided to do some grocery shopping and then decided to take some time for myself and head to the local bar. Some people would think that an introvert like myself would have no reason to go to a place like the bar, and normally you would be right. Unfortunately, even a person such as myself needs to have some human contact every once in a while or else even the most stable person will go crazy.


    Entering the bar, I sat down at one of the stools and ordered a couple of beers and watched the football game they had on. Personally, I thought almost all sports are fun to watch but playing was another thing entirely. Of course, hockey had a special place in my heart living in a place where we had natural ice rinks a good part of the year. Watching the football game I couldn¡¯t tell who was playing and I didn¡¯t care really, I was more focused on the brunette who had been watching me since I entered the bar. Normally I would like the attention from someone of the opposite gender, but she was being excessively strange about it. She would only glance at me quickly and go back to what she was doing like it never happened.


    The only reason I noticed was because she was someone I had never seen before in town, and living in a small town like I was everybody knew each other, myself included despite how little I came into town. I quickly decided I didn¡¯t like the attention and decided to head home after paying up my tab. Walking out of the bar I got in my car and started driving home only to feel like I was being watched again. I looked around as I was driving and quickly put to rest my thoughts that I was being followed as no one was even remotely in sight. Feeling like I was completely out of sorts I decided I just wanted to go home and try to forget all my problems. There were way too many new and strange things happening in one day.


    Parking my car I went inside and lied down on my couch and put on the game again. I may not care much about the game but I definitely don¡¯t like to stop something after I¡¯ve started. I sat down and began to watch the game when I started to get a strange feeling again like I had yesterday. I decided to follow that feeling this time and I began by closing my eyes and trying to focus inward on that feeling. The only problem was the more I focused on the feeling this time the more it felt like it was slipping away from me. I began to wonder what to do as nothing I tried was working, I could only keep trying different methods to find out what this feeling was. As I began to think of other solutions I decided to stop focusing inwards and think a bit more on what I knew. I knew this strange feeling would possibly have to do with my powers since I only began to have this sensation when I made the breakthrough with my powers being able to manipulate heat and not just fire. I couldn¡¯t help but think it would have to do with heat but I couldn¡¯t figure out what. I could manipulate the heat and insert it into objects as I felt the heat move. And then it hit me, the feeling of the heat!