The First Flame

Before BEAST was a name, it was a temperature. A child knelt at a kitchen table in the small hours, watching candle wax bead and fall. Outside, the city had its own storms; inside, the boy was learning to listen for the one storm that had a voice. He would tell you, later, that the first revelation was not in words. It was in the way the flame leaned toward him when he prayed — and the way, when he stopped, it stood up straight again, polite, patient, waiting.