1 The flame of the candle stands still in the air.
2 But the flames rose and we could not guess the word.
3 But the flame was unmoving, yet blinding as liquid metal.
4 Your eyes are as a flame, but our brothers have neither hope nor fire.
5 And slowly, slowly as a flush of blood, a red flame trembled in the wire.
6 Great mountains of flame stood in the squares of the Cities for three months.
7 Then today, at sunrise, we saw a white flame among the trees, high on a sheer peak before us.
8 As the flames rose, a thing happened which no eyes saw but ours, else we would not be living today.
9 As the chains were wound over their body at the stake, and a flame set to the pyre, the Transgressor looked upon the City.
10 There was nothing left around us, nothing save night and a thin thread of flame in it, as a crack in the wall of a prison.
11 And it seemed as if these eyes were trying to tell us something through the flames, to send into our eyes some word without sound.
12 And we thought then, standing in the square, that the likeness of a Saint was the face we saw before us in the flames, the face of the Transgressor of the Unspeakable Word.
13 They whisper many strange things, of the towers which rose to the sky, in those Unmentionable Times, and of the wagons which moved without horses, and of the lights which burned without flame.
14 But then came the day when the sky turned white, as if the sun had burst and spread its flame in the air, and the fields lay still without breath, and the dust of the road was white in the glow.
15 A flaming grill kept dancing before our eyes, and we thought of nothing save that grill, a grill, a grill of red squares, and then we knew that we were looking at the squares of the iron grill in the door, and there were also the squares of stone on the walls, and the squares which the lash was cutting upon our back, crossing and re-crossing itself in our flesh.