You call us ghostfire. The bookish are politer: phosphorus fire, they say — bone-phosphor kindling in the wind, nothing supernatural about it.
The bookish are half right. The fire does rise from bone. But why do some bones kindle and others never? In the same burial pit, why do those few skeletons alone glow, night after night?
Because the light is not phosphorus. The light is what went unspent.
Every living heart carries a flame. Some burn it lavishly, some frugally. When the lifespan ends, the flame goes out with it — that is the ordinary course. But there are always those who die with a long measure of flame remaining: the wrongfully killed, the young, the ones who died mid-journey, mid-sentence. The remainder refuses to disperse. It clings to its own bones and burns them, slowly, thriftily, alight.
That is us.
I am the remainder of a peddler who traveled by night. That year I was escorting a load of medicine over White-Bone Ridge for my employer when a flash flood took me, carrying-pole and all, into the ravine. My heart's flame had much left in it — and I can tell you exactly where the much came from: the medicine was bound for the plague country south of the ridge, and every day's delay meant more dead.
The first night my bones kindled at the bottom of that ravine, that was still the thought burning.
It was only after becoming ghostfire that I learned the trade's discipline. We have no limbs — we cannot move three feet. No throat — we cannot say one word. We can do exactly one thing: shine.
But do not underestimate shining.
Night travellers fear ghostfire and give it a wide berth — and giving it a wide berth is precisely correct! The places we cluster are gullies, sink-pits, collapse-scars: the very places we ourselves went down. We burn ourselves into warnings, into the four glowing words here is danger. The old hunters of White-Bone Ridge understand. They teach their children: don't fear the green fire — that's the departed, marking the pits for you.
In three hundred years, this one pit's flames have turned back more stumbling night-walkers than any of us can count. My swept-away medicine saved no one; but the light left over from that errand can still be spent carefully.
And so the days might have gone on — a flame burns out eventually, and burning out means truly finished, truly set down: a clean extinguishing. Every few years, one of our pit's old lights goes quietly dark. We do not weep. It is a glad occasion: someone has finally completed their lifetime.
But lately, the extinguishing has been denied us.
Since the Grudge-Bone Altar rose, on every eclipse night a suction rises from its direction. Sucking what? Us. Whole slopes of ghostfire lift involuntarily off the ground, stretch thin, and stream toward the altar's mouth — like lamp-oil siphoned backward out of the wick. Only by gripping our own bones do we stay. The two guttering old lights at the pit's east end could not grip hard enough.
The taken fire reappeared the next night, rising from the altar's crown — changed in color. Not our frugal blue-green glow. A black brightness, sharp enough to hurt, and in its light a person's shadow moves half a step before the person does.
Light, burned black. Flames hoarded across whole lifetimes, poured out and burned into that.
Our whole pit shook with fury. But we cannot move three feet. We cannot cry one word.
So the night the medicine-basket boy crossed White-Bone Ridge, we did what we had not done in three hundred years: all thirty-seven lights left their bones at once and formed a single line — from the mouth of the official road all the way to the outer ring of the Grudge-Bone Altar.
A waymark laid with our lives. Thirty-seven lamps. Not one missing.
The boy followed it to the end. And at the end he turned, faced the slope full of green fire, and bowed — deeply.
As he straightened, the oldest light in our pit — a soldier whose name no one living remembers — went out with a soft snap. Peacefully.
That, I think, was what he had been waiting for: to have his light properly used, once. After that, a flame may rest.
We remaining thirty-six conferred, and agreed to send one light with the boy. They chose me — a peddler under escort duty was always fated for the long road.
West, then. I have hoarded this little light three hundred years, and it was for this road:
to shine on the pits for him at night, and the gullies, and the places where the black-bright things are hiding.
Until it burns out.