Igneous

“Hold still.” Kya crushed the gelatinous aloe in her palm and applied it gently to the reddened, warm back of the child in front of her. The boy, about six, sniffled quietly from the pain. “All done,” she said once she’d finished. “See? That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

The boy shyly shook his head. Kya ruffled his hair, making him giggle, and sent him back into the arms of his thankful grandmother. As they walked back into the surrounding village, Kya watched heat radiate off the dirt under their sandals in visible waves.

She rubbed sweat from her brow. From behind her, her partner Milo wordlessly handed her a wet cloth. “It’s worse this year, isn’t it?” he murmured.

Kya nodded as she wiped the sticky aloe from her hands. She had been thinking it, too, but couldn’t bring herself to voice it out loud.

Summer hadn’t even truly begun yet. The highest temperatures were still a month away, and yet the heat was already afflicting everyone in the village like a plague. As the days grew longer and hotter, there were more and more sun-sick people under her medical canopy, packed back-to back with people shiny with sweat and desperately fanning themselves. With every fainted farmer and sunburnt child she tended to, it became harder and harder for Kya to dismiss the notion that she was not able to do enough.

“You’ve heard the elders talking, haven’t you? I’m becoming worried.” Milo took the cloth back from her and rinsed it out in their bucket of water.

It was no secret that the circumstances were creating a stir in the village, and the implications of that were grim. But Kya only wanted to focus on what mattered most: the people in front of her. She began skinning another aloe leaf. “Let’s not talk about this now.”

“But I think we need to prepare ourselves. With the solstice tomorrow--”

A shrill outcry cut him off.

“Help! Help!” A woman came running toward the canopy, sweat pouring from her face. “My husband’s collapsed!”

In an instant, Milo and Kya were on their feet. “Go help carry him, I’ll get the water,” Kya delegated, scooping up the bucket.

As she hurried through their little desert village toward the creek, she caught the eyes of two elders watching her from the stoop of their home. She ignored them and tried to push down the discomfort in her chest.

Like everyone else, Kya had been told stories in childhood of their ancestors and the ways that they withstood the extreme temperatures. Those ways were long left in the past-- they had been since before she was born-- but as the death toll grew with each summer heat wave, so did the talk about reviving the retired customs. Kya had the dreaded feeling that this would be the year it finally happened.

She reached the bank and knelt to fill up her bucket. Across the stream, at the base of the mountain from which the water flowed, was a carved obsidian obelisk. Kya looked up at it as she stood, internalizing the words staring back at her. In honor of those who lie within the mountain.

----

Kya would do anything to help the people of her village, and they all knew it. Because of that, she wasn’t surprised when the elders came to find her that night. A group of farmers followed behind them as though to back them up with an imposing presence. She stopped cleaning up around the canopy to acknowledge them, a pit of dread already forming within her.

“Kya,” said an old woman, the grandmother of the same boy she had treated that afternoon. “It has to be you.” It was stated like it required no explanation, like Kya already knew exactly what she meant. And in truth, she did-- deep down, Kya had been preparing for this day for a long time.

“We are grateful for the service you’ve done for the village,” said a retired farmer, his face worn and damaged by years of exposure to the relentless sun, “but it is no longer enough.”

Kya spoke through the lump in her throat. “I understand.”

She fought the urge to protest, knowing even in her desperate state that if it wasn’t her, it would be someone else.

The old woman reached for her hand. “Will you do this for us?”

Kya did want to live-- desperately so-- but she couldn't allow herself to pass on the fate to another. “I’ll go,” she said quietly. “Not because you demand it of me, but by my own choice.”

The woman released her hand, satisfied by this answer. “Be ready by dawn.”

With that, the elders and their guards turned and left, leaving Kya to digest the news alone.

Moments later, Milo returned with fresh-picked aloe in hand. He spotted the retreating group and his expression changed to concern. “What did they say?” he asked with urgency in his voice.

“They came to thank us for our help,” Kya told him.

His worry dissolved into visible relief. “Oh, great.”

Together, they finished dismantling the canopy, then parted ways. The heaviness of her lie stayed with Kya through the night, but she knew that if Milo knew the truth, he would try to stop her.

----

On the dawn of the longest day of the year, Kya was collected from her home by a group of the townsfolk and escorted to the base of the mountain.

These were people Kya had known and loved all her life. People she had grown up with, people who had taught her, helped raised her, and people she had tended to when the heat wore them down. These people walked her over the stream, past the obsidian obelisk, and up the slope.

None of them spoke during the climb. The silence was eerie. As the smell of sulfur overwhelmed her senses, Kya wondered if the stories about her ancestors were true; if her death truly would protect them from the wrath of the sun.

When they reached the crater’s edge, one of the farmers gripped her arm tight in a calloused hand. She looked back at him to find tears in his eyes. He looked away.

As the old woman placed a woven garland around her neck, Kya stared down into the molten earth beneath her and accepted her fate.

----

Milo sat in the shade alone, studying an unused aloe leaf. The medic’s canopy was empty, devoid of its usual patients.

He watched as children ran and laughed and wrestled with each other in the village streets, unburned and unstained by sweat. Their mothers no longer hounded them into the shade. Farmers joyfully conversed as they worked, happier and more productive than ever before. A new sense of life had been restored to the village with their newfound resistance to the heat.

Milo had been devastated when he found out. After that, he had been furious. Now he thought with regret that Kya’s sacrifice had worked-- she had helped the town in the way she’d always wanted to, only she wasn’t here to see it. That thought simmered in his chest like a hot ember, burning him alive the way the sun no longer would.

It wasn’t fair.

He looked up at the plume of smoke rising up from the volcano’s peak. Perhaps one day, the souls sacrificed for the town’s greater good would lash out and take their revenge, leveling the valley with boiling hot tar and molten rock.

----

Inside the volcano's sulfuric crater, the cooled lava on the surface broke apart and began to churn. It bubbled and boiled bright orange. Miles underneath the surface, something had started to stir.

On the day of the sacrifice, as the ritual was invoked and the heat-resistant power woke up from deep within the villagers' genes, the same process happened to Kya as the magma engulfed her body. When she hit the surface, she lost consciousness. As she sank deeper, the long-dormant system inside her body kicked into motion, protecting her from a volcanic death but not from its transformative process. The convection of the magma turned her body into something greater than human-- something igneous. And in that state, the flow of the molten rock brought her into a chamber deep within the volcanic system.

Inside this chamber, her body broke the surface of the roiling lava and her eyes opened. She took a breath, surrounded by golden-orange light and a fiery heat that didn't seem to hurt. Then hand extended out to grasp hers. A voice followed it, speaking in her native language: “Welcome home.”