Fire and Water
The way it works is either you burn or you drown.
Fire is destructive and flashy and loud. You see what it destroys, it fills the air with black smoke. You can sense that it’s evil or that there is an evilness to the power it has. What it is doing is natural, and many would deny that to be evil is natural, but that’s just not the case. You can be bad or you can be good, we just gave words attached to the rules of a system of governance. It’s bright and obnoxious and it leaves behind not much of anything. Just ash. You sift through the remains and are left with memories.
When someone burns they scream, when someone burns they break apart, they fall to pieces, they become wild and manic and lose control. Everybody can see it and not many people can do a thing about it. You try to put water on it, smother it out, but raging flames always leave scars and those scars don’t heal so well and what you put out is what you can see and the fire sometimes just sneaks under the skin, inwards and upwards into the mind and the spirit and it burns there. Still loud and glaring. Still filling the air and the world with smoke and ash.
Water is silent and oppressive. It seems serene. It simply moves the thing and breaks apart what is flimsy and what is strong or well built it keeps together but moves it all the same. It’s subtle. It simply changes the world around you, it destroys calmly. Whipped to a frenzy with wind and storms, then yes, it shatters apart everything, brought up in a heaving turmoil. Water can break things apart, it wears them down over time in ways not so visible, it is not fast, it works slow.
When someone drowns they’re quiet. They simply sink beneath the waves and they may struggle but it’s all mute and flailing and indiscriminate. They’re body remains in tact, the water becomes a part of them, forces out the air in their lungs and replaces something intangible with something else almost intangible. It alters only slightly in rictus faces and blue skin. You can pull a person out of the waters, you can pull them away and they will have no scars or marks upon them and may even forget the damage if they’re saved….but they’ll remember the feeling. It won’t break them the way fire will, it will haunt them…it will move them. It will change them.
You can either burn or you can drown.