By the time he went to reclaim himself, it was too late.

As a young man, he’d realized there was a power to being alone. Relationships were tethers that held you back, sapped you of strength, of will. People were poison. And not all poisons were bad; sometimes the toxic taste, the caustic kiss, was a good thing.

But too much killed you all the same. No matter how alive it made him feel in the moment, he knew that in the end, it would cost him.

So, he learned to burn.

He had a hunger in him, he’d realized. A hunger for power, for clawing his way to the top; it didn’t matter the mountain, he just wanted to be at its peak. And every time he tried to work magic, tried to sate that hunger by taking a step forward, he found a tether, a person, holding him back.

Parents and family. Friends and teachers. Work and community. All the hundreds upon hundreds of microscopic rules of social interactions at parties and on subways, personalized email signatures, voicemails that went on just the right amount of time. These and more sat upon his heart like a weight, held him like a hairshirt, torturing him with every attempt at breaking free.

There was true and deep magic in the world. But he could not grasp it when every time he reached for it, he was held back.

It hurt him to consider it, but he knew: Nothing in the universe could remain untouched by fire. Not even relationships.

He set fire to his family first, just to make sure he couldn’t back out.

He burned the tether to his mother as they ate dinner, saw as her understanding of who he was and why he sat at her table fade between bites of eggplant and red sauce. By the time his dinner was done, she had the vague, polite smile one gives to a stranger on the bus right before they get off at the next stop.

He saved her the trouble of asking him who he was and left.

Next, he burned the tether to his father, sequestered away in his study, reading. In a way, he’d got the idea from him, admiring his father’s tendency to surround himself with the inanimate, the painless. “People,” his father had said to him one day, his eyes red, nose crusted with snot, “will only let you down, son. No matter how you try to help them. All they’ll do is let you fall.”

With a snap of his fingers and a sad smile, he set the tether to his father on fire. The room burned and left hundreds of books unscathed. His father didn’t even look up, only bowed his head once, eyes leaking for but a moment before going back to the story in front of him.

He hoped it was because he had read something sad and not the feeling of fire surrounding him.

On and on, he scoured his life. With every friend left behind, with every teacher forgotten, with every social nicety cleansed from him, he felt lighter. More confident. Powerful. He moved through life as a ghost, unseen, causing people to shiver in the wake of his passing.

And one evening, staring into a dirty mirror behind a run-down bar, he looked into his own eyes and understood the final barrier to true power.

He could do many impossible things now. He could speak with crows and ask them to steal the last breaths of the sorrowful dead. He could walk the length of the world between storms, leaving Los Angeles behind and Kyoto ahead in the space of a step, an ozone gasp, a flash of lightning. He could even wind the hearts of those around him like a finicky and meticulous watch, set them ticking however he pleased.

But there were deeper magics he could not touch. Because there was one thread he had yet to burn.

Staring into his own eyes in the mirror, he saw it: the thread of himself.

Regret would come later; when hunger unsated reared its head, very little could stand in its way. But regret, oh, regret would arrive when it would, which would always be a moment too late.

It should have scared him; how easy it was to burn his own thread.

But fear, like regret, is always a step behind. With a cold fascination, clinical and distant, he watched his own regard for himself fade from the depths of his own eyes.

The man in the mirror had to be him. Right? That reflection moved when he did, quirked his mouth when he quirked his mouth. That was him, it had to be. So why didn’t he recognize himself?

A question that would haunt him later when he realized what he’d done.

But you don’t recognize much when you finally realize that after a lifetime of hunger, you’re sated. Satisfied.

And there is much you can do when you don’t have a name.

Without a name to give it form, the body folds in on itself, flesh and blood and bone become malleable suggestion, not concrete facts. He became insects and beasts, flame and air, gleefully unbound to the meat of his body, swapping forms with the ease of a trickster god.

Without a name to anchor it, the mind can travel into spaces reserved for the dead and deathless, free from constraint. He sent his consciousness into landscapes of thought and intellect, where angels inscribed shadow-lit tomes under their many, inscrutable eyes. He sent his consciousness into planes of congealed emotion, where clumps of infant sentience grew in reef clusters of crystalline psyches.

Without a name to contain it, the heart can open itself to truths of the universe so bright, they make the stars seem dim by comparison. He read truth in every ring of every unfelled tree and within the pumping heart chambers of every person he passed and found himself weeping at the strength of a snail’s shell and the strength of the snail within that shell, whose determination he could finally understand like an eel understands the sea and a cardinal understands the sky.

Which is when he finally understood the deepest truth of them all.

Here, in the braided voices of fear and regret both, he learned that without a name, without a tether to himself, and without a tether to any living being around him, all that knowledge and all that truth and all that magic meant so little, so less than nothing, it could only be described as the deepest and most certain kind of death he had encountered in the known universe.

Which brings us here. Now.

To a man staring into a glass he knows he has sat staring into before. Knowing it was here he threw the last esoteric fuel on a bonfire of his own making. Where he burned his connection to himself. Where he threw his name away into a fire he had been warming himself by for so long, that he’d forgotten what it was to feel warm.

He was always cold now. He had been cold for longer than he understood. And a colder force gripped his limp heart as he realized that once you burn something, it cannot be unburnt. Ash does not hold its form. And he had long ago scattered those ashes across his life, blighting those burned things to never grow again.

He screams into the glass. He has been screaming for some time. He has been screaming for years, and no one has heard him in even longer than that.

Sometimes, he sobs. Other times, he rages, shattering the glass, only to reform it in the blink of an eye, just so he can shatter it again.

The bonfire he built is dying now.

There is so little left to burn. But if there is, he’ll find it. He’s a smart guy, after all. He’ll think of something.

Just as soon as he figures out who that man in the mirror is.

And why he looks like he’s ready to die.