A forest of coniferous trees transformed into gigantic Christmas sparklers, red and orange and silver and blue sparks shooting hundreds of feet into the sky. Animals flee before it, and the earth behind and beneath is bare and scorched, brown where it isn’t black. A small pond hisses and bubbles away to nothing, and the air shimmers and turns to poison in the heat.

The dragon of flame coils up the side of the mountain to the peak and plumbs the depths of the valley and screams its triumph and its joy. The world it makes is new.

© Stephanie Saulter 2010

‘Fire’ also came out of Chris Fallon’s creative writing class in early 2010. The brief, as I recall, was to write for no more than four minutes on one of the four classical elements: earth, air, fire or water. Chris was pretty happy with this little sketch and so was I, especially since the fire-dragon made its way into another story later on in the class. It’s still up on the Idea Store website: http://www.ideastore.co.uk/public/documents/PDF/ISCW%20Creative%20Writing/Fire.pdf