Alicia Vickers Flame Guide

Alicia looked at her hands. "I've never lit anything on purpose. It just... happens."

Corin wanted spectacle. Alicia wanted purpose. He saw her fire as a trick to refine; she saw it as a language to understand. The first crack came in Nevada, when she accidentally melted a slot machine after a drunk gambler grabbed her arm. Corin yelled at her for drawing attention. She yelled back, and the tent they were sleeping in caught—not from anger, but from the sheer pressure of suppressed heat. alicia vickers flame

She sat in the desert for two hours, letting the sand around her slowly turn to glass. Then she stood up, brushed herself off, and for the first time in her life, lit a fire on purpose—not to destroy, not to perform, but to cook a simple can of beans. Alicia looked at her hands

She didn't blame him. She kissed his cheek (warm, always warm now) and left Stillwater on the back of Corin's rust-red motorcycle. happens

"Everyone has a little fire in them. The trick is learning to love the spark without becoming the ash."

"How do you do that?" they'd ask.

She took the name three months later, after Elias quietly admitted that Alicia had been adopted at birth from a woman who died in a mysterious house fire. "We thought if we never told you, the fire would stay asleep," her father said, crying. "We were wrong."