Mid-Week Flash Challenge - Week 73

This week's image was created by Laura Leiva over on Deviant Art. It's a hobby of hers, and if you ask me she's pretty good at it! Love this image.

The General Guidelines can be found here.

How to create a clickable link in Blogger comments can be found on lasts week's post here.

There is also a Facebook group for Mid-Week Flash, if you fancy getting the prompt there.

Scorched 

Everything around her was going up in flames, literally and metaphorically. It burned her eyes while it burned her soul. Everything she had lived and worked for turned to ash in an instant. 

She feared that after this she would turn to stone, her heart turning cold, unable to sustain any meaningful life from here on out. 

It was her own fault, she’d let them in, she’d let them stay. She’d fallen in love with their quirky ways. 

She’d had opportunities to take control and put them in their place, but she hadn’t done it, choosing to be gentle and hopeful instead. She had provided clear boundaries and limits, held up the red flags so they knew exactly how far they could push it, but they hadn’t heeded any of it. And so now this had happened. 

Her own mother had given out plenty of warnings as well, but they hadn’t heeded her either, and now she was consumed in the blaze too. 

The fire had been unrelenting, as was its nature. It had taken everything, gutted all of it, leaving no place safe. Her tears scorched her face as all she could do was watch. 

It hadn’t been what she wanted, but in the end it was what had become necessary. She chided herself for not having done more early on to stop this outcome, but in the end she wasn’t the only one responsible and accountable here – it took two to tango.

She wondered if she would ever be able to recover, the spark of hope ever residing within. She pondered the possibility. It was all down to the right circumstance, and what happened in the time between. She would need a long time, she knew that. 

In the meantime she waited for the inferno to subside and the dust to settle and some order from the chaos to assert itself. It would take millennia.