sometimes things are going so well you just forget certain details. How did a long rant start? How did you get yourself into such a precarious situation? How did it get to this point? well on this particular day, as normal and happy as any other day, Jericho had to ask herself.

"How did this happen?"

"What went wrong?"

"Why me?"

These thoughts kept repeating in her mind while she had watched her home since birth burn to the ground. Celebrating her tenth birthday with her loving mother and father, she can be excused if she doesn't remember the exact details. All she remembers is having a fun time all day with her parents and being told to wait outside while her parents prepared their "Huge gift" they had prepared for her, only to step outside and be blasted out the front door. Recovering with severe burns on her back, she turns around and watches the house burn with those three questions infecting her mind like a virus.

You might wonder why she isn't running to the neighbors house for help or why she isn't using the well to extinguish the flame, however little her chances of even dampening such a raging inferno. Well first of all, she lives in the woods, so no nearby neighbors to call for help, and secondly, she remembers what such a flame was. While not the most rare thing in the world, sometimes particularly powerful beings like spirits or evolved monsters need to be killed body and soul. Spirits are pretty straight forward, their bodies are their souls, so destroy them once and thats it, though they can only be destroyed with magic, so not everyone can kill them. Evolved monsters, on the other hand, need to be killed by blade or sorcery, not once but twice. Evolved monsters "evolve" because their spirits have become empowered, and their bodies simply catch up after enough time or consumption of other animals possessing mana.

She knows this from her mother and father, both being well learned and seasoned warriors. One of their lessons talked about killing evolved monsters. When an evolved monster dies, its spirit, though incredibly weakened, stay with their corpse after death, and the only way to rid the corpse of the monsters spirit is with magic. most prefer to burn the spirits, and when they do, they burn an intense color of whatever type of magic they most used. For example, an evolved water nymph burned blue. if they used different types of magic it burned whatever color those elements would make if the user combined them, like wind and fire would make lightning colored flames, but thats another can of worms because the color of lightning also reflects the user's mood.

These fires also burn out rather quickly, most newly evolved monster's flames burning out within minutes. The fire currently burning all she knows in the world, though, has been burning for an hour and has a color she has not been told about before. In front of her is an intense black and red flame, black closer to the center of the flame fading to blood red as it fades. Jericho, unable to process her parents' death, simply lies there where she landed and cries. A wail so distrought and heart broken surely even a hungry wolf would avoid her out of sadness for the girls' loss.

Inside the fire is something strange though. The burning spirit, recovered from the mana of two sufficient warriors, awakens to the pain of its very being on fire. Quickly, it realized that if nothing was done, it would burn away, so it looked around and spotted a child infected with its mana from the initial blast, ripe for protecting its currently fragile state. So it does what any reasonable demon does and quickly gies to reside in the child's body. The childs own mana, being a very rare combination of both her mother's wind mana and her father's fire mana, quickly rejects the foreign spirit with a shock, but due to the childs untrained body and veins which she would use to channel and use the mana around her, she is quickly overwhelmed by the apparently strong demon's spirit. While passing out from the trauma and an inexplicable bought of drowsiness, she watches her home go from that ominous black and red flame to the normal orange and red flame, signifying that it is now a normal fire.