The One Formed of the Smokeless Fire

I did not grow up listening to tales from the Quran, for I did not grow up Jewish. My mother died before I had even uttered a first word, she left behind questions that I didn't have answers to, she left behind my twin brother Otto, and I, Emery. Paintings of strange men covered in dark runes that danced along their skin like words onto a page, filled my dreams ever since I dug out a chest from underneath my parents bed the night of my and Otto's 13th birthday. It was all any of us had left of her, and I was determined to know what my father had kept locked away all of those miserable years that we had lived without knowing anything about our mother.