Fire of the Atom

Date: 9.10.2224 (Midnight)
Location: Forest of Echoes, Texas

I wandered too close to the wrong kind of worship today.

The signal led me here... not a broadcast tower, just a rhythm in the static. Where the humidity swells like lungs under pressure and the bugs move like the pulse of the world itself. I can’t mark it precisely, but I can feel it. That’s enough. That’s where the fire is calling.

The air became thick like furnace breath. Each inhale stung, like sucking molten glass into your lungs. Radiation clung, heavy, tasting of iron and ash. My heartbeat thudded in my teeth.

Instinct screamed Rad-X. But I was slow. Too slow. My pack shook in my hands, and the injector burned as it slid into my vein. Enough. Enough to keep me upright. Enough to bear witness.

The Children of Atom... worshippers of flame, believers in decay as divinity. But what I saw wasn’t childish devotion. It was weaponized faith.

They formed around a crater, robes blackened and burnt at the edges, arms open, faces lifted to the sky as if God itself could be cupped in a palm. And in the center....him. The prophet, not a machine. Just a man, skeletal and towering, wrapped in light that did not come from the moon or stars. His voice cut through the forest, measured, a cadence like scripture mixed with thunder.

He raised his arms, and the fire answered.

Not some trick, flare or spark. A pillar of flame ripped skyward, controlled, called, contained by devotion.

But it wasn’t the flame that rattled me.

It was the faith. Eyes glowing, not from radiation, but from obsession. Faces melting from exposure, yet smiling. Kneeling, waiting, begging for the burn. Worshipping their own poison. And him...he fed it to them like communion. Like truth.

I’ve seen this before, just different packaging: not fire, but fear. Not radiation, but rhetoric. Men using belief as a weapon. Twisting suffering into purpose. Lighting the world on fire, then kneeling in it and calling it holy.

I didn’t stay. Didn’t test the fire. Didn’t pray with them.

The prophet’s voice followed me across the swamp, bouncing off the twisted trees, echoing long after I put distance between us. The flame scorched the sky. But the thing that lingered—the thing that won’t let me sleep...was the faith itself.

The Forest of Echoes isn’t named for the trees. It’s named for the way belief repeats, rebounds, reshapes the world.

I made it out. Barely.

And I carry this now: not the fire, not the brimstone, but the understanding of what devotion can do when the world has no rules.

— Big Chief Mike Marcel