Open Fire

The cavemen are quarreling. Should the flame belong to everyone?

The whole camp had gone mad, Thag thought. The village elders, who looked like older versions of her husband Iyr, shaggy with prominent superciliary arches, had been arguing over whether everyone should have access to the fire-making technology, flint struck against pyrite, or only appointed elders, who argued in their own favor.

They had heard that a tribe a ways over, in the settlement of Rjken, might have also harnessed it, and insisted that the fire could help them beat Rjken in war, though currently they were at peace. The hunters were also livid; it was only yesterday they lost a large stampeding aurochs; there weren’t enough men to battle it, having been hypnotized by the fire’s glow. It would have been food for a week.

One of the elders, Aga, who built the fire ring, thought they should mete out the fire only among select caveholds, and keep it contained very carefully. In the evenings, the elders gathered around the circle he built with rocks and silt, chattering about what to do. Aga thought the fire meant the end of their world and kept telling the other cavemen as much; fire could be all they had hoped and dreamed of; fire was the cessation of their toil and torment, but it could also destroy their entire civilization. Aga was kind of scary.

Another one of the firekeepers, Del, who was hoarding stone flakes, was more moderate when he spoke about what he thought the fire could do: “Who could predict the future?!” Del was optimistic, however, and wanted everyone to have fire; he thought it best that it was evenly distributed so it could cause the least harm. The only way to stop a bad man with fire was a good man with fire.

But since Del had the monopoly on stone flakes, some of the other elders did not trust what he said as much. And he was adamant that he didn’t want the fire to go to Aga, his closest competitor. Or Muj, his other closest competitor.

Naka had found the fire first, actually. He accidentally struck the first spark while dragging wood logs across stone one hot afternoon. When he replicated it by rubbing various different materials together, finally landing on flint and pyrite, he raced to tell Del, who thought they should turn the firekeeping into a coalition, but whatever they did, they shouldn’t tell Muj.

Muj would rather have no fire than have Del be a torchbearer, but the feeling was mutual, if Del was being honest. They had all worked together at first. But Aga wanted them to slow down the use of fire (”What if it burns down our camp?”) and Del wanted people to give stone flakes in exchange for its use. And he was already parceling it out, for the few who had gotten word of the invention, wanting it to keep them warm at night.

Naka left the consortium to think up further ways to prevent the fire from spreading; so far, he had amassed several piles of sand.

Then there was Lop. Lop held the camp’s wood stores and also wanted the fire to be open to everyone. He didn’t care whether the Rjken tribe got hold of it; even better, more customers for him.

Iyr, who was too young to be an elder, kept his portion of the fire, which he got from Del, deep inside his cave. He spent more time with it than his wife Thag and even their new baby, Byr, who showed up around the same time as the fire. The fire had kept Byr warm in the frigid winter, and she seemed to be in awe of it when it was near, though she did not pay it more attention than Thag’s breast, which was her first priority.

Iyr could not stop gazing at the hearth; he spent all night watching the embers crackle, and couldn’t remember when he had last had a full night’s sleep. Since the fire had been harnessed by his village, he could not think of anything but its lambent flames and all the uses he could put them to; he could heat the cold sinews his family were apportioned post-hunt, he could clear out brush, turn it to ash, he could have a warm bath in the river, he could see at night, he had protection from the large cats that occaisonally prowled; the possibilities were endless.

🔥

But the change was not all good. Iyr hadn’t had sex with his mate Thag for 12 nights, and he hadn’t hunted in the same amount of time; the steppe bison must have had a field day, as he wasn’t the only hunter who had gone moth, drawn in by the infernal siren’s song. The walls of his cave were barren, with no skins and only a few sinews to heat, and Thag was no longer vocalizing pleasantries in Iyr’s general direction. She was mad at him.

The fire’s existence was as inexplicable as the baby for Iyr. His understanding of how they worked was about the same. A part of him felt that this fire could be like him, alive. Or even better than him, bigger, more powerful. He knew he was weak in the face of fire; after all, he wasn’t made of light; he couldn’t char a forest or create a clearing in no time at all.

Up until the fire, Iyr’s primary role in the settlement had been hunter, but he was no longer going on as many big game hunting trips, for bison, aurochs, and even mammoths; it seemed like many hunters had been shirking their duties to play with fire, and their mates had to pick up the slack with their gathering and foraging of wild roots and berries. But Iyr had been ad hoc trapping, nabbing small rabbits and deer in his backyard and drying them over the fire—this new kind of meat stayed edible for weeks, and Thag had warmed to him again when he showed her what he had discovered. Vibe hunting.

“Go show the others,” she said. To Iyr, the elder circle was intimidating, but dried venison that could last, replacing the need for near-constant hunts, could speak for itself. He set off for the center of the encampment full of purpose.

“This is going to put so many hunters out of work,” Aga responded when he saw the preserved game. “Or maybe it will create more jobs? More demand for dried meat could mean more hunters.”

This wasn’t the camp’s first attempt at cooking; in fact, many of the hunters who had stopped going on hunts because of the kindlemania had already started rebranding themselves as “cooks.” They waited eagerly as the carcasses were brought in from the forest to roast them in the cinders. But the fact that someone had done this individually, and charred the meat to that perfect balance of chewy yet not charcoal on their own, was huge.

“Hail fire,” one of the elders spontaneously proclaimed. “Hail fire,” a small group of elders responded, notably Aga. Del was ashen-faced. Iyr noticed that some of the elders had brought ceremonial bird claws and pigment to the fire circle, items he usually only saw at funerals or initiation ceremonies, like the one he had with Thag after their betrothal.

“Hail fire,” Iyr responded, almost as a reflex.

“Stop!” Del cried out to Iyr, “This is not some sort of deity like the sun or the stars; this is a reaction, an effect from a cause, and it is Neanderthal-made, not above us. It would be blasphemy to worship it!”

Aga had gotten out of his seat in the dust and waved his arms violently, “Stand down, Del. Iyr was just sharing his enthusiasm for fire.”

“Why can’t fire be close to a God?” Aga went on, “Doesn’t it illuminate in the same way the sun does? Heat and cool in the bent of the seasons? We are stealing ideas from the sun! This could be the solution to all of our problems.”

“You’re a fool. It’s entirely of the earth, and besides, it uses too much water.”

WhackkKK!

Aga had slapped Del from behind, so hard he almost fell into the fire. Del stumbled a bit but regained his balance.

“You see why we need to keep this controlled?” Aga hissed.

Del found a piece of wood next to him that had fallen out of the fire’s reach. He gingerly dipped it in the flames and swung it at Aga’s head like a club. Aga’s hair ignited, and he screamed and rolled around in the dirt to put it out. Through his shrieks, he finally got it to extinguish. The rest of the elders looked at Aga’s hair, smoldering. It was half gone, and his scalp was burned.

Without a word, two of the elders grabbed Aga by the shoulders and led him off, slinking, injured, towards his cave. Del lay slumped in the sand, also defeated. Iyr sat down and watched the fire like nothing had happened, while Thag, back home, nursed Byr, humming a primitive lullaby. And somewhere on the village outskirts, maybe even in Rjken, a tiny ember from a fire enclosure broke containment.

“‘There are moments when the force of nature and the intensity of weather conditions exceed all human planning and every operational capability,’ said Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on Monday, August 2026. Fires in the western region of Athens had burned more than 27,000 acres.”