Kaupunki 07 - An Academic Scroll on the Safe Usage of Candles

Property of Kawakami’s Rare Books

Title: The Safe Usage of Candles Featured in the Journal on Trans-Dimensional Religious Studies

Author: Professor Rigmor Mäkelä, phd, department of physics and trans-dimensional religious studies

Abstract

For centuries burning a candle has been a powerful tool. For religious ceremonies, to pass time, provide light, or simply make a space smell nice.

Today candles serve a different purpose. That of a transcendental nature. In summary, the candles fold space time around the user who must hold it in their hands during a meditative state. In doing so the user will feel the fabric and definition of reality melt away. If a user can maintain their composure they can access and commune with inter-dimensional beings. In the past these may have been called ghosts, angels, or on occasion and in stupendously frightening instances, demons.

This transcendence has been the subject of little study outside religious and counter cultural movements due in part to the extreme cost and the highly regulated nature of the ingredients.

Wax can only be harvested from the bloody crescent Hygrocybe mushroom found only in remote regions growing on the grand necrotic cedars of a forest floor that is kept very secret by those in the know. These mushrooms are a dark crimson and produce a thick carmine coloured wax when crushed. Once harvested the wax is gently heated and formed into a candle stick of roughly a hands length with a simple cotton wick.

While it remains unclear exactly how the candles work, it appears to be a combination of the chemical reactions, physical sensations, and mental concentration that cause the transcendence.

The wax is potent and can rarely be found in its pure form. Often it has been cut with other substances of a neutral or psychotropic nature. This is advised, as exposure to a pure wax candle can cause severe long-term neurological damage.

It is said that the highest level monks of Crescent Order have trained themselves to face exposures of several days. In doing so they have collected accounts of their journeys on scrolls in the massive cement bunkers of their temple. These texts are, however, sacred and not public. Though, small excerpts have leaked over the millennia. In past academic pamphlets I have shared some of these stories.

I have spent the past decade of my life studying the usage and impacts of candles, but have found the most impactful research to be first hand. Though it fits into a moral and legal grey area, through the university I have been able to practice the meditation and training required. I have prepared an account of my most recent journey.

✦✦✦

It was a cold evening. I had packed an assortment of the required items and made my way to the corporate philosophy department. This wing of the university was a large open hall made of monolithic brutal cement. Usually bustling with students it was now abandoned for the annual Syndicate Appreciation holiday. It was a perfect space, I thought, for my experiment. I moved to the middle of the hall, where a large cement pillar stood. It was where larger lectures would take place as students gathered around to listen.

My classes were not taught in rooms like this, but instead, much smaller spaces in the bowels of the school.

I sat in the middle of the pillar laying out the items from my bag in front of me.

One Blood Red candle.

A quartz lighter.

A glass bottle of carbonated water flavoured with bitter roots and barks.

One dried fig.

And a shiny silver ring.

I closed my eyes for a moment. Trying to focus only on the sounds of the hall and the feel of the cold ground.

I opened my eyes again to see the fading orange light paint a streak across the wall in front of me from the open window behind. The sun cycle slowly dimmed until it was dark in the grand hall. There were no electric lights in this space.

Calmly, I took the lighter and candle in each hand. Clicking the button the wick ignited. I placed the lighter back on the ground and took the candle in both hands. Sitting cross legged I held it up and stared into the flickering flame. At first it crackled like wind through the leaves of a forest, but soon it began to slow until it gently swayed and flowed like water in an ancient river. The wax had begun to liquify and drip down the sides.

While having molten candle wax on the skin may seem painful, it was a necessary part of the process. It was also important to clear one’s mind, and to keep one’s eyes open at all times. Save for the odd blink.

It’s here where time begins to fade. Not that it slows, but simply that it doesn’t exist. The fractions of moments it requires to think a thought seem to go on forever. It’s only the hypnotic dancing flame.

Soon there is a sound. That of bedlam and cacophony. A once quiet room becomes loud.

Then the air begins to grow warm and soon the smell of freshly cut grapefruit.

It is now that the candle’s flame began to sharpen. So sharp in fact that every detail becomes a line. Not individually though, but like the sketchy contiguous line of a pen so tightly wrapped that there are only tiny spaces between. As it travels it changes colour from “normal” to brightly fluorescent colours. There may even be colours that do not exist, but describing them with math or language is still beyond me.

This visual experience begins to unfold in the darkness surrounding the candle until the inky blackness too is a swirling pattern of colour and light. This is a sensation of movement and of time and space feeding back on themselves.

It is now, where the untrained and unaccustomed user of candles may panic. This panic begins a chain reaction that has left some, trapped in a state of time feeding in on itself. Unable to escape the auditory and visual hallucinations. Studies of people in this state show changed brain chemistry and severe neurological damage.

So, it is important at this moment to think of only one thing.

The candle in front of me is real. To ignore the cold ground and the wax dripping onto my hands. To forget the tension in my shoulders and even my own presence.

And deeper in I travel. This is the purest candle I have used.

The feedback and movement are so rapid now that it feels as if I’m hurtling through space approaching light speed.

Across from me. I feel a hulking presence. A face obscured by the candle. But a figure all the same. I cannot speak to ask what it is, but the sound of thunder blasts through me. A sound I had only heard on ancient recordings in the university archives. This sound was not a language I have heard before, if it could be called that. It continued on and I sat trying to focus on the features of this beast. I can only describe them as large and muscled bearing wide curled horns.

It then did something unexpected and picked up the dried fig. Holding it over the candle a moment before presumably plopping it in its mouth.

But then, it was gone.

Back to the shimmering void. Hurtling along until suddenly a slender green hand of a Vertecuine woman reached above the flame. It wore the shiny silver band that I had given my wife long ago.

Could this be? Hopea?

“My dear is that you?” a voice I hadn’t heard in a decade cooed.

Behind the flame was her perfect frame. Pinkish hair. If only I could peer around it and see her large black eyes and soft lips. If only I could kiss her one last time. How? In all the universe. How? I desperately wanted to call out to her. To tell her I missed her. That I loved her, but I couldn’t speak.

“It’s you, isn’t it my love?” The voice called out. “I’ve missed you, don’t you have anything to say?”

I wanted to. More than anything I have ever wanted to call out. To say those words back to her. I tried but there was no sensation of even having a body. It had been a decade since her passing. I had read that communication with the dead may be possible. Did this mean that her spirit was somehow out there in the void?

“It’s been cold. I’m lonely, my love.” It called out softy. “Rigmor. Is that you? Just give me a sign.”

I mouthed “I love you,” and to my shock. The words squeezed out.

Then, there was a distinct sound of a crack and fizz from the carbonated water. And the voice called back. This time in monotone. “Rigmor, is that you?”

She would never. Not the bitter soda. On our first date she tried it and fallen ill. So ill that I had to pay the bill and take her to a Pharmacopeia for medication. It was only after the medication had kicked in and she was feeling better that we shared our first kiss under the glowing light of our local bodega.

This time the bottle appeared above the flame. The hand holding it was… horribly disfigured. Her perfect green skin was now black rotten flesh curled back to reveal bone. Exposed sinew and knuckles clenching the half drunk bottle. The silver ring was still on her finger.

I could still see her silhouette. A skeletal face and patchy pink hair waved in some lost breeze.

“Now you’ve done it. You’ve fucked it all up.” Came a low chilling voice that wasn’t hers at all.

No. This wasn’t her. She would never do this.

“No” I shouted.

There was silence and only the pale skeleton on the other side of the candle flame.

Then from all around. A laugh. Maybe many laughs, In all different tones. Forming a chorus of discordant glee.

“Ok, ok,” it called in the voice of a man. “I’m just messing with you. It was pretty good though, right?”

I sat in silence.

“Oh that’s right, that’s right. You’re not supposed to acknowledge the self when you do this. Oopsie daisy. I hope that doesn’t mess with that squishy human brain of yours. Always so fragile!”

Not my Hopea. No, an inter-dimensional entity, many cultures would call a demon.

“That’s good. You just shut your mouth.” The hand reached around and caressed her face. It felt like fire, but I held in a scream.

“Ok, ok, you’re probably wondering why I’m here. I assure you I wasn’t planning it. I just saw you hurtling through the dimensions and I wanted to come say hi. I’m not going to hurt you though, I’m just going to let you know, that really was your dead wife and if you want to be with her all you have to do is say ok… or really anything.” The burning hand patted my cheek. Then transformed back into the soft delicate skin of my wife.

I didn’t speak. Making deals with devils was, well, making deals with devils.

“Please, don’t you want to be with me?” Her voice pleaded.

I opened my mouth and stopped. The hand on my cheek still burned. And the candle was growing near the end of its wick. So I settled in and stared at the flame as it burned down. The voice continued to plead. But I knew it wasn’t my wife’s.

✦✦✦

The flame began to flicker and die. And the voice did too. Soon it was only a feint light and the sound and vibrations began to slow. I thought only of the dying candle and blocked out the sound. As it died there was the sound of a ring hitting cement.

“I love you, I whispered.” But I was now alone in the brutalist hall bathed in the soft glow of the moon simulation. My arms were asleep and I let them drop to my side. Dried wax drippings down my hand.

The bottle and fig were gone. The only object that remained was the ring sitting across from me in a different spot than I had left it. Though it appeared to be a colour I couldn’t describe with a soft pulsing aura.

To others the ring appeared a black colour and studies done in the university lab found it to be a site of highly anomalous functions. For safety, it was handled only by machines and stored inside a lead-lined vault.

My research on the ring was the subject of numerous academic prizes and grants. Research on it now forms key insights into core understandings of future dimensional technologies and communication.

In that research I did not tell this story. I didn’t speak of the fact that I had on occasion heard my love calling from the ring. Begging me to put it on.

To my classes who grew in attendance with my fame I have not spoken of the phantom burning I still feel on my cheek, night and day.

No. I would have been considered mad for this and as a result I’ve kept it to my dying days. Though, now that I’m an old woman, I feel it prudent to send out a warning to the city. The truth is that candles require a total lack of ego to operate. A lack of ego that no person truly has.

To everyone who’s ever lived or loved, there are too many strings for the demons to pull and we are not strong enough to control them.

This is also why I’ve decided that instead of fading off. I will put on that ring and enter the void in search of my love.

Rigmor Mäkelä, phd.

Dedicated to Hopea. I love you. I always will.