When I was a child, I heard voices
Some would sing and some would scream.
You soon find you have few choices,
I learned the voices die with me.

Zaid Sabah, age nineteen, has lived a life most would call traumatic and horrific. The youngest son of a somewhat wealthy Iraqi family with ties to the then-active Ba'athist government, Zaid was born late in 1994. His childhood seemed unremarkable until the age of six, when he accompanied his father and older brother Mahmoud on a tour of one of the newest oil fields being established near Kirkuk, south of the Turkish border.

Something had been dug up in the oil field, the remnants of what seemed to be some sort of abandoned temple. The markings were unfamiliar to the personnel on site, and though they had sent for an archaeologist from Baghdad the work had to go on. Zaid's father insisted they move any possible artifacts out of the site and continue working. One of the artifacts was a small clay vessel, akin to a pot or bottle with a cloth wrapping and a strange, overlapping series of slash marks painted in what appeared to be red clay across it.

Zaid was standing nearby when one of the workers dropped the jar. All he remembers of that point in his childhood was a feeling of blinding pain and absolutely uncontrollable hunger. Zaid blacked out entirely, and only came to three months later in a cold, barren room somewhere in Baghdad. He was covered in burn scars, and his memory was a blank.

He would come to learn over the next three long, painful years that his father, brother and every member of his father's staff on site had died. Burned to death, and then partially consumed. He had been found by emergency personnel that had come to staunch the massive oil fire that had erupted in the fields, evidently the only survivor...Though, they wouldn't call what they found a survivor in the truest sense. The doctors explained that he had healed miraculously, but when he had first been found the entire right side of his skull had seemed to have been scorched away, burned to something like charcoal, with his right arm withered beyond repair. He should have died from his burn scars, but he didn't. He thrived, in fact, as long as they left him alone.

Medical staff had tested him, tried to find out just what had happened, what he had done to become...Different. What they got for their trouble was incineration, and then in swift order consumption. He wasn't there; Zaid wasn't awake. The child was merely a vessel for something else, something darker, that fed on the burning flesh and bone of those who dared approach it.

Three years they kept him and experimented on him, testing his capabilities. Zaid learned he had no real control over his powers, they simply manifested whenever they so wished. And he also learned not to test his luck with either the scientists on staff, or with whatever had taken over his body. His eye burned from its socket, his scars never truly healed, and the hunger gnawed at him ever more as he grew.

____________

When I was a child I'd sit for hours,
Staring into open flame
Something in it had a power,
Could barely tear my eyes away.

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And then 2003 came. Nine year old Zaid found himself being shipped out of the laboratory he had been held in for years, into the streets of Baghdad where gunfire reigned and bombs fell. The entity in his body writhed and surged to the forefront, smelling fire and death, and it burned free of him in a glorious display of pyroclastic carnage. His guards, his handlers, the scientists. They all burned. And then civilians...And American troops.

It wasn't until he was struck with an armored fighting vehicle and pinned beneath the back tire that he was subdued. Two broken legs, a collapsed lung and a skull fracture. Those injuries didn't come from the entity, so they didn't heal as quickly. He was captured, and more than that he was shipped out of Iraq, unknowingly being one of the so-called weapons of mass destruction that the Coalition forces had come to find. Nobody ever expected a scared, wounded nine year old boy with no control over the darkness within to be on the list.

He was held by S.3.R.A. for a further seven months while research was performed and his injuries healed. Precautions were taken, and paperwork filed. They knew more of what he had become than any other agency on Earth. The symbol that had been burned into his back and that he left scorched on many surfaces in Baghdad proved to be the key. The jar had contained an ancient entity, a spirit of hunger and malevolence, of fire and smoke. A Djinn, an Ifrit to be precise, had possessed the boy as a vessel.

Though Zaid had hoped to see his Mother again, S.3.R.A. could not allow such contact. They barely managed to get approval, with some difficulty, not to terminate the boy. Instead they worked to educate him in what he had become, and to give him a chance to live a semi-normal life. He was released from S.3.R.A. observation in 2006, having learned English, and more importantly having made contact with the Ifrit itself.

The creature wasn't purely evil, but it was insatiable. An uncontrollable demon of hunger that craved mayhem and burning flesh. He heard it whispering to him, calling to him, trying to bend him to its will. He learned with time to control the urges, but it was always a struggle. The Ifrit was ancient and powerful, and despite his best efforts it still insisted on sacrifice from time to time. Something small; an animal to appease it.

Zaid tried several times to escape the Ifrit and his own tormented existence, everything from hanging to poison, drowning to a gun in the mouth. The Ifrit forced him to purge the poison and it burned the rope, it evaporated the water in his tub and melted the lining of the gun barrel. It wouldn't let him escape; it was too comfortable in his skin. In its home, scarred and marked by its presence.

Zaid was entrusted to the care of the Felton S.3.R.A. branch due to the town being something of a hotbed of activity, and having one of the best equipped departments in the country. Legally an adult as of 2012, Zaid has been fully released to the public under observation. A heat-resistant monitoring anklet keeps track of his movements and body temperature, but the Ifrit finds ways around the device. It only burns out of his body through his arms and face, away from the anklet, and it always leaves a scorched seal behind as a calling card. The Ifrit, you see, still hungers. Still craves burned, broken bones and blackened flesh. Zaid, for his part, is growing weary of the struggle with is literal inner demon.

Thankfully he has found support in the company of the Man-Eaters Anonymous support group, particularly from Mar Talbot, Tcho-Tcho Hybrid, and Christopher Warburton, Wendigo. He sees a kindred spirit in Mar, someone who feels that the power they hold may be too much for any one person to handle. And Chris...Chris reminds him of his father, in a lot of ways.

So Zaid struggles through every day, knowing that any minute the darkness might consume him, but he marks every day without a fresh burn scar as a victory against the Ifrit. He simply dreads the day that the flames may consume the people he has come to care about just as it consumed his family. He prays that he'll be able to control it when that time comes, at least long enough to find an end to his tale that only requires one last life be lost.

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All you have is your fire,
And the place you need to reach.
Don't you ever tame your demons,
Always keep them on a leash.

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Art by  Flowerdaddy to introduce a new member of the Feltonverse, shared with my mate  Feltonirregulars and I.