The fire engine arrived too late. The pile of ash and debris that had once been a column of flame and once been my home was done. Everyone agreed that no one had ever seen a fire burn so quickly, so hot, and so cleanly. There would have been an investigation, but there was nothing to investigate. Just a lot of tiny pieces that were my life.

I knew that it was a bad idea when I had first tried it. Language is not to be taken lightly, even at the most abstracted level it's a dangerous thing. But at its most basic level, language is the thing. The trick to finding the true name of something is nothing more than research and practice. Each character line, each phoneme, these are secret and hidden for a reason. And they are all crucial, all as vitally important as every other part.

And the more basic the word, the more basic the thing, the more that word, that name had to encompass. A specific thing isn't terribly hard, the more complicated it is the easier it is actually. The word might be longer, but it is made of parts, and those parts can be abstracted, researched and fixed in your mind. You can learn to speak the word as a combination of many smaller things, and bring it together as one.

But an idea or a concept? That is a single thing, but not. The first problem is understanding that idea. And once you have that, all that is left is weeks, months, or even years of study.

And I should have known better. My earliest experiments had been disasters, and each new step, each new achievement was just as hard. I should not have tried to reach so deeply, I wasn't ready. I should have known better than to write "fire".

Fire is all and nothing at once.