The Fire Eternal

[Cristoforo Kanoy]

Inthe Arctic: Slowly the ice is changing; bears are starving; dragons are rising; and the souls of the Inuit dead are haunting the skies. The spirit Gaia, goddess of the Earth, is restless, aching to bring her might down upon these changes. But all living things may suffer if she does. As the weather grows wilder and the ice caps melt, all eyes turn from the north to David's daughter, Alexa. She is the key to stopping it . . .But can one girl save the world from the forces of evil or will she disappear like her father?

The book opens with a short chapter about how the Earth, Gaia, is beginning to get restless, and then goes to explain Zanna's sadness about David being gone. She gives the invisible and shapeless dragon G'lant, which David gave to her at the end of Fire Star, to her daughter Alexa. Since David's apparent death, Zanna has been trying to get back on her feet. She bought a New Age shop called the Healing Touch and is living with the Pennykettles in David's old room. While Zanna is at her shop one night, Lucy sneaks into her room, and steals a letter that Zanna wrote to David. Every year on Valentine's Day, the day that David died, Zanna writes a letter to David telling him all of the events that are going on in the house. When Lucy reads the letter, she feels the need to do something to tell the world that David is not dead. So she writes an E-mail to a man named Tam Farell, whose role is not yet revealed, telling him to go the Healing Touch and ask for Zanna.

As the book goes on, every few chapters, the author puts in a chapter telling the reader what is happening in the Arctic. The Ice Bear, Ingavar, is with his two followers, a fighting bear called Kailar, and a Teller of ways called Avrel. They go and meet Thoran, who is really Dr. Bergstorm, and he tells Ingavar that his time on the ice is up. So Ingavar consumes Thoran with icefire, and his spirit is passed on to Ingavar. Meanwhile, in Zanna's shop, Tam Farell comes in and tells Zanna that he is having a pain in his neck. Using her methods she tells him that his pain should be in his liver, not his neck. He says that was a test to check her skill. Zanna is rather charmed, amused, and annoyed by him, and his remark and moodily schedules a consultation for them. As Tam is leaving, he invites her to a poetry reading at a bookshop, and tells her to bring her partner. Later that day, Zanna, Liz, and Lucy go shopping at the garden store, and find a 'fairy door' for Alexa to play with, and Lucy sends a fateful message to Tam telling him what Zanna's scars are. She writes only one word: Oomara. In the Arctic, Ingavar remembers how Avrel and he first met. Having disguised himself as a fox, he tricked Avrel into following him, and then filled his head with old knowledge and legends. As Avrel and Ingavar walked on, they saw the souls of countless Inuit men in the sky.

Fire has always been one of the most unpredictable of the four elements. Unstable, burning, all-consuming. It mystifies humanity since its very discovery and instills respect or even fear in our hearts. How many times have you been sitting by the fire, observing its flames dance freely, and you felt chills running down your spine? This is the feeling that the Sacred Fire deck wants to excite in you.

I was floored. A few years later, I came across this article about the repairs being done on the Eternal Flame. I was amazed all over again at the care the US Army Corps of Engineers took to make sure the flame never went out, even while they were replacing the tubing, the burner, and other parts.

For all the work it takes for modern engineers to ensure a flame is always burning, think of how much more work it took for the Levites to keep the altar fire burning as described in Leviticus 6. This was not like switching out propane tanks. Wood had to be gathered and cut. It had to be a roaring fire so the sacrifice would burn completely. The ashes had to be disposed of some distance outside the camp. No wonder it took an entire tribe to maintain the offerings and feasts!

I recall my father telling me about a discussion he had with a Jewish rabbi in Israel on the subject of hell. At the time, my father was a new convert to evangelical Christianity and was startled by a question the rabbi posed to him.

So will hell ever be empty? Yes, in the sense that no one will dwell in hell, because hell will have been cast into the lake of fire. And now the better question is, will the lake of fire ever be empty?

However, if that is not enough, Jesus himself answers the question. The first-century Jews, much like us today, wanted to know if there would be people who would spend eternity separated from God. So some of them asked Jesus whether this would be the case. Luke 13:23-24 says,

Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy, that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few.

Some might say that this refers to only the people in the day of Jesus. Even if this were true, it would still mean some people from that time would be separated from God, which would mean the lake of fire will not be empty.

He will come at the end of time to judge the living and the dead, to render to every person according to his works, both to the reprobate and to the elect. All of them will rise with their own bodies, which they now wear, so as to receive according to their deserts, whether these be good or bad; for the latter perpetual punishment with the devil, for the former eternal glory with Christ.

It requires some serious verbal gymnastics to make perpetual (perpetuam in Latin) mean something finite. In light of Jesus saying some will not be saved, and the Magisterium saying the punishment of the damned will be perpetual, the logical conclusion is that some people will actually experience perpetual punishment with the devil. This means the lake of fire will not be empty.

What does this mean for us? For one, it means we should be vigilant as to the care of our souls. It also means we should do everything we can to bring the good news of Jesus to those around us, in order to prevent them from ever being among those who populate the lake of fire.

The fire of eternal light is an old fire pit that has been rebuilt and now has a white flame within that acts as an inextinguishable light source in the area it is built in. Building a fire requires the completion of Making Friends with My Arm, 35 Construction, and 66 Firemaking. When built, it gives 350 Construction and 300 Firemaking experience. The player must have a hammer, a saw, and a tinderbox in their inventory to build it along with the below items. The fires are located at three different locations: Falador Mole Lair, Lumbridge Swamp Caves, and Mos Le'Harmless Cave. A spade and a light source are required to gain access to the Falador Mole Lair. The fire pits located in the Lumbridge Swamp Caves and the Mos Le'Harmless Cave are a short distance from the entrance, meaning a light source shouldn't be necessary if the player is quick enough to build them although one is still recommended.

At some point there is a fire very spiritually important to a certain people - so important that they build a city around it, and begin developing an empire with one of their main motivations being to provide fuel to the fire. They believe that if it burns strong, they will achieve success, if it falters, they will face hardships, and that if the fire ever goes out, the end of the world will soon follow.

Assuming that the fire is in a pit around half the size of an Olympic swimming pool. There's protection from the elements, disposal of ash, and expanding the pit are all easily doable. Fuels available are wood and coal (dung is blasphemous). Is it possible for this "eternal fire" to be kept burning for decades or centuries? If it can, at what point do the fuel requirements become exceedingly unreasonable (i.e. deforesting the average continent)? Are there any other obvious problems with the existence of this fire?

The nature of your question makes it sound like the fire was already there, that these people found it rather than lit it. In which case Will's answer is perfect (and you could easily see why a primitive people could be very impressed by something like that and consider it spiritually important).

But as someone who works with wood fuelled fires on a regular basis (specifically a wood burning pizza oven) I thought I'd provide an alternative angle.

What you want here is efficiency, to minimise fuel consumption while keeping your flame burning. You don't get much more efficient than pizza ovens when you're talking about burning wood.

Our oven is roughly 1m in diameter and probably 30 - 40cm high in the middle and to keep a fire burning that maintains a temperature of 500 - 600 C only requires 1 medium sized log (kiln dried hardwood) every half an hour. Of course you're looking at a much bigger fire than this, half an Olympic swimming pool is 25 metres long, so let's say a 25m diameter dome with about a 6m high point (I don't think scaling the height up 1:1 is ideal). And a hotter fire burns faster. You're also presumably looking for more spectacle than heat, which means maintaining a bigger flame then you normally would in a pizza oven.

Even so I think you could say 75 logs every half an hour, which would be about 56kg (assuming a 750g average for a log), so 112kg an hour. Which comes to 981 tonnes a year.

EDIT: Thanks to Joe in the comments for pointing out an error in my calculations here. I've redone them from scratch. The end result is actually a lot less space required as I really made a mess of these the first time round.

Growth rates and sizes for trees are a bit tricky, but the live Oak (from the US) apparently could reach a height of 18m and width of 24m on average in 75 years. If you assume that only 10% of that 10368m is actually wood, then you get 767kg of wood [density of 0.74 (103 kg/m3)], which means you would need 1279 oak trees a year to keep your fire burning.

Turns out these calculations were all wrong, based on the information in this page it would appear a single oak is likely to yield a total of 7860kg of wood, about ten times what my original calculations (corrected for errors) would yield. This means you would need 124 oak trees a year to keep your fire burning.Growing this many trees would take roughly 18 acres. Of course, these trees take 75 years to reach maturity, so you should have 1,350 acres of trees in varying states of growth that you replace as you go.

Post Edit: That's still probably on the high side, as Joe mentioned deliberate farming and management can probably drastically reduce the space required, but 1,350 acres really isn't a lot.

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