The candle

In the eighth ditch every flame is a man, and one of those flames has two horns. The game takes a piece of it and puts it in your hand: the greater tip bends down into the unlit candle you are carrying and stays there, and from then on you are the one carrying the fire. In the poem that flame is neither touched nor taken away; here it is, and it is the gesture the second half of the chapter turns on.

The candle has no ammunition of its own: it burns the lamp’s oil, nine seconds of light for every second of jet. Firing means choosing to stand in the dark, and that is the declared reason this never becomes an action game with Dante inside it.

And it scatters nobody, because fire down here is not consecrated matter: it is only fire. It drives off swarms and snakes, and it takes a soul’s appetite for standing over you away for a second and a half. Anyone who points it at a devil is only burning their own light.