The Grease of the Third Ditch

Dante explains the fire burning on the simonists’ soles with the flame that runs over the outer skin of a greased thing, and nobody puts that one out: it burns itself away. In the game that simile is the floor of the ditch. The oil dripping from the burning soles gathers into bands laid right across the corridor from side to side, joined by runnels, and between one band and the next there is three and a half metres of bare stone, which is where you wait.

The ones who light it are the damned themselves: a sole kicks and catches the nearest band, and from there the flame opens forwards and backwards along the corridor, slower than a walking man, so you watch it come from a long way off. A band burns for three and a half seconds or so, then the oil is spent and ash is left, and for seven and a half seconds you can stand on it, until the oil wells up again. Crossing means staying in the wake: not running ahead of the fire but going where it has already been, and the code states outright that this is the only thing in the whole game done behind a danger instead of in front of it.

The grease is darker than the stone and the ash lighter, and that way round is deliberate: the mark you see from a distance has to be the danger, not the safe ground. Tried the other way round, the conspicuous thing became the good footing and the invisible one the place where you burn. And the fire does not only take life, it shoves, because if it cost a heart and no more, anyone with two would spend one and cross at a run, and reading the wake would be worth nothing. How thickly the waves come is not settled by the ditch: it is settled by the player, because every source taken away thins them out.