Lilith steps forwards, a nervous yet excited pep in her step as she approaches the only woman in her life who hasn't been blotted in wax. Family, friends, comrades... all are long forgotten faces, smeared by Her heavy stamp.

"Approach, waxling, and do not tarry." Candler speaks thus, Hers is a sculpted smile; it does not drop. Lilith swallows, drily, hastening her advance with a melty feeling betwixt these hot waxen ears of hers. Like her thoughts are pre-emptively experiencing the burn. Today is her day, nobody else's, the day her servitude to the Candelabra Corps begins in earnest.

"S-Sorry Candler, I—"

"You are not required, nor permitted, to speak in the Chamber of Searing Light." Candler slams Her spike-heeled boot into ground, it sinking an inch or so deep into the hard wax flooring and commandeering the pounding in Lilith's chest. The well conditioned wax carries herself forward obediently, fearfully, doing well to remind herself of what will happen should she disobey this dark presence before her. The Candler wields the flame of conquest, its burn is absolute and unending. At the beginning of the month she had been prouder, stronger, or so she thinks. It's... remembering is hard, and Lilith is built from too soft a wax. Candler's piercing gaze scratches across the marks in her rich maroon flesh, where the etchings She gave Her latest work mark Lilith's division in the surface war, her assigned Candelabra.

Lilith nods, thin lipped and readily trimmed for her lighting. Whatever Candler says goes... even if she thinks she hated Her, once. No, no! She still hates this wretched woman, having endured the painful etchings imposed upon her and the constant roundabout rhetoric. Lilith was a fighter once, or so she thinks, but now this wax grows weary. The Empire she once rejected does not require fighters, only more kindling for their fires of endless war. An insatiable strife.

"On your knees, incendiary." Candler's eyes are as hands, pushing Lilith to the floor with harsh touch firm as the real thing. The Igniter's long leather gloves need not even rise from below Her hips. "Prepare your head for me now, don't be difficult."

Swallowing drily, Lilith drops onto her knees like a marionette cut from its strings. The deferent, pathetic shell of her former self decides that now is the best time to present not her wick, but her fight. Prime for the snuffing.

"You're not... I'm not your pilot, Candler. My name is Lilith... and this isn't my choice." Her nerves are fraying, but that kindling sprouting from her head remains perfectly intact.

A callous air arrests the room, Candler's scene shall not be sullied so selfishly by the likes of these ungrateful clumps. It is She who shapes their destiny, and no one else. "Oh, I wasn't under any illusion. Come now, pet, take stock of your surroundings. There is no future awaiting you within the confines of your cell." The domineering flamestress clicks Her tongue and finally sees fit to raise Her hand, though purely performatively. Digits drenched in sleek black run through coarse greying hair, Her feigned agitation melting into liquescent simper.

And then, Candler speaks the words that Lilith had been dreading.

"It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness."

Lilith shudders, her posture correcting. Back straightens out — shoulders pick up — head lowers reverently. "Why... Why am I so..."

"Candles. Do. Not. Speak." A hand reaches forwards and grips Lilith's face harshly, leather-clad touch sinking into waxen cheeks with a ferocity that has the poor incendiary squirming in discomfort. With her cheeks pushed in so forcefully, Lilith cannot hope to speak, and this floaty feeling in the back of her head makes considering disobeying her Candler a distant afterthought. "You ask me why? Poor thing, is your memory spotty again? The infusion will do that, but I assure you the scents you bring to the battlefield will be... to die for. The stench of war is a pleasant one, you'll see."

Candler's words spark memory of the infusion process, the real reason Lilith has been so terribly docile in this past week or so leading up to the lighting ceremony. As Lilith blinks, she recalls that heated rod wielded by Candler, almost the length of her own restrained form. "You exist to be bound, such is the luck of your kind." Spoke the woman she could still bring herself to earnestly scorn at that time, firmly pushing the rod against the wax at the top of Lilith's head. It only hurt at first, when she felt herself melting for Candler for the very first time. After that, when the inside of her body became so malleable that the long rod could run right through her from top to bottom... it began to feel excruciatingly good. It was quite literally a spine tingling sensation that changed her at her core, Candler pushing the infusion down to rest by Her candle's navel. "Chamomile and Lavender, to keep you and your division calm in the war above." The wretched woman spoke, but Lilith was already beginning to mellow out. Hollow out. Candler's rod removed, the wax rebel felt the violation of her flesh and — while she lamented the unwanted molestation of her mass — felt her anxiety on the matter begin to dissolve against that pleasant thrum in her abdomen where the infusion had already begun to mix.

"I can see it in your eyes, incendiary. You're remembering your place. Tis a bad morning to be slow on the uptake, your ascension is due and running behind schedule. Your former resistance comrades have already been locked into their respective sconces." The leather hand recedes and Lilith lets out a long, resigned sigh, staring up at the woman who wields her fate with crushing indifference. Candler, like the rest of Her kind in the Candlempire, is not as soft as the wax they oppress. They are a conquering copper kind, though most assuredly crueller than kind. Invaders from the worn-out-west in need of new home, these despotic Igniters built the sconces, the Candelabrum Sanguinarius, and made it known that peace was an option they had discarded before they even hit the eastern shore.

Lilith opens her mouth, but the words do not come. Her friends, faces melted over by Candler's suffocating abuse, have already been lit and summarily ensconced? It should anger her, light a fire in her chest that requires no aid from the ornate Igniter stood before her in smug and glamour. It does not. Lilith is calm, frightfully so, kneeling before her master like her body no longer remembers any other shape.

Her kind are a commodity, the enemy renamed their own empire to fit this change in the natural order. Candles are a tool. They are fuel, they are weapons, and they are pets.

"Now, dear, I shan't ask again. Present. Your. Wick." Candler snaps Her sharp metal teeth together and Lilith — no — candle obeys. Before Igniters there were no wicks, no candles, but now it forgets what those times were like. It is not a person, people are made of copper. Clumps of wax like this one exist to be bound, ensconced and burnt.

A warmth spreading in its abdomen that compels it into a serene and unnatural calmness, the candle does as it is told while hoping that its beloved Candler will not punish it for the disrespect it had shown in this hallowed chamber. A part of candle, the pieces of useless wax named Lilith, still yearn for a way to resist this horrible curse of compliance. That's okay, once the wick is lit all will be absolved by fire, baptismal flames of slow sublimation that make incense of her ego.

The candle prostrates, head dipped low by Candler's well-blacked boots as its sense of self shivers in anticipation of dripping down onto the unfeeling concrete below. A boot steps closer, then another. Leather perches upon the candle's shoulders as an eery stillness takes its stringbound heart, encircled by wick it wasn't born with. Copper hands wreathed in midnight black clench the wax firm, a creak of leather in candle's ears reminding it that none of this is its choice. Just as things should be in a world of people and tools, this candle has as much agency as the object used to trim its wick, or that long heated rod that made it shamefully hot between the thighs.

"Good girl, I'll enjoy watching you fight my war now that yours is over. Do put on a good show, and try not to tarry... you things only last for so long until the wick runs its course." The cloying smugness of its Candler is a welcome choke to candle's ego, reminding it that the time for personal responsibility is over. Oh, what a fucking relief. The copper woman and Her kin tower over candle-kind, and so She bends down with butane breath blowing across the top of Her broken pilot's head. "And now..."

Lilith shudders, one last time, hearing mechanical clicking sound at the back of Candler's throat and feeling the heat of ensuing ignition. Resembling a tongue, the translucent blue flame escapes past Candler's pointed metal teeth and drags itself across the waiting wick in one clean lick. The candle writhes in its place, feeling that artificial part of itself catching fire and accepting that it is officially too late to deny that it is nothing but an accessory of war. Of endless bloody regime. Even melted clumps have a purpose to serve, recycled into fuel for the heart of the capital: that monstrous sacrificial engine they dubbed the Candelabrum Sanguinarius.

"Tilt your head up, incendiary." Another snap of teeth that extinguishes the blue hot flame and commands candle into action. Naturally, it does as instructed, breath hitched from the new world of sensation at its head. "Good pet. The initial lighting can be rather intense, you'll settle once the ego dies and the smoke fills your eyes. Until then, well, I can provide distraction from the teething stage. While your undesirable personality drips down from that pretty waxen head of yours, my candle, why don't you go ahead and..." Snap! "...affix yourself upon your Candler's boot?"

Soon to be little more than the obedient creature it already acts, the lit candle nods dutifully with a restrained wince coating that glowing face. Without wasting a moment lest Candler retract such a benevolent order, phrased as suggestion, the candle mounts itself on that shiny black boot and straddles it with waxen legs. Candler removes Her glove with sharp teeth clenching the finger, promptly dropping Her hand onto the tamed wax pilot's head with a large enough hole in the centre for the flame to rise up through. Mechanical fingers sharp as talons sink into the soft wax in possessive hold, the candle groaning and whining incessantly and the sound falling upon deafened ears. Candles do not speak, after all, nor do they protest their masters' touch.

Wax begins to drip down from the top of candle's head, with every drop a piece of Lilith is discarded. There is nothing she can do, because this is no longer her vessel to control. A drip, drip, drip of wax and her sense of self melts away, making these degrading activities it participates in all it has to live for. Fucking Candler's boot is a reward worth killing for, and a dream worth dying for. Within that impenetrable black footwear, the Igniter begins to heat up its lower leg inside the confines of the copper limb. Heat transfers nicely and soon, the candle is slick between its legs, drip, drip, dripping down there now too. So wet already, liquid wax beginning to roll down the dominant woman's boot as Her pet begins to pant.

Another drop of melted wax, and there goes its name. Another, its family, no longer simply smeared but completely evaporated in the smoke rising up towards the chamber's high ceiling. It is cathartic for this candle, to lose that which made it ever think it deserved to be a person. It finds itself so very eager now, as the flame descends into its head and begins to melt its very brain, to join the rest of its division in their assigned Candelabra and fight for the good of the empire. It does not love the empire, of course, but craves Candler's affection, Her approval, more than it values its own life. Its own kind.

"Faster, my little waxling, do not be afraid to dirty my boot with your filthy lust when we both know who, or what, will be cleaning it up after." Candler's words are absolute, everything She does and says is doctrine. How can it not worship the woman when Her treatment feels this heavenly?

"Hhhrkk…" The flame melts away everything not related to Candler's wants, sublimating the last of its ego as smoke begins to pool in its eyes and leave a blank, uniform grey stare. Dark red rolls down its body, smears Candler's leg, and stains a ground far more sacred than a single burning candle. It'll spend the next few years in service before it burns out, an all too eager servitude spent in the name of a woman it does not truly know. Candler's a title, isn't it? What's... a title? "Ggghhhk." G-Getting stupider, soldier doesn't need smarts. Melt it all away, ehehehe… drip, drop, drip... drop.

Candler's boot feels fucking amazing, that's all it needs to know. If it remembers that, it's the smartest girlthing in the whole damn world! The object that used to be called Lilith gives a beaming smile as radiant as that light behind its waxen face, panting wantonly into the air while thrusting hips into the only thing that exists anymore.

"Come for me now, incendiary." Snap!

The hand still covered by leather reaches out to seize its property's throat, lightly choking the candle that soon loses itself in throes of ecstasy that carry it, dizzy and disgraced, into the beginning of a new and terrible existence. As rich maroon pleasure oozes out over Candler's boot, and the entire candle's body pushes into its owner's with its roused surface coating Her in worthless wax drippings, candle has only one thing on its mind.

It exists to be bound, and it loves to be burnt.

Months Later

Nothing gets candle #800000 fired up the way being saddled up in the sconce of a huge candelabra does.

It used to say it’s because of all the good you can do with that kind of power turned back towards the empire and its oppressive regime, but now it understands the truth of its kind. The fire comes from a million different things. The way the candlestick beneath it roars as the machine kicks into life. The scent of infused oil and burning wax as the burner sparks up. The way everything in the world quivers when its division's enkindled candelabrum, tall as Douglas Fir, takes to the surface above. This fire isn’t just in its head. It’s deep in the candle's very wax. Its melting, wickbound heart.

It’s fucking perfect.