We were in the Hall of Candles. Jeremy was leaning back on his chair with a mug of beer in his hand. I was staring cross-eyed into the crystal ball, trying to make it work.

Suddenly a candle on the wall flared bright and I looked aside to see it.

"Ah, that one's Elijah. I was hoping he would," said Jeremy, getting up and walking over to the candle in its hollow.

I got up and followed. "What does that mean?" I said. The flame was raging hard and giving out far too much light for an ordinary candle flame. Indeed, the stick of wax below it was dwarfed in comparison.

Jeremy shrugged. "What you see is what you get. The flame is Elijah's soul. Apparently, he's getting... excited."

"Excited?"

"As I said," muttered Jeremy, picking up the candle gingerly, "what you see is what you get. Use your unconscious mind to interpret, rational analysis will be of little use here."

Jeremy had set the taper down on the table next to the crystal ball. Following his advice I silenced my mind as best I could and asked my gut feeling what was the meaning of the thing. As I did so, the flame seemed to turn clear and I caught snatches of colour, movement, sound - fleeting but violent. "What caused this, do you think?"

Jeremy was staring into the crystal ball when I looked up to hear his reply, with that odd dilation of the pupils that signified a certain sort of trance. I was chastising myself for distracting him, but he muttered a reply without apparently breaking his concentration; "Could be anything or nothing, a soul might react to events but really... events are just the foil or... the catalyst, at best... you gotta realise people will be people whatever happens to them. Ah," he looked up suddenly with a more normal face, "done. Come and look."

I circled the table and looked into the ball from behind Jeremy's shoulder. From here, a nice image was coming through. Elijah - I recognised the man, vaguely - his face was streaming with tears and contorted with anger, and he was yelling at a person we couldn't see from this angle, yelling, no, spitting, roaring in hatred. A knife was in his hand, and at that moment he slashed his own palm and held his fist up high.

"Woa," I said, taking a gulp of beer. "Looks like he's ready to kill, or something."

"He's breaking free of his chains. Look at the candle."

And for sure, the candle was burning ever brighter, dancing in time with the rhythm of the man's gestures.

"Now," said Jeremy, "one of two things will happen. Either the flame will come to a peak and settle down again, or the candle will grow so that the flame can stay bright."

A couple of people had come into the field of view and were attempting to hold Elijah down. He was fighting, but not very skilfully in comparison, just energetically, and he was looking once more like a trapped animal and not a free man. One of the men fighting him got a hold of his head and bashed it against the wall. Instantly the flame vanished to but a flicker.

"Dead?" I asked, fixated.

"Nooo..."

The flame was still there, caressing the wick, holding close, and burning quite bright for such a tiny thing.

In the crystal ball Elijah was being dragged off.

And the candle was growing.