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Levi McAllister
Levi and Charlotte’s father (a fire spirit who most people know as Jack) left the family several years before Edith’s death, creating a rupture in his relationship with his children aren’t willing to repair. His existence as a fire spirit—a being who was first brought to life by an indigenous woman who lit a fire for warmth, and who can now appear in any fire on the island—is only known to himself and the late Edith. To everyone else, including his children, his identity is profoundly mysterious. When Graham Malik attempts to investigate him, there seems to be no sign of his existence apart from a driver’s license, and those who see him are unable to confirm anything about his physical appearance. Because he’s foremostly a supernatural fire spirit, Jack can rarely maintain emotional connections with human beings, even his children, and the pain of Edith’s death only magnifies this detachment. Though he makes halfhearted efforts to help and protect his children, he’s never truly able to repair his relationships with them—relationships that first ended because Edith learned that he’d used his powers as a fire spirit to force her to him. Jack has a long-running habit of lighting “sparks” in humans’ brains to make them more receptive to people and ideas they consider foreign. While this suggests that the fire spirit genuinely desires to use his powers for good, his broken connections to his wife and children emphasize that relationships built on exploitation and dishonesty—or even partial honesty—are harmful and unsustainable.
Fire Spirit/Jack (Levi and Charlotte’s Father) Quotes in Flames
The Flames quotes below are all either spoken by Fire Spirit/Jack (Levi and Charlotte’s Father) or refer to Fire Spirit/Jack (Levi and Charlotte’s Father). For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Coal
Quotes
He even met others like him—beings of rock, of sand, of earth and ice, that lived in much the same way he did, although they weren’t the same, not really. Some wore fur and feathers and watched over the creatures they resembled. Some floated high in the sky and released rain, on a whim, to extinguish him. Some swam through rivers and called themselves gods. Some were kind. Some, like a blood-hungry bird spirit he encountered deep in the southwest, were cruel. Most were calm, seeking only to care for the creatures and land that they felt drawn closest to.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
What part of the world had thrown hooks into his soul? The answer, he had learned early in his life, lay in the hands that had clashed two stones together to create him. It was people, always people; only people that he really cared for. He had helped them cook, create, shape and heat themselves, and had come to think of them as not so much a family but as part of himself. For of all the shapes of life he had encountered, they were the only ones who had shown him that he had a purpose in this water-edged world.
They brought pain to the people he’d been helping for centuries—pain that he initially responded to by burning down their buildings, their docks, their great bird-like ships—but they also came with a vast multitude of new purposes for him. With them he was not merely cooking marsupials, sharpening spears and burning scrub; he was exploding black powder and flinging balls of metal through the air faster than any bird could fly.
After all these years he was reduced to the same state he was in at the moment the woman, crouching by the riverbank, had first summoned him with the clash of two smooth stones.
So when Charlotte began leaking the fire he’d given her, he did nothing more than watch. When his son started unravelling, he intervened with only half of his flaming heart.
Just like their mother, they would eventually die. And he did not want to be close to them when they did.
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Fire Spirit/Jack (Levi and Charlotte’s Father) Quotes in Flames
The Flames quotes below are all either spoken by Fire Spirit/Jack (Levi and Charlotte’s Father) or refer to Fire Spirit/Jack (Levi and Charlotte’s Father). For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Coal
Quotes
He even met others like him—beings of rock, of sand, of earth and ice, that lived in much the same way he did, although they weren’t the same, not really. Some wore fur and feathers and watched over the creatures they resembled. Some floated high in the sky and released rain, on a whim, to extinguish him. Some swam through rivers and called themselves gods. Some were kind. Some, like a blood-hungry bird spirit he encountered deep in the southwest, were cruel. Most were calm, seeking only to care for the creatures and land that they felt drawn closest to.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
What part of the world had thrown hooks into his soul? The answer, he had learned early in his life, lay in the hands that had clashed two stones together to create him. It was people, always people; only people that he really cared for. He had helped them cook, create, shape and heat themselves, and had come to think of them as not so much a family but as part of himself. For of all the shapes of life he had encountered, they were the only ones who had shown him that he had a purpose in this water-edged world.
They brought pain to the people he’d been helping for centuries—pain that he initially responded to by burning down their buildings, their docks, their great bird-like ships—but they also came with a vast multitude of new purposes for him. With them he was not merely cooking marsupials, sharpening spears and burning scrub; he was exploding black powder and flinging balls of metal through the air faster than any bird could fly.
After all these years he was reduced to the same state he was in at the moment the woman, crouching by the riverbank, had first summoned him with the clash of two smooth stones.
So when Charlotte began leaking the fire he’d given her, he did nothing more than watch. When his son started unravelling, he intervened with only half of his flaming heart.
Just like their mother, they would eventually die. And he did not want to be close to them when they did.
