I'm thinking the encoding scheme should maybe include big/small as the fifth bit in each flame, maybe inside/outside for the 6th bit. This would give you 2^6 or 64 possible bit-strings for each flame, usable as a base64 alphabet for a Bacon cypher. There needs to be a number of flames related to the number of chars in a private key format, or a decoded string that would represent a clue in readable text, and the latter may be very tough to detect with any sort of cracking algo.