They were a dying ember in a cold wind.
Once, the Skjarn clan had been firebearers, keepers of a sacred flame said to be sparked by the gods themselves. But war, frost, and forgetfulness had scattered their bloodline to the edges of the world. The traditions fell silent. The flames went cold. All that remained were whispers in the wind and bones beneath moss.
But not all embers die.
Ivar Skjarn stood alone atop the ridge, a bundle of kindling strapped across his back, staring into the breathless dusk. The sky burned violet and gold over the jagged spine of the Ironfell Mountains. Somewhere beyond those peaks, the last temple of the Flame was said to sleep, its doors sealed, its altar buried beneath ash and time.
Few believed it still existed. Fewer still believed in what lay within. But Ivar carried an oath etched into his blood. He would not let the flame die in silence.
He descended the pass in silence, a wolfskin cloak wrapped tight, frost biting his cheeks. Every step echoed a memory, stories told by his grandmother near dying coals, runes scratched into stone by ancestors whose names the world had forgotten. The fire, she said, had been lit from the bones of Yggdrasil, when a single ember survived the fall of the gods and was passed into mortal hands.
Ivar didn’t know if it was true. But he needed it to be.
Three days into the wild, he found the cairn.
Rocks stacked like ancient prayers, worn smooth by wind and time. At its base was a scorched stone, blackened by heat no winter storm could cleanse. He knelt, brushing away snow to find the rune: Kaunaz — the fire rune.
The air shifted. The wind whispered. And something stirred beneath the earth.
A dream, perhaps. A memory not his own. He saw a figure, cloaked in fire, walking through a forest of ash. Runes burned in the branches. Ravens circled above. At the center, a single glowing ember hovered in the hollow of a tree stump, pulsing like a heartbeat.
Yggdrasil, he realized. Or what remained of it.
The vision vanished.
He pressed onward, guided now by intuition more than maps. Snow thickened. The stars watched in silence. One night, as he camped beneath an overhang, flames danced strangely in the fire. Faces flickered in the smoke, stern, sorrowful, familiar. Ancestors. Or madness.
“I carry you,” he whispered. “I won’t let it end with me.”
The fire flared.
On the seventh day, he found it.
Half-buried in frost and stone, a round door lay sealed with rune iron. He pressed his palm to its center. The Kaunaz rune glowed faintly beneath his touch, then burst into light. The door groaned. Stone shifted. And warmth, not of the earth, but older—spilled from the threshold.
Inside, the temple walls were carved with scenes of flame and tree, god and man. One depicted a serpent coiled around the roots of fire. Another was a woman holding a torch high as wolves circled her feet. The final carving was cracked but clear: a hand reaching toward a single ember.
He followed the corridor downward, the heat rising with each step. And there, in the heart of the temple, he found it:
A bowl of black stone cracked and ancient. Inside, resting alone, was the ember.
It pulsed like breath. Soft. Steady. Alive.
He reached out. The air turned heavy. Fire bloomed beneath his skin, rushing through his veins like blood reborn. Visions struck him, a battlefield of ash, a voice crying out from roots, a world not yet dead.
This ember was not merely fire. It was a memory. The last witness of a world scorched and broken.
Ivar knelt, trembling. He placed his kindling into the bowl, whispered the words he had been taught, and breathed into the spark.
It caught.
The flame rose — golden, silent, strong.
Not a blaze, but a beginning.
He wept.
They say Ivar returned with fire in his eyes and a voice not entirely his own. He rebuilt the hearth of Skjarn. He taught the rune songs. Children learned the old words. And each year, on the night of the long frost, they gather to light the sacred flame, carried now not in temples or tales, but in the hearts of a people once forgotten.
The ember lives.
And so does the memory of Yggdrasil — not in root or leaf, but in fire that refuses to die.