After Ragnarök, the world was still.
Ash choked the skies. The sea swallowed the bones of Midgard. Yggdrasil, the great World Tree that had once bound the Nine Realms, now stood broken, its trunk split, roots torn asunder, and limbs scattered like spears hurled by dying gods.
But deep beneath the ruin of Asgard, in the hollow where Nidhogg once gnawed, something glowed.
It was not a fire.
It was wyrd—woven fate. A lingering warmth, the last ember of what once connected all life.
Many had died. Even more had been forgotten. But some, like Eira, remained.
A lone seeress who had survived not by strength, but by silence. Hidden in the caves of the dying mountains, she emerged after the final clash to find the world unmade.
All around her was silence, and in silence, she listened.
The wind had no direction. The sun, no path. The old songs would no longer rise to her lips. Even her runes, carved from birch in the old days, had ceased to speak.
But the ember spoke.
It flickered in her dreams, an unseen thread pulling at her chest like an anchor of memory. It is called not with words, but with yearning.
A single whisper: "Seed me."
Eira knew what it meant. The Tree was gone, but not dead. Yggdrasil had given its last breath to one ember, enough to begin anew, if someone dared.
She wandered the scarred remains of the realms, seeking where the ember lay. The oceans were sour. The heavens cracked. The old shrines had crumbled. Even Helheim was emptied, its gates broken.
But there, beneath the shattered root where the serpent once coiled, she found it.
Not glowing. Not burning.
Breathing.
A single, pulsing coal of silver and gold, cradled in the petrified sap of the Tree's heart.
She reached for it, but it was not hers to take. It was hers to earn.
Visions struck her down. The past, Odin’s search for wisdom, Fenrir’s bound rage, the weeping of Frigg, the trickery of Loki, the fire of Surtr, all poured into her mind. She screamed with every soul who had fallen. She knelt with every life that once fed the Tree.
And in her grief, she understood.
This ember did not hold power. It held memory. And only by bearing it, not ruling it, could the Tree rise again.
She swallowed it.
Not with mouth, but with soul.
Light poured from her eyes. Her skin cracked like bark. Her bones bent like boughs. She fell to the earth, and when she rose, her body was no longer hers alone.
It was Yggdrasil's vessel.
She wandered again, this time not seeking, but planting. Step by step, her footprints left shoes behind. Not roots of wood, but roots of choice. People found her. The broken, the mad, the lost, they followed.
Not because she promised a new world.
But because she remembered the old.
The Last Ember of Yggdrasil still glows today.
Not in temples. Not in branches.
But in those who choose to carry memory forward, rather than burn it behind them.
When the world falls again, and it always will, one ember is all it takes.