The Ember Orchard

Kael had always believed the orchard was a myth.

Old travelers spoke of it with smoke in their voices, as if the words burned on their tongues. An orchard of living flame, hidden somewhere past the Hollow Cliffs, where trees grew fire instead of fruit and where the sky never truly slept. The elders in Kael’s village dismissed the tales as nonsense—"traveler’s tales," they’d say, “dangerous imaginings for a boy who already dreams too much.”

But dreaming was all Kael had left.

He had no father. His mother lived mostly in silence now, broken by years of labor and disappointment. The village of Neftel was a dull gray, its people trapped in the rhythm of surviving, never living. So, on the night of his seventeenth birthday, with a broken satchel and a half-loaf of bread, Kael ran toward the cliffs—toward the myth.

Three days passed. His legs ached. His food vanished. The sky above grew stranger with every hour—first tinged orange, then flickering like candlelight. On the fourth night, Kael found it.

The Ember Orchard.

At first, he thought he was hallucinating. Before him stretched a grove of trees—tall, twisted trunks of black glass and bark that glowed from within. Their branches bore not leaves but tongues of fire. Golden, red, blue, even silver flames shimmered in silence. And yet the orchard was not burning.

It was breathing.

The heat wasn’t scorching. It was comforting, like the warmth of a fire on a winter night. Kael stepped forward, hand trembling. One of the trees bowed gently, as if acknowledging his presence. A flame fell from its branch—not crashing, but drifting like a feather—and landed in his open palm.

It didn’t hurt.

Instead, it pulsed like a heartbeat.

“You’re late,” said a voice.

Kael turned. A woman stood between the trees, wrapped in dark robes stitched with glowing thread. Her hair was silver, her eyes flickering like oil lamps. She looked both ancient and ageless.

“I’m sorry?” Kael said.

“You were supposed to come years ago,” she said, walking toward him. “But perhaps this will do.”

“Who… are you?”

“I am Serith, Keeper of the Orchard,” she said. “And you, Kael of Neftel, are its heir.”

He froze. “I think you’re mistaken. I’m nobody.”

“No,” Serith said, gently taking the flame from his hand and placing it in a crystal bowl. “You are everybody, if you choose to be.”

Over the next days, Serith taught Kael the old ways—the true history his people had buried. The Ember Orchard was the last remnant of the Ember Pact, a union formed centuries ago between the Flameborn and the Earthbound. Together, they balanced the world—until the Earthbound betrayed them, sealing the orchard and silencing its heirs.

“You are Flameborn,” Serith said. “And you’ve come to wake the orchard.”

Kael learned how to harvest the fire-fruit and stir the roots with his breath. He sang with the trees and heard their dreams—dreams of firestorms and forgotten gods. But he also began to dream of Neftel.

Of his mother.

Of a world still gray.

“I don’t want to be a guardian,” he said one night. “I want to help the world I left behind.”

Serith looked at him sadly. “Then you must understand: the world will not want your help. Not until it burns.”

On the seventh day, Kael saw the signs. Ash in the wind. A sickness in the orchard’s southern edge. Serith grew weaker, her robes dimming.

“They’ve found us,” she whispered.

From the cliffs came a hunting party—villagers, soldiers, and a priest whose mouth dripped with old lies. They claimed Kael had been bewitched. That the orchard was a curse. That fire must be tamed, not worshiped.

They brought torches.

Kael stepped between them and the grove.

“I am Flameborn,” he said. “This fire is not a curse. It is truth. It is memory. It is life.”

They did not listen.

The orchard wept, and Kael screamed. Not in fear—but in fury. The fire within him surged. The trees echoed his cry, and the flames rose—not in destruction, but in revelation.

Each villager saw something different: a lost child, a moment of joy, a truth they had buried. The priest dropped his torch. The soldiers stepped back. And the orchard glowed brighter than ever before.

Kael had awakened it.

When dawn came, the villagers left in silence. Serith, fading fast, smiled at Kael one last time.

“You chose both paths,” she said. “Now light them well.”

Kael returned to Neftel weeks later—not to live, but to plant. A single ember-fruit, glowing in his palm. He planted it outside his mother’s window, and each night it shimmered like a small sun.

Others saw it.

Others began to dream again.

And far beyond the cliffs, the orchard breathed.