The Last Ember

There are places the maps refuse to remember—places swallowed by time, erased by dust, and ignored by stars. Callahan had spent most of his life chasing those places. Not for gold. Not for fame. But for the Ember.

Discounts

They said it burned in the heart of a ruined mountain, in the ashes of a forgotten world. They said it was a spark of something older than fire, older than the gods themselves. Something that could ignite all things that had grown cold. Most people thought it was a myth. Most people were wrong about most things.

Callahan wasn't a warrior, nor a scholar. He was something else. A man held together by old letters and older promises. His daughter, Maeve, lay in a hospital room 600 miles away, her heartbeat slow, her lungs failing. "The Ember heals," the old journals had claimed. "It awakens the dying." He didn’t know if that meant hearts, minds, or bones—but he didn’t have the luxury of specifics anymore.

The quest had taken him through broken cities and flooded caverns. He’d bartered with smugglers, outsmarted bounty hunters, and nearly frozen to death crossing the Vinterfell Tundra. Every place brought him closer to the mountain that wasn’t on any satellite image, wasn’t mentioned in any history book. Mount Solace.

And now it loomed in front of him—cracked and hollowed, like a skull waiting for fire. The snow was falling sideways, the wind howling like a banshee with a vendetta. His body screamed for rest, but something deeper pulled him forward. A tether tied to love.

He found the entrance where the map didn’t show it. Not carved, but broken—as if something had burst outward from the inside. He lit his last torch and stepped into the belly of the beast.

Inside, the walls glowed faintly, as if veins of dying coals still pulsed beneath the surface. There were murals—half-burnt, half-erased—depicting figures with blazing eyes offering light to the sky. The further in he walked, the warmer it became, though his breath still fogged in front of him. It wasn’t heat like fire. It was warmth like memory.

Then he saw it.

A chamber of obsidian, silent as grief. And at its center, a pedestal no taller than a child’s knee. Floating above it—weightless, dancing—was the Ember. It was no larger than a walnut, but inside it swirled the glow of a thousand sunsets. It flickered like a heartbeat. Or perhaps it was one.

Callahan approached slowly, but not out of fear. Reverence. He reached out with cracked hands. The Ember didn’t resist. It slid into his palm as if it had been waiting.

The moment he touched it, he saw her. Maeve. Not in pain, not sick. Laughing. Running barefoot through autumn leaves. He saw himself, too—not as a ghost of exhaustion, but whole again. Strong again. It lasted seconds. It lasted forever.

But the mountain had rules. The old texts had warned: “The Ember chooses the bearer, but the mountain demands a price.”

He stumbled back into the snowlight, Ember tucked to his chest. The sky was beginning to break—dawn threatening the horizon. And as he descended, step by step, the warmth began to leave him.

He knew he wouldn't make it back.

Callahan didn’t die in the snow. He became the snow. They say his footprints froze in place halfway down the mountain, never melting. As if the earth wanted to remember him. As if forgetting would be a sin.

Maeve woke three days later.

No doctors could explain it. Machines started beeping where silence had lived for weeks. Her lungs filled with air, her skin warmed like sun after a storm.

Clutched in her tiny hands was something glowing.

A spark.

An Ember.

Discounts

And somewhere in the forgotten bones of Mount Solace, a torch flickered to life again. Waiting for the next story to begin.

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