Ash and Memory
508 Words
Kaelen Vire had lived seventeen years in the Ashfall Monastery, and he
had never once felt warm.
Not truly warm. The monastery sat at the edge of the world, perched on cliffs that overlooked the Endless Gray Sea. Wind carrying the dust of dead volcanoes swept through its halls constantly, coating every surface in fine ash that no amount of sweeping could remove. The brothers joked that the ash was their true master, and they were merely its servants.
Kaelen swept the courtyard with practiced efficiency, his wooden broom disturbing swirls of gray powder. Around him, the monastery hummed with its usual morning rhythm. Brother Mattheus rang the bronze bell. Brother Corwin prepared the thin, bitter porridge that passed for breakfast. And Master Eldrin Voss stood at the eastern balcony, as he did every dawn, staring at the horizon where the sun rose weak and pale.
"You sweep with violence this morning, Kaelen."
Kaelen paused. He hadn't heard Eldrin approach. The old master moved like smoke when he wished to.
"The ash falls faster lately," Kaelen said, not looking up. "I thought I'd get ahead of it."
"The ash always wins." Eldrin's voice carried a weight that made Kaelen look up. The master's face, lined with age and secrets, seemed more drawn than usual. His eyes, the color of faded amber, fixed on Kaelen with an intensity that bordered on fear. "How long have you been here, boy?"
"Seventeen years. Since I was a baby."
"And in those seventeen years, have you ever wondered why we took you in?"
Kaelen set down his broom. "I assumed it was charity. Or penance. Or—"
"It was necessity." Eldrin stepped closer, lowering his voice. "Come with me.
There is something you must see."
The master led Kaelen through corridors he had never walked, past doors that had always been locked. They descended into the monastery's lower levels, where the air grew thick and warm, where the ash did not reach. At the deepest chamber, Eldrin pressed his palm against a wall of black stone, and a doorway appeared where none had been.
Inside, a single flame burned.
It was small, no larger than a candle's light, suspended in midair above a pedestal of carved obsidian. But it was unlike any fire Kaelen had ever seen. Its color shifted between gold and crimson and something deeper, something that hurt to look at directly.
"The Last Ember," Eldrin said. "All that remains of the Eternal Flame that once protected this world."
Kaelen felt something twist in his chest. The flame called to him. Not with sound, but with something deeper. A resonance in his blood, in his bones, in the hollow spaces of his heart he had never been able to fill.
"Why are you showing me this?"
Eldrin's answer came slowly, each word falling like a stone. "Because it recognizes you, Kaelen. It has waited seventeen years for you to come home."
The flame flickered, and for the first time in his life, Kaelen Vire fe
lt warm.
And terrified.
- Writer
