Part IV – The Night the Embers Spoke
As told by Lirian Ever-Weaver
Some tales are not sung in the village square. They are not carved into wood or whispered near the hearth. They linger instead in the soot-streaked corners of memory, buried beneath what we dare not say.
This is one such tale.
It began the night the storm refused to break.
The air above Helithorn was too still. The clouds too heavy. The mist too thick to be natural. Aerin Greystone lit the hearth early, sensing the weight of the day pressing close around their home. Cearnach hummed an old weaving tune, his hands calloused from carving the loom Calla now sat beside.
She was not speaking. Not weaving. Only watching the flame.
There had been voices in her dreams for weeks. Strange, soft ones. Not commands. Invitations. *"You are not made for their fear. You were born for more."
That evening, she returned home from the market with her jaw clenched and her shoulders tight. Whispers had followed her again. One child had called her "witchspawn." An adult had not corrected them.
Cearnach had tried to speak gently. Aerin had offered tea and calm.
But something in Calla cracked.
She stood—too fast, too full of a storm she could not name. Her hand jerked. The flame obeyed—not with warmth, but with hunger.
They say the fire moved before she did.
The roundhouse glowed too bright for a moment, then too hot. The mist outside turned gold. Then red.
By the time the villagers saw the smoke, it was too late. The walls had collapsed. The roof fell in.
Calla was found outside, barefoot, hands bloodied from trying to claw her way back in. Her cries were wordless. Her breath steamed in the rain.
She had not fled. She had stayed. But the fire had taken everything anyway.
Some say she lit the fire.
Others say she tried to stop it.
But none deny what they saw when she rose from the ash: a girl with soot in her hair and light in her hands. A girl who did not scream. Who did not speak.
The voice came again, low as smoke: ‘Now they see. Now you know.
Meav was the only one who moved.
She stepped forward—just one pace—toward the ash-streaked girl standing in the rain. Her hands trembled. Her mouth opened.
But a whisper rippled through the crowd.
“Witchfire.”
“She lit it.”
“She stayed, but she brought it down.”
Someone reached for Meav’s sleeve. Another shook their head.
She had buried too many daughters to risk becoming the next one remembered in ash.
And Meav—brave, kind Meav—stopped.
She had known the old songs—sung not in words, but in wailing.
The ones sung by women who mourned not just death, but memory.
She had once keened for her sister, for her son, for a child taken by wind and water both.
But for Calla, she sang nothing.
Only silence. Only fear.
And that, too, is a kind of death.
She did not speak.
She did not step again.
No one did.
Not even when Calla turned toward the forest.
She walked into the Wraithwood alone.
No one stopped her.
No one offered her bread for the road.
Not even Meav.
The trees closed behind her.
And from that day, the wind in Helithorn no longer smelled of peat smoke.
Only ash.
She did not flee the fire.
She rose from it, ash-crowned and unclaimed.
But fear is quicker than truth,
and even the kind can be quiet when the flames speak first.
—From the Ledger of Lirian Ever-Weaver
Lirian Ever-Weaver notes:
Should this fragment stir your soul, you may seek the fuller song in ink and spine.
The Fianna Chronicles: Awakening
A forgotten legend. A fire rekindled. A warrior’s name remembered.