In the spring of the first year of the Firefolk Era, the first wisp of new fire broke through the snow.
It came not from an altar, nor from a furnace, but from Cold Spine Village in the far north of the Nine Provinces—an abandoned village once sealed shut by wind and snow, where no cooking smoke had risen for three years. There, a girl named A He felt a warm fire seed among the ashes beneath a stove.
She did not know its name. She merely wrapped it in cotton wool, tucked it against her chest, and nurtured it with her warmth day and night. Three days later, the fire seed awoke, the stove kindled itself, and a pot of old rice cooked through, its fragrance drifting ten miles.
"The fire... came alive?" The old village chief knelt in the snow, tears streaming down his aged face.
But A He had already fetched a bamboo strip and inscribed three words with a piece of charcoal: "The fire awoke."
She hung the bamboo strip above the door and said, "I want to record how this fire came back."
That thought was like a star falling into water, its ripples spreading across the Nine Provinces.
The Firefolk Era was neither proclaimed by emperors nor ordained by an alliance. It began with the "will to remember fire," kindled spontaneously by millions of ordinary people.
- On Firefly Plain in the south, farmwives wove Fire-Pattern Cloth, embroidering the names of everyone in their households with luminous thread, with a note beside them: "On this day, in this month and year, our household's fire seed first burned."
- In Sand-Speech Town in the Western Region, storytellers stopped telling heroic legends and began telling Firefolk Stories instead—of how a youth from Ash Kiln Village used