Year eighteen of the Firefolk Era, the spring equinox.
A Ya retired into seclusion.
She told no one, leaving only a lamp at the end of the Light River Corridor. Beneath it lay a plain letter bearing three words: "I've gone home."
She returned to where it all began—Gray Ridge Village.
The little mountain village had once been laid waste by the Dead Ash Marsh, then revived when the sparks rekindled. Now a new pavilion stood at its entrance, named the Lamp Guard Pavilion. A fire burned within it all year round, tended in turns by the village's old and young. As cold gave way to heat and heat to cold, the villagers gathered there to roast sweet potatoes, brew tea, and tell tales of old. The firelight shone on their faces as though illuminating a thousand years of memories.
A Ya moved into the old schoolhouse at the far end of the village. An ancient locust tree stood before it, with a stove beneath its branches that she had built with her own hands.
She no longer wore the crimson-patterned robes of a Starfire Envoy, nor did she carry the fragment of Heartfire Jade. She tied on a coarse cloth apron and rose each morning to fetch water, split wood, light the fire, and cook. She taught the village children to read, light lamps, cook porridge, and bake flatbread. She taught them how to cook a pot of rice over the smallest flame, how to keep a stove fire alive through the night, and how, on nights of wind and snow, to place a lamp in the most visible spot on the windowsill.
"Grandma Aya," a five-year-old boy asked, holding a little oil lamp, "if I light a lamp, can I be a Lamp Guarder too?"
A Ya stroked