Legend XC – The Sparkwalker

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Once upon a time, there was a creature born neither as a dragon nor as an ordinary forest being, but from the last embers of a fire that no one knew how to guard. It was later called the Sparkwalker, but this name was only a faint echo of what it had once been, for names always come only when understanding is lost. The Sparkwalker lived in ancient forests crisscrossed by paved paths, remnants of a time when humans still believed they had to impose order on the wilderness. Its body was supple and powerful, covered in shimmering scales of green and blue, as if the foliage itself had learned to breathe, and beneath these colors glowed something deeper, a heat that did not burn, but remembered. His head was dragon-like, yet his eyes were watchful and wise, not cruel, but discerning, and when he opened his mouth, no destructive fire flowed from it, but a single, focused flame, like a thought that had smoldered within for too long. The Sparkwalker was not a hunter of the forests, but their guardian against oblivion. Where old paths ran, paths no one used anymore, he walked along them, breathing small fires onto the tree trunks with his breath, not to burn them, but to restore to them the memory of warmth. For trees, it was once believed, forgot first summer, then spring, and finally themselves. The Sparkwalker ensured that this did not happen. In the centuries when people began to see fire only as a tool or a danger, the knowledge of beings who lived with the embers without succumbing to them faded away. The stories of the Sparkwalker became rarer, then quieter, until they were passed down only as warnings against will-o'-the-wisps. But the Sparkwalker remained. He walked across the cobblestones of forgotten streets, his claws clicking softly on the stone, his tail trailing lines of warm air that intensified the scent of autumn leaves. Sometimes he encountered travelers lost in the forest, who later told of a dragon-like creature that guided them without ever approaching, and whose fire didn't burn but warmed. With each lost tale, however, the Sparkwalker grew heavier, his steps slower, his flame smaller. He could not recreate fire, only preserve it, and when no one knew what it had once stood for, even its embers began to flicker. On nights when mist hung between the trees and the forest seemed like a place outside of time, the Sparkwalker would stop and breathe his last warmth into the bark of a particularly old tree, as if he knew that something must live on there when he himself could no longer do so. Eventually, he was rarely seen. The paths became overgrown, the pavement disappeared under moss, and fire reverted to something either used or feared, but no longer understood.