When the fire petered out in the early hours of the morning and the chill of the stone-walled chamber iced his skin and steeped its way into his bones, Rían shivered himself awake. With his breath escaping from his trembling lips in misty puffs, he crawled over to the large hearth a few feet away. Noting the dulling orange glow of dying embers winking under the piles of gray ash, he grabbed an iron poker that had been lying nearby and began to clear away the residue, hoping they weren’t already a lost cause. Once discovering more smoldering embers, his chattering teeth issued a celebratory smile before he grabbed a few logs from a pile along the wall and carefully placed them inside the hearth. After feeding the cinders with a few chips of dried bark that he had found lying near the wood s
