Around 2776 SD, six centuries before the present, the Neferati crossed north out of their peninsula kingdoms and raised a city on the Needle—the narrow promontory that commands the Tarkhon Strait from both shores.
They did not come empty-handed. Priests carried sacred fire north from the Flame of First Fire in Yaif, oldest of the Eternal Flames, and kindled it in a cathedral at the new city's center. That flame is the Evertorch. It has not gone out since.
The choice of ground was cold and exact. Hold the Needle and you hold the strait; hold the strait and you tax the trade that crosses half the world. The founders built Tarkhetan on the chokepoint and grew the empire outward from it, leaving behind the trade-fealty bonds and the processional forms that every later dynasty would keep without quite understanding them.
What the founding meant to the Neferati and what it became are no longer the same thing. The line that raised the city thinned into humanity across three centuries and lost the throne at the Severance. The Kingdoms of Fire still date their grievance to this act. By their telling the fire was not given to Tarkhon but lent to it, carried north under promises the human emperors have neither kept nor openly refused. The flame in the cathedral still burns with the character of Yaif's, and any Neferati priest who stands before it knows whose fire it is.