Fernling Whist was a halfling hedge-recorder from a village south of Grendenheim who survived the World Fire (10 BSD) and spent the next forty years setting down what she had seen and what other survivors told her. Her account is raw and untheoretical. It is the one detailed record of how the burning touched a living halfling community, a subject the grand chroniclers pass over in a sentence.
What she recorded
She wrote in plain village idiom and took no interest in causes. The heat came first, she said, days before anyone saw a flame. It arrived as a dry pressure that cracked the lips and emptied the wells, and the older people read it as a drought breaking the wrong way. Then the sky took on a color she never settled a word for. Brass, she wrote one year. The inside of a coal, she wrote another. Livestock would not lie down, and the birds left and did not come back.
When the fire reached the valley it did not behave the way fire behaved. A banked hearth could climb the wall and take a roof in the time it took to call for water, while a torch carried out to read the dark would gutter and die in a still room. People learned to trust no flame, including the ones they had lit themselves. Fernling lost most of her family in a single night. She recorded it in two sentences, then went back to writing down what the neighbors had seen.
The aftermath fills the longer half of her record. The ground in the worst-touched fields held its warmth for years, enough to feel through a boot sole on a cold morning, with nothing left alight to account for it. Some plots grew nothing and then grew too much at once. She tracked which families left and which stayed, where they went, and how the spared villages rationed what the fire had not taken. Her interest stayed on the people. The why of it she left to others, and the others mostly never asked.