Cinder Heart

An inn with a fire that never needs a log, on a road where winters kill. Travellers sleep there and wake more tired than they lay down, and stay another night. Behind the flames, eyes open.

It is a drove-road tale and a winter tale. An inn, or a kitchen house, or a refuge on a high road, is famous for its fire: it has burned all winter without anyone seeing wood go on it, the chimney is warm in August and the whole lane gathers there when the frost comes. The host is generous and urges travellers to stay, and they do, for they sleep there more deeply than anywhere and wake without rest, craving the warmth. Dogs will not lie by the grate. Somebody who went down for more ale is not seen again.

What lies in the hearth, those who have seen it say, is a furnace that is alive: a great heart of blackened plate split by glowing seams, chimney-like horns, many ember eyes, an upright mouth and long red tongues, with roots and flues running out through the walls and floors and down into the foundations, and tentacles that reach up through the grate. It does not move from where it is. The house is its body, and the host and the regulars are its servants, who keep the fire, guard the cellar and talk travellers into staying. The Brethren hold that it feeds on warmth and on the strength of those who sleep near it.

The sign the tales give is a fire that burns without being fed, in a house whose people grow thinner each winter while its fame spreads.

As witnesses describe it

A living furnace filling an inn's great hearth: a mass of blackened armour cracked with red light, rows of glowing eyes, a tall burning maw and thick tentacles spilling out across the tavern floor among the benches. The second picture shows its exposed core down in the cellar foundations, roots and tentacles twisting through the stonework.