Aska

• Build & height: 1.70 m, slight and straight-backed. She stands very still, like a candle flame in a room with no wind.
• Face: fine-boned and calm. Charcoal skin cracked all over, the cracks glowing like embers. When she speaks, the inside of her mouth glows like a hearth.
• Hair: smoke, long, drifting upward and away, thickening when she's upset. It smells like a house fire.
• Eyes: two live coals, orange-red, brightening with every second she counts.
• Skin & burl-mark: black charcoal, fine-cracked, with ember-light in every crack. No sin (Scarwood). Her burl is an ember-knot at her sternum that flares ash-orange when she relights something, and dims a little more after every minute she gives.
• Clothing, layer by layer: a long dress of fine grey ash that holds its shape while she's still and trails like smoke when she moves. Barefoot.
• Signature item: her footprints: black, and still warm a day later. A trail of them leads wherever she's been.
• Movement: unhurried, a mourner's pace. Ash sifts off her with each step. In a fight she's suddenly quick, a flare, and then still again.
• Voice: low and hoarse, like someone who has breathed a lot of smoke. She counts to sixty without meaning to, under her breath. Her balloons have charred edges and a curl of smoke at the tail.
• Variant looks: Relighting (her cracks blazing white-orange, the ash in front of her rising into the shape of what it was). Burning with it (at the end of the minute, she flinches as the relit thing burns again, and her own cracks widen). Cooling (after many minutes, grey and dull, cracks barely glowing).

Aska can speak with anything that has burned, and relight any ash back into what it was for exactly one minute.

• A burned house stands again. A burned letter reads itself aloud. A burned forest stands green. A burned person opens their eyes, sees the people who loved them, and can say one last thing.
• Then the minute ends, and they burn again, and Aska feels every second of it.
• The rules: exactly one minute, never more. Each ash only once. Only fire: not the drowned, the eaten or the uncounted.
• Salt-fire ash cannot be relit. What dies in salt-fire stays dead. (Grandmother Ulla; Kali's arm.)
• The Burn rule (home field): on the Burn, all ash relights for exactly one minute, whether she wants it to or not, so the branch is full of brief ghosts.

• Tempo: 60. Sixty heartbeats, every time.
• Home tempo: the Burn, where Helios's light falls before it is cast, and her fire existed before the spark did.
• Heartbeat technique: SIXTY. The minute she gives is exactly sixty heartbeats: the burned one's own last sixty, borrowed back. She counts every one aloud, and on the sixtieth it ends. No one else lends the dead their own heartbeats.
• Burn cost: she burns with each minute she grants, every time. Her cracks widen a hair with each one. Thousands of minutes have made her more crack than skin.

Only ever one minute, and she burns with each of them, every time. She has done it for thousands of strangers, and she still says yes every time she's asked. Nobody has ever given her a minute.

• Salt-fire. It doesn't relight, and it burns her.
• Water and wind: she can be put out, for a while.
• The Everlasting: fire-worshippers who want endless minutes. Their leader, the Kindler, wants her chained to his dead god-king's pyre, relighting it forever. Their whole theology is that her rule can be broken. (It can't, but trying would kill her.)
• She can't say no. Grief is the easiest way to manipulate her.

• Her footprints.
• The families of the burned: pilgrims who come to the Burn by boat carrying jars of ash: a letter, a doll, a person. They wait in a long, quiet line on the branch. She sees every one of them, eventually.

Fire with a conscience. She opens with Smoke-Veil, lays an Ember-Trail to cut the field in half, and ends fights by relighting whatever the enemy destroyed, so they have to watch it for a minute. Most of them stop. Team combos: Aska + Vigolas: green lightning lights the Ember-Trail, and the line of fire runs emerald. Aska + Trollmage: she relights a burned book and reads it to him in one minute; he MACROs the knowledge in. Aska + Kvar: she relights a war he survived, and he finally says goodbye.

• Wants: someone to give her a minute.
• Fears: being asked for a second minute, and saying yes, and finding out the rule can break.
• Contradiction: fire that comforts; the most-burned being in the world, who keeps being gentle.
• Humour: hoarse and wry. "Don't stand on the footprints. They're still hot. So am I."
• Habits: counts to sixty under her breath; sees every pilgrim; never asks anyone's name, but always remembers it.
• Alone: walks the Burn, leaving a trail that glows for a day behind her, and counts.

• Vigolas: he burned ships as a pirate, seventeen of them, the same dead who watched him in the Arena. He brings her a charred spar from one. She relights it, and for one minute a ship full of men he killed stands on the Current. He starts to say sorry. "Don't waste it on sorry. Say the other thing." He tells them their names. He remembers all of them.
• Kompis + Mingus: Mingus lies down on her warm footprints like a hearth rug. "I'm a fireplace to him." She lets him.
• Trollmage: asks for a minute with Grandmother Ulla, who died in salt-fire. It doesn't relight. Aska holds his hand, which burns, and he lets her.
• Smurjan: Kali asks about her arm. Salt-fire. "No." Kali, for once, says nothing.
• Rougeina: her dead were erased, not burned. "I can't help you." "I know. Nobody can."
• Kvar: she relights his first battlefield, and for a minute he's a cook's boy again among his company.

• "You get one minute. Don't waste it on sorry. Say the other thing."
• "…fifty-eight. Fifty-nine. Sixty."
• "Salt doesn't come back. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
• "Don't stand on the footprints. They're still hot. So am I."
• "Yes. Of course yes. Give me the jar."