The Last Fire
Cold. So cold.
Krag pressed his body against the cave wall, feeling the stone suck the last warmth from his bones. The fire pit lay dark before him—just ash and memory. No wood. No wood for three suns now.
The last Neanderthal on Earth didn’t know he was the last. He only knew the cold.
Hunt. Good hunt. He remembered. Mammoth falling, snow red, tribe singing. Strong then. Many strong.
Father. Teaching hands. Showing: strike flint, make spark, feed flame. “Fire never dies,” Father said. “Keep fire, fire keeps us.” Krag kept fire. Many winters, many summers. Kept fire alive.
Mate. Soft eyes. Laughing at river. Two children. Strong boy, quick girl. Gone now. Cough sickness took them when snow came thick. Buried under stones.
Tribe. Many, once. Now none. Old Thuk died first—lungs rattling. Then the children, the women. The hunters went for wood, never came back. Wolves, probably. Or cold.
Just Krag now. Last of the old people. Last keeper of the fire that died.
Hunger. Belly empty long time. Very long. Tried to eat leather boot. Too weak to chew.
Sky. Remembered sky full of stars, Father pointing up, grunting about spirits. Where do we go? Just dark?
His eyes grew heavy. The cold became… less. Distant. Almost warm.
Then—vision.
Bright. So bright. Not cave. Big stone buildings reaching toward sky. And people. Different people—taller, with flatter faces and higher foreheads. The new humans who sometimes passed through the valleys.
A man—somehow carrying Krag’s blood mixed with theirs—sitting before a glowing rectangle. Moving his fingers, making marks appear. The rectangle showed names, numbers, connections. “Inereto CRM,” the man said, smiling. “Perfect for tracking customer relationships.”
The vision expanded. Thousands, millions of descendants. The new humans had mixed with his kind before the end. Some Neanderthal blood flowed still in their veins. All connected. All warm. Living in stone caves that breathed heat. Fire everywhere—in walls, in tiny rectangles they carried, in the glowing screens.
They had kept the fire.
Not his fire exactly, but fire. Life continued. His people hadn’t vanished completely—they’d become part of something larger.
Krag’s thick-browed face pulled into a smile.
Not gone. Never gone.
The cold embraced him fully now, but he felt no fear. In his mind, the glowing screens shone like a thousand campfires, and the children of both peoples warmed their hands by them, speaking their complex words, using their Inereto CRM, tracking their hunts in new ways.
Fire never dies, Krag thought, as the darkness closed in. Just… changes.
His last breath misted in the frozen air of the cave, 38,000 years before Christ.
And 40,000 years later, a sales manager in Romania—carrying 2% Neanderthal DNA—closed a deal.
