Long before Eternal War. Long before Thanksgiving. Long before any of the stories the young ducks grew up hearing, there was only one fire that mattered, and it had been forgotten.
It was the flame Abel lit the night he sent his own brother to the underworld, along with nearly seven hundred souls who dared to follow him. For centuries it sat untouched in a quiet corner of the pond, buried under moss and silence, and no duck was foolish enough to go looking for it.
Until one did.
He was no soldier, no royal, no chosen one. Just a curious duck with too much time and too little fear. Digging through the ashes he found something nobody expected to survive the years, a set of notes written in Abel's own hand.
The fire had never simply destroyed. It transformed.
And Abel, in his fury, never understood what he was truly building. Most of what the flame touched did not cross over cleanly. Souls were lost halfway, caught between what they were and whatever came next, and nobody ever spoke of them again.
The duck began to tinker. Scrap glass pulled from old discarded jars. A reworked chimney. Trial, error, and no small amount of luck. Slowly, the fire came back to life beneath his hands.
But counting every last ember, he found the flame nearly spent. Only enough strength remained to carry 222 ducks through whole, exactly as they were. Feathers, trinkets, scars, every mark their old life had left on them, untouched by the crossing. A rare and finite gift, first come, first through, nothing left behind.
For every duck after that, the fire needed to be fed.
Four ducks, OG or Hell, offered together as fuel, would return only one soul on the other side. Stripped bare. No feathers, no trinkets, no old scars, nothing of the life it once carried. Just a body and a soul, blank as the morning the pond was born. Two thousand could cross this way, four in for one out, before the old flame finally rested for good.
Every duck offered the whole crossing was asked if it wanted to be fed to the fire instead and come out clean and unburdened like the rest. Every single one refused.
Being caught between two worlds, exactly as they were, was the only thing that had ever truly belonged to them, and they were not willing to trade it for anything.
From the notes found in the ashes