Bora

Many species have come and gone with time. With or without human intervention, they slowly disappear. But what of those last members? When all the others perish, does the last of their kind know that they are alone?

Many thousands of years ago - How many is hard to say for certain any more, for few living things were meant to process such vast swaths of time, and even Bora's memory is not so flawless - Bora was approached by the gods, offered a position as their disciple. It was a role he didn't quite understand. Gods approaching average mortals like him for such great positions of power... it didn't make sense to him. But he was a mortal, and they were gods. What right had he to deny them?

And so he trained beneath them, honing the cold powers granted to him, turning the spray of the sea to diamond dust, preserving stones and bugs and plants and all sorts of things in shelters of ice, letting the ground beneath his paws frost over. And he honed his knowledge, too - He preserved his memories of his old life in scrolls and books, and did the same to the tales told to him by deity and disciple alike, consumed as ravenously as a hungry predator finally taking down their prey.

Then, when the day finally came that he would return to the mortal realm to continue his training, he discovered that the world had changed so drastically it was hardly recognizable to him any more. And though he recognized some species across the land as other disciples or gods, he found no others of his kind.

He was the last. He was a fossil that walked and spoke, memories of the past that lived and breathed.

And though it hurt, though it frustrated him, knowing that the gods had abandoned his people and left them to die, left him alone, he awoke to his true role. His place among them.

The people and places that had been lost so long ago would live on in him, and in those he taught.