Chapter 7

A memory opens at Eisen's home, where Heiter spots a pair of graves and learns they belong to the dwarf's family, lost when demons once raided his village. The priest kneels to pray, prompting a debate on what waits after death. Eisen believes the dead simply become dust, while Heiter insists they ascend to Heaven, and Frieren admits she doubts any of it, since no magic can render a departed soul visible. Himmel shrugs that it hardly matters either way. Heiter argues that Heaven ought to exist because no one who fought so hard to live deserves to become nothing, and the whole party, Eisen included, bows their heads for his kin.

In the present, twenty-eight years after Himmel is gone, Frieren and Fern travel to the Bredt Region in the Central Lands to call on Eisen, who is praying at those same graves. When Frieren offers her help, he leads the two to the Voll Basin in search of the Great Mage Flamme's lost notes, records said to describe conversations held with the dead.

Eisen explains his purpose along the way. He finds it sorrowful that Frieren never told Himmel she wished to know him better, and he hopes the writings might let her say so directly. Frieren dismisses talk of speaking with the dead as a fairy tale and claims she no longer wants to meet Himmel, but Eisen counters that every form of magic began as a fairy tale, and that he too longs to hear about the Hero. After days of searching, the trio finds an enormous tree swallowing a set of ruins, both wrapped in a powerful barrier.

The sight stirs a recollection from a thousand years past, when Frieren's master Flamme nurtured a tiny sapling and foretold it would shield the place for a millennium. Flamme warned her young apprentice that she would one day commit a grave mistake and yearn to understand people, and urged her to return here to be guided. As the memory fades, the barrier lifts on its own and the great roots part to expose a doorway where Flamme's notes hover, already open to the very page Frieren needs.

Eisen reveals to Fern that Frieren was Flamme's finest pupil, which is why the writings respond to her. The notes recount how Flamme journeyed to the continent's northernmost reach and reached Aureole, the realm where departed souls find rest, to converse with her fallen comrades. That paradise lies in Ende, the frozen region now occupied by the Demon King's Castle. Eisen presses Frieren to seek it out and finally speak with Himmel, and she accepts despite dreading the brutal cold around the castle. The chapter marks Flamme's first appearance and notes that dwarves, like elves, seem to treat thirty years as a brief span.