It was the hottest summer on record in Hasslet when I was born. It had been 30 years since the God war and the changes wrought since they departed this world. Record keeping for tracking the changes was still a bit of a novel thing, since the seasons started running themselves.
Now though, dead in the middle of August, it was *Hot* and the air was so heavy and humid some the Waters claimed they could swim though the air. A few feared for the rice harvest, but for the fact those same waters were pulling the moisture from the air and the river to help keep the paddies at the right level.
My mother was of the warrior cast,  She was something else with a naginata at that time and was seriously annoyed at being unable to do her duty to the Kasai clan. She was rather sore, gravid, and out of breath with me and unable to be out and active as she would have liked. By the time the heat wave came, it sapped the last of her strength and made her frankly miserable in the last weeks of pregnancy.
My father was also a warrior, but was often out: trying to put down lowmen and some of their nearby enclaves, or keeping the peace in the city. We lived just outside it, in an estate community of genasi, and most of them were part of the Kasei clan or related to its function. It was nicknamed Kasai village as a result.
When mother went into labor on the 15th, it was evening and father was still on patrol in the city. A messenger was dispatched for him  to come attend his wife, the midwife summoned, and the braziers and lamps were lit. The evening was had not seen the heat abate and it was stifling, even for the fires who attended the redheaded genasi mother to be. She cried out and sweated and complained that she *Burned*; 'an impossibility,' the attendants thought.
But as the night wore on it seemed the heat only grew as the braziers around them grew brighter and the fire in them danced as if in celebration, and the flames of the lamps bent, as if craning to see around their fixtures and watch the birth taking place. They say Father seemed uneasy at the sight when he joined his wife in the last hour of labor, taking her hand in his and telling her to concentrate on her breathing. Finally, mother's drawn out pain at last came to a head with one final anguished cry as the shrill voice of her daughter joined her.
The attendants whispered excitedly to each other at seeing the child before the midwife silenced them with a look, cut the cord, and carefully washed and swaddled the new babe.
The panting and tired wife, who had taken a break from crushing the (non sword) hand of her husband, now squeezed tight again with a wince from him, as she picked up on the midwife's thoughtful mood. Asking what was wrong in a hoarse voice.
"Nothing is wrong." the elder woman said, "She is a healthy baby girl, You have a daughter, Lady Kasai, and already she burns brightly.." she whispered as she presented me to my parents, a soft, white face peeking thought the blanket, and a crown of thin white fuzz. In sharp contrast to my parents deep olive tones and fiery red hair
The flames told me later that my father looked askance from me to my mother as if in doubt I was his, but my mother was too exhausted to notice as she smiled in that manner only a mother can for her first child, and coo at me.
After a while she passed me to him and he took me, a little apprehensive, as mother drifted off. "A rare thing," said the aging midwife, as if sensing his doubt. "I've helped with hundreds of birthings, but she is, and likely will be, my only pure expression. A Pure Flame." She nodded to me "She is yours Lord Kasai, but, you can always tell how hot a flame by looking at it. There is a blaze in her and embers in the rest of us." Understanding washing over his features as he looked at me in a new light while the old lady clucked lightly.
The sun rose to an occluded sky, painting the morning clouds  with red and pinks, the tall columns awash with the color of fire, and later in the afternoon a summer rain washed away the heat wave, but some of the elders still say that the heat of the hottest summer in Hasslet yet, had actually broken in the predawn with the cry of a newborn genasi girl.