He woke to the sound of whispers. It was not the sound of men, but of the world itself—the soft, ceaseless hiss of ash sifting against the canvas walls of the tent. For a long moment, he lay still, listening, adrift in the pre-dawn gray. Around him, the other ashborn were little more than lumps of shadow under threadbare blankets, their soft breathing the only proof of life in the cold, still air. The scent of old smoke and settled dust was the only scent he had ever known.
From a nearby tent a deep, wet cough began, a rattling, desperate sound that spoke of lungs slowly turning to stone. Rhus. The sound of the ash-lung was the camp's true morning bell, a grim promise of the fate that awaited them all.
Rising, his bare feet found the familiar, shocking cold of the rough wooden pallet. Each movement was a familiar routine, executed in the shared silence of the exhausted. The coarse, heavy linen tunic pulled over his head, its weave perpetually stiff with coal-stain and grime no matter how often it was washed. The worn leather strips wrapped around his calves, the bindings a comfort he always cherished. The softened boots that felt more a part of his feet than a covering for them. Lastly, the cloth scarf, wrapped securely over his nose and mouth. It was less for the cold and more for the ash. The ash was always there. It was in the air, in the water, in the food. It was the substance of their world.
Outside, the world lay draped in shades of gray, like an unfinished sketch left in the rain. The Burn Field stretched in every direction under a sky the color of old iron, a permanent, twilight gray that offered neither the hope of a true dawn nor the peace of a true night. It was a garden of rust and bone, a landscape of breathtaking desolation.
The skeletal remains of ancient, city-sized war machines, now called Velgriths by the laborers, slumped on the horizon like the carcasses of forgotten gods. Closer, the ground was a nightmare of twisted metal, where the shattered hafts of spears grew like withered reeds and the breastplates of forgotten soldiers bloomed from the earth like metallic fungi. He took a path around a patch of ground marked by a ring of blackened stones—an Echo Cyst, the elders called it, a place where the memories of the dead were said to be so loud they could drive a man mad. He didn't know if it was true, but he wasn't foolish enough to find out.
He moved toward the trench lines where a familiar, broad-shouldered shape was waiting. Fen. The old man's beard was silvered with a fine layer of blackened residue, but his eyes, when they met Xieren's, were clear and steady. He offered a short, sharp nod.
"Xieren," was all he said.
"Fen," he replied, the name a puff of warm air in the cold. The words were an anchor, a quiet affirmation that they had both survived another night in this graveyard.
They stepped down into the trench, the gritty earth crunching under their boots. His shovel bit into the pale top layer, peeling it back to reveal the grim archaeology beneath. Here, a splintered piece of an Embered shield, its steel still faintly smelling of ozone and scorched earth. There, the delicate curve of a rib cage, pierced by a Tidegrave flechette coated in a dull, venomous-looking patina. Their work was twofold. First, they salvaged. Any piece of armor, any length of unbroken steel, was tossed into a barrow for the Factions to collect raw materials for their endless, grinding wars.
Then came the remembering. Each discovery was handled with a reverent care as they searched for the small personal tokens the elders called "memory triggers"—a tarnished ring, a sigil-stamped buckle, a scrap of embroidered cloth that had somehow resisted decay. He collected these in an oilskin pouch, his lips moving silently, forming the words of the ashborn creed: Clean the field, feed the fire, silence the past. It was their sacred duty. They were the undertakers of a war without end.
Hours dissolved into the methodical scrape of shovels against metal and bone. A cold wind swept across the field, lifting the ash in ghostly, swirling spirals. He paused, squinting into the gray haze, and a flask was silently passed into his hand. He drank from Fen's waterskin without looking, the liquid shockingly cold and tasting of metal, then handed it back. Xerien gave a quick nod as a thank you.
The barrow-wains groaned into camp, their wooden wheels churning the ash. They carried fresh dead from the endless skirmishes that still flared up in the contested outer zones of the field. The drivers were hooded, anonymous figures who unloaded their grim cargo as a scheduled routine and were gone again before the bodies had even begun to cool.
He and Fen joined the others, carrying the dead to the preparation area. The task was to strip them of their armor and weapons for the Faction forges. It was here that the nature of their world was laid bare. He saw the defiant snarl frozen on the lips of a Maulkin raider, her body a canvas of tribal tattoos, an axe still clutched in her hand with a grip death had not loosened. He saw the cold, serene face of a Hollowborn infiltrator, a thin, almost invisible garrote wire coiled at his belt. He saw the shock in the eyes of a young Tidegrave hunter, a tiny, barbed dart still embedded in her neck. He felt the weight of their stolen stories, a burden of silent witness that settled heavier on his heart than any corpse on his shoulders.
The work bell's bronze voice cut through the ash-thick air, calling them back from their grim chore. Lunch came around. Thin broth, tasting vaguely of turnip and marrow, served from a communal pot. He and Fen sat on a fallen log, the companionable silence broken only by the scrape of their spoons in the wooden bowls. The conversations around them were sparse, functional—a broken tool, a collapsing trench wall, a rumor of an Embered patrol spotted near the western ridge. But his own mind was elsewhere, drifting toward thoughts he couldn't quite grasp.
The afternoon work resumed with the muted groan of weary bodies rising, tools in hand, as if answering a summons from beneath the earth. Xieren and Fen returned to the trenches, their boots following the shallow grooves carved over years of repetition—paths so ingrained they felt like the natural contours of the land itself. The sun, though unseen behind a lid of permanent ash, had clearly climbed. The wind had shifted as well, now carrying a faint, acrid bite that made the back of his throat burn.
They passed Sector Hollow 6, an area cordoned off by rusted wire and char-stakes driven into the soil. The ash there was darker, clumped, and oddly magnetic. Fen cast it a sidelong glance but said nothing. No one worked Hollow 6. Not anymore. Whispers claimed it was a testing site for early iterations of the Factions' Oryn experiments—failures, mostly. Ground where even ash wouldn't settle, and tools warped after a day of use. Others spoke of an old Ascendant relic buried beneath the surface, a crystalline engine that had pulsed once, centuries ago, and never again. Xieren had never asked. In the Burn Field, some truths were worse than ignorance.
In the next trench over, a pair of younger ashborn, a wiry boy named Kess and a broad-shouldered girl named Mora were sifting through a pile of shattered helmets and melted breastplates. The remnants were still warm. Steam curled from the wreckage like breath. Whatever battle had birthed these remains was no more than a few hours old. The Burn Field was vast, but never still.
"Bet this one was a Maulkin charge," Mora muttered, brushing aside a half-melted sigil with her boot. "Only they're dumb enough to run into Embered lines with nothing but brute force."
"Dumb doesn't mean wrong," Kess replied. "Some of them make it through. Enough to keep trying."
Fen grunted from a trench away. "That's not bravery. That's recursion."
Xieren blinked at him. "Recursion?"
"A pattern that feeds itself," Fen said. "A loop. Doesn't end unless something breaks it. Usually a neck."
The rest of the day passed in monotony—until a low, thrumming vibration rolled beneath their feet, shaking loose dust from the trench walls. All motion ceased. Everyone froze, heads swiveling toward the northern sky. Far off, over the ridgeline, a bright flare of light ignited—too slow to be lightning, too deliberate. The shimmering core of it pulsed with unnatural rhythm.
Xieren watched as the light twisted into a spiral, a controlled burst of Oryn energy—a signal. Not for them, but for Faction eyes. None of the laborers spoke, but all understood. Something had just died out there, or worse, something had been born.
Fen wiped his brow with a soot-blackened sleeve. "That's the third one this month."
"They're getting closer," Xieren said.
"Or the field's getting smaller."
The day's haul was lighter than usual—scrap was becoming harder to find, even in the deeper trenches. Xieren noticed that more bodies now came stripped of valuables. Someone upstream in the system was skimming the loot before it reached them. The idea sparked a quiet, bitter anger. Even in death, the ashborn were second-tier scavengers.
After the final pyre-loading, Xieren took a detour on his return to the tents. He skirted the edge of an older sector, long since abandoned. Here, the land sagged, craters filled with black water that refused to evaporate. Scavenger rats—the only native life in the Burn Field, scurried between mounds of wreckage, their eyes reflective and far too intelligent.
A decaying husk of a war-clad Velgrith loomed over the marsh. It had been shattered in half, its upper torso collapsed into the bog. In one skeletal arm, a rusted greatsword still jutted into the mud like a broken monument. Xieren stood at its base, staring up at the silent behemoth. He had seen it since childhood, but today he lingered.
They say the Velgriths had once walked—living engines of war, powered by entire villages worth of Oryn users tethered together. He couldn't imagine it. The scale of it. The cost. But the evidence towered before him.
He reached into his pouch and removed a small, bent sigil pin—a family crest no one would ever claim. He pressed it into the ground at the base of the blade. A tribute. Pointless, but necessary.
When he returned to camp, the sky had deepened to a sickly plum-gray, and the familiar sounds of evening had begun—the scrape of boots, the murmur of exhausted voices. The mess line was shorter tonight, faces missing that had been there that morning.
Pushing through the tent flaps, he entered the communal space where lanterns swayed gently with the wind. Shadows danced across the canvas walls, stretched thin and wavering like ghosts too restless to leave. Fen sat near the center, hunched over a worn sickle, sharpening it with slow, steady strokes. The blade wasn't for battle—it was for stripping copper wire from old wrecks. Even their tools were meant for scavenging.
As Xieren approached, Fen spoke without looking up. "Rhus didn't move today. Didn't even come out to say good morning."
Xieren lowered himself onto the crate beside him. "I heard."
"Means it's close," Fen muttered. "He'll be gone who knows when."
Xieren said nothing. There was nothing to say. Everyone knew what it meant when someone stopped coughing. That rattling noise was the body's last fight. When the coughing stopped, it was because there was nothing left to fight with.
Fen finally looked up, eyes ringed in soot and sleeplessness. "I used to think the fire would take me. Some blaze in the trench. Quick and loud."
He shifted, the sickle resting across his lap. "But lately…" he shook his head, voice low. "Lately I think it'll be the quiet. Just slipping away one night. No one noticing. No name. No fire. Just nothingness."
He stared into the lantern light like he was trying to see the end of something that had already begun.
"Like Rhus," he said.
"Gone before the camp even misses him."
Xieren swallowed. He wanted to say something, to reassure—but there was nothing he could offer that wouldn't feel like a lie. So he just sat there, beside the man who had raised him, and let the silence stretch.
Eventually, Fen rose and disappeared into the night, leaving Xieren alone with thoughts too heavy for words.
Darkness crept across the Burn Field like spilled ink, not the clean darkness of night but the gray-black of a world that had forgotten what true light looked like. The air grew thick with the day's accumulated scents—sweat-soaked leather, the metallic bite of old blood, the ever-present taste of ash that coated everything, even the inside of his mouth. In the distance, cooking fires began to bloom like small, defiant stars, their smoke adding another layer to the suffocating atmosphere.
That night, as Xieren lay on his pallet, sleep did not come easily. The curling smoke, once a quiet companion, now seemed to whisper things he couldn't quite hear. He turned toward the tent wall and stared at the faint outline of a spider-crack forming in the canvas seam. The world was splitting.
He thought of the trial that promised freedom.
Of Elia.
Her face.
Her Love.
Her Touch.
He turned away from both thoughts and toward the darkness, seeking refuge in dreams that refused to come.