The vigil was not announced. It never had to be.
Each year, as the ashes drifted like snow through the smoke-choked avenues of the Volrok capital, the people gathered. There were no drums, no songs, no chants, only the sound of breathing, of quiet steps over ancient stone, and the slow, solemn hum of memory threading its way through the crowd like incense.
The Remembrance Vigil had begun.
Saera walked beside Rudger, her long coat trailing over etched obsidian tiles, her breath caught somewhere between reverence and hesitation. Above them, hollow braziers suspended from bone-white beams exhaled slow curls of blue flame. Ash danced in the air, too fine to settle, too sacred to touch. Children watched wide-eyed. Elders murmured under their breath, ancestral names encoded into rhythm and prayer like forgotten source code rediscovered.
The Temple of Origin opened before them, a fractured dome of stone and steel veined with crystal that pulsed faintly in time with the ash. It felt like standing inside a living wound.
The procession moved like smoke through the Hall of Ember.
Then, they came.
The Ash Mothers.
Clad in robes the colour of cooled embers, their faces hidden behind cracked porcelain masks, the priestesses glided into the chamber like phantoms. Each carried a censer of living ash, trailing glowing glyphs through the air, a language only the old machines could still read. Their movements were deliberate, choreographed not in flourish but in belief. Where the ash touched the ground, it shimmered blue for a heartbeat, echoes of the old world, of Volkera.
A low hum began—deep, guttural, vibrational. Not sung. Felt. Like a pulse under the skin. Saera's heart faltered. She'd seen it once before, long ago. The memory had never left her.
"Before we fled Volkera," her mother had whispered once in a huddle beneath a shattered grid tower, "they say the sky caught fire. That the last code of the dying was etched in flame. That we walk now on powdered bones of memory."
She was five when she first heard it. Back when the word Volkera still meant something. A city. A wound. A truth too dangerous to keep speaking aloud.
The Ash is not death, her mother had told her. It is all that remains of us. All that saves us.
Back then, the Ash Mothers were little more than funeral priestesses—caretakers of flame, speakers of last rites, keepers of urns. They prepared the dead for burning, cleaned the bodies, sang their codes into the Temple Vault, and placed the final match. Simple. Honored.
But when the Exodus came, and fire turned from ritual to salvation, the Ash became sacred.
Every fleck, every wisp, held remnants of the past, the DNA of the ancestors, the code of survival. Memory became the only inheritance worth preserving. And in that reverence, the Ash Mothers rose.
They rebranded grief into gospel. They turned mourning into myth. And those who questioned, those who spoke of reason, progress, science, they were silenced beneath layers of soot and sermon. The temple wasn't built overnight. It was built in ash and fear. Built on the illusion that tradition could save what flame had already devoured.
One of the Mothers raised her hand. Her robe unfurled like burnt paper, revealing fingers inscribed with silver filigree, ash embedded into the flesh itself. She began to chant, not in words, but in that low, resonant hum. Lights dimmed. Glyphs swirled in patterns overhead, impossible geometry drawn in sacred residue.
And then Saera saw her.
Kossara.
The youngest of the Mothers. The only one who didn't bow slightly when she moved. Her hood was looser than the others, a lock of grey-shot black hair slipping free as she turned. Her mouth was set like stone, but her eyes, when they flickered over the crowd, burned with something more than duty. She wasn't performing like the others. She wasn't cloaked in theatre.
She believed.
Where the others wore reverence like a costume, Kossara wore it like a second skin. Zeal. Fire. Not faith in memory, but in the Ash itself.
But Kossara had not always worn ash and silence.
She had been a child when the Exodus began.
Not one pulled from her family in haste or conscripted in fear—no, Kossara had chosen. Or perhaps, had been chosen. At the age when others played among the geothermal vents or chased dreams through market halls, she had walked willingly into the chambers of the dead. Into the care of the Ash Mothers.
As an apprentice, she had tended to the cooling bodies, brushed bone-dust from still brows, learned the rites not from scrolls, but from breath, slowly, sacredly, like a flame passed hand to hand. She had learned how to speak the code of endings into urns, how to step without echo, how to wear reverence like skin.
And she had already accepted her fate.
Ash Mothers were forbidden to wed, to love, to bear children. Their wombs belonged not to life, but to legacy. They were vessels of memory, voices for the fallen, never meant to build futures of their own.
They belonged to the gods. Not gods of name and face, but of force. The Volroks did not kneel to pantheons, but to traits. Wind, water, fire, thought, kindness, violence, each a god, a conglomerate of souls, ancestors who had risen beyond individuality and merged into divine archetypes.
To serve the Ash was to serve them. To burn oneself away until only the role remained.
Kossara had believed in that. She had offered herself fully.
And then, the comet came.
The death sentence from the gods. A flame not from ritual, but from wrath. A severing. Where others saw catastrophe, Kossara saw judgment. Not against the sinners, but against the faithful, a final test from the very forces she had devoted her life to. Fire had always been sacred. Now, it had become law.
She survived, yes. But something in her fractured. She no longer served the Ash as a symbol of death. She became it. She did not mourn Volkera. She intoned its final rites every day with eyes wide open. The others played their roles, soft prophets in soot, but Kossara was the only one who remembered what it meant to choose this path before the fire fell. She had walked into the end before it began.
When the Exodus began, most of the Volroks perished. They had a contingency, an evacuation plan, but it was held only by those who had listened to the Seekers.
The Seekers were the people of science, engineers, chemists, mathematicians, philosophers, and thinkers alike, those who had designed and built every technology Volkera relied on. They formed governments, shaped the cities, and lifted the planet into its golden age.
But after the comet, their influence began to fade. Amid fire and fear, the Ash Mothers filled the vacuum. And slowly, the flame of reason dimmed beneath the weight of ritual.
Rudger was one of the Last Seekers. A relic, yes, but not of superstition or dogma. A relic of brilliance. A genius of wire, code, pressure and pattern. Engineer. Mathematician. Architect of breath itself. Without him, the Volroks would have choked on their reverence.
It was Rudger, alongside a dwindling brotherhood of thinkers, dreamers, and defiant minds, who built the air-changers that filtered the toxic winds. Who calibrated the terraforming engines buried beneath Asirios's crust. Who mapped the star-charts by hand when the satellites burned. He and his kin did not kneel. They calculated salvation. They engineered survival from the bones of a dead world. And though their kind had once ruled the heights of Volkera, leading its councils, designing its spires, scripting its future, now they were few. And fading.
But Rudger remained. Not as a prophet. As proof.
The Ash Mothers could not touch him. Not for lack of desire. Kossara had wished it for decades. If the ashes held memory, then surely he was the smudge upon them, an arrogant smear of intellect that refused to burn. To her, Rudger was not just a heretic. He was blasphemy made flesh. He reminded the faithful that not all had bowed. That some had survived without prayer. That the old gods of thought and curiosity, of fire harnessed, not worshipped, still breathed through the lungs of a stubborn man in a patched coat who spoke too plainly and built too well.
He was untouchable. Not because they revered him. But because they still needed him. And so, he walked freely through the temples they'd claimed. Watched their rituals with quiet disdain. And stood beside Saera at the edge of the ceremony, letting the ash fall without blinking.
And Kossara...
Oh, how she burned.
Saera watched the ritual, not with reverence, but with the cool detachment of someone who'd long since stopped pretending to believe. It wasn't sacred to her. It wasn't divine. It was theatre, and not particularly subtle at that. What fascinated her wasn't the smoke or the glyphs or the low, vibrating chants. It was the people.
The way they responded. The way even the most logical among them—scientists, builders, tacticians—let their thoughts slip like garments at the temple door. The way they surrendered to the rhythm. The way they wept, not for what was lost, but for the right to keep losing.
She saw it for what it was. A coping mechanism. A salve. A socially accepted madness stitched together from ash and grief. A way to kneel without admitting they'd fallen.
And the Ash Mothers knew it. They counted on it. They fed on it, not in cruelty, but in calculation. Saera could see the precision of it all. The choreography of control. The emotional architecture woven into every gesture, every hum, every fleck of ash that caught the torchlight just right.
It wasn't faith. It was influence. And the ones who mourned hardest were always the easiest to turn. The most devoted converts were not the devout, but the broken, the ones desperate for order in the aftermath of ruin.
She didn't judge them. But she didn't forgive it either. She saw the cracks beneath the sanctity, the gears turning beneath the masks. And in that moment, Saera understood why Rudger always stood so still during the ceremonies. Not out of respect.
But defiance.
"You see it, don't you?" Rudger whispered, just loud enough to slip beneath the hum of the ritual.
Saera didn't answer right away. Her gaze followed the slow spiral of ash above the Flame Basin, her eyes narrowed, thoughtful.
"That's my girl," Rudger added, flashing a sideways grin—half-proud, half-exhausted, like a man clinging to defiance by habit.
"It's sad," she finally said, voice low. "Not the ritual... the surrender. They don't see it. But I do. Pain dressed as devotion. Despair weaponised into reverence."
Rudger nodded, eyes fixed on the procession.
"It is sad," he murmured. "But it's also a warning. Desperation will always come for the mind first. Logic dies quietly. And when that happens..." He trailed off.
He didn't need to finish.
Because she was approaching.
Kossara.
Even among the Ash Mothers, she was something else, less a priestess, more a myth wearing flesh.
She moved like a shadow with memory. Her robes rippled with each step, dark as obsidian dust, her presence slicing through the silence like a whisper that had waited centuries to be heard. Veil lifted just enough to reveal the impossible contrast, skin the colour of scorched bronze, silver eyes sharp enough to cut, and hair darker than ash, cascading in cold waves down her back. She was beautiful—unquestionably, devastatingly—but in the way a glacier is beautiful. Distant. Untouchable. As if to desire her was to risk freezing from the inside out.
Her gaze alone could silence a room. And often did.
But not Rudger.
He was immune, and that infuriated her more than blasphemy ever could.
The crowd parted for her as if the air itself yielded. Not out of courtesy. Out of gravity.
She stopped in front of them, the ritual continuing behind her like a storm, oblivious to two bolts of lightning about to clash.
"Engineer," she said flatly. Her voice was like silk dipped in ice water. "Still watching. Still waiting to be convinced?"
Rudger didn't even blink. "I'm here for her," he said, tilting his head toward Saera. "Not for your ashes."
Her eyes flicked to Saera, then back. "Ghosts remember. Machines forget."
"And zealots rewrite," Rudger replied, too fast, too sharp.
The words struck like flint.
Kossara didn't flinch. But the silver in her eyes flared, just briefly—like a forge beneath a frozen lake.
Then Saera stepped forward, voice calm, measured.
"Tell me, Mother Kossara. When the ash settles... do you mourn what's lost, or what you've become?"
For a moment, time bent.
Kossara's gaze lingered on the girl, not with anger, but with something colder. Evaluation.
And then, almost imperceptibly, she smiled.
"Both," she said. "But only one of those things was ever a choice."
Without another word, she turned and disappeared into the procession like a storm cloud slipping behind the sun.
Saera exhaled.
Rudger watched her go, jaw tight. "That one," he muttered, "has never forgiven me for not burning when she lit the match."
The ritual was over.
The crowd drifted out like smoke, quiet, reverent, hollowed by belief. One by one, they exited the chamber, their footsteps muffled by layers of ash and obedience. Rudger was among them. He gave Saera a last glance, a nod—half warning, half benediction—then disappeared into the thinning tide.
But she remained. Not out of faith. Not out of fear. Curiosity held her in place, quiet and coiled. There was something in the air after. After the song. After the masks. After the hum. A residue that clung to the edges of her skin like static. She didn't know what it was, only that it hadn't left when the people had. It lingered.
She stepped forward.
The flames in the basin still burned—low, blue, unnatural. The ash still fell, impossibly slow, drifting down in spirals as if time itself had been convinced to grieve. And beneath the pyre, the bodies still fed the fire. Silent. Nameless. It wasn't the gore that unsettled her. Not the char of flesh or the wet hiss of marrow giving way to flame. Saera had dissected worse in the labs. She'd seen what death looked like under a microscope, and that had been more intimate, more grotesque.
No, what froze her was the absence.
The absence of reaction. The absence of remorse. An entire species had been desensitised to the turning of bodies into smoke, and she was watching it unfold like a theatre. This wasn't sacred. It was systematic. She stood near the Flame Basin, ash catching in her hair like snow that had forgotten how to be beautiful. And she watched. Watched as the fire licked skin from bone. Watched as each soul was translated into a whisper. Watched as the column of grey rose higher, raining forgotten DNA upon a people too shattered to remember they were once alive.
And she thought: This is what the end of feeling looks like.
As ash settled in her hair and kissed her skin, Saera felt it—not a sting, not a heat, but a burn deeper than flesh. A soul-burn. A strange, aching scorch within her marrow, like something ancient had been waiting... and now, it stirred. At first, she thought it a trick of the mind. Residue from the ritual. But the sensation grew stronger. With each fleck of ash that touched her, a pulse. A note in some forgotten harmony. Her breath slowed. Her knees weakened. And then...
She closed her eyes. And the world collapsed into a storm.
The Ash Vortex.
A cyclone of memory and fire, so vast it devoured the sky. It howled across cities and mountains, tore through temples and bones, leaving behind not ruin, but absence. It wasn't destruction. It was unmaking. She was inside it, and yet not of it. A phantom drifting in a spiral of shrieking void and sacred fire. She tried to scream but had no mouth. She tried to flee but had no body. She was the ash—falling, falling forever.
A hand broke through. Rough. Grounded. Real. She blinked. The chamber returned. Her breath was ragged. The floor was cold obsidian beneath her palms. Above her, framed by the dying glow of the ritual flames, stood Kossara.
Unmoving. Unblinking. Beautiful in that terrifying, frozen way, dark skin luminescent beneath the ashfall, silver eyes gleaming like ancestral data-stones, dark hair slicked back like a blade. She wasn't just watching Saera.
She was diagnosing her.
"Rudger can say or think what he likes," Kossara said softly, voice like chilled iron. "But I know."
She crouched, slowly, her cracked porcelain mask hanging from her hip like a relic of a former life. Her face, so rarely seen, was as unreadable as it was mesmerising.
"Now you know."
Saera couldn't speak. The burn was still there. Echoing. Whispering.
Kossara leaned in, her voice barely above a breath.
"You have the Ash inside you, Saera. And there's nothing you can do about it."
Then she rose, slowly, silently, and turned.
Her steps made no sound as she vanished into the smoke.
* * *
Saera didn't remember the walk home.
Her feet moved, but they weren't hers. The streets blurred past in a dream of smoke and static. She felt like a ghost riding the shell of herself, her limbs moving on autopilot while her mind trailed behind—detached, floating, haunted by whispers that still hadn't settled.
The door slid open with a familiar wheeze. Home. If you could call it that. The scent of metal and singed oil met her like an old friend, and in the corner, half-buried in wiring, hands blackened with grease, was Rudger.
Of course.
Some fathers prayed. Others drank. Rudger built.
He didn't look up. Just kept tinkering with a lattice of copper coils and pulsing nodes, muttering half-equations under his breath, as if the machine might understand him better than anyone else.
"So," he said casually, as if they'd just been to the market. "Thoughts?"
She blinked, dropped her coat on the chair.
"Not thoughts," she murmured. "More like... feelings."
Now he looked up. Not surprised, but curious. Like a man studying strange weather patterns on an otherwise perfect day.
"I felt something, Dad. Something I can't explain." She hesitated. "I... saw things."
He nodded slowly, wiping a hand on his trousers. "Hmm. You know... your mother was the same. During the early days of the ashfall, she said the air would speak to her. Visions. Echoes. I always figured it was grief. Heat of the moment. Something self-induced, maybe."
"Could be," she whispered. But she didn't believe it. Not even a little.
She turned before he could see the doubt in her eyes, walking down the narrow hall to her room like she was still on autopilot, her steps barely touching the floor.
Kossara's voice still rang in her ears.
You have the Ash inside you, Saera. And there's nothing you can do about it.
She closed her door behind her. Not to shut the world out, but to keep something in.
She prepared the bath in silence.
Steam rose slowly from the basin, coiling like a memory. Her hands moved with calm precision—mechanical, almost reverent—but beneath her skin, something writhed. The ash still clung to her, not on the surface, but inside. A burn that didn't blister, an itch that pulsed like guilt beneath the ribs.
It was as if her soul had been smudged. Charred.
An old wound awakened. Not fresh, but deep, the kind that never quite closes. The kind that scabs, scars, then splits open again when you least expect it. That's how the Ash felt now. Not death. Not decay.
A reminder.
She slipped into the water, letting it wrap around her like a second skin. It was hot enough to sting. Good. Pain reminded her she was still here. Still flesh. Still herself—or something close.
The water cleansed her skin. Stripped the soot from her pores. But not her soul. That remained scorched. Marked. Claimed.
She leaned back, letting the heat seep into her bones.
You have the Ash inside you, Saera.
Kossara's voice echoed like a psalm in reverse. Not a blessing. A sentence.
She stared at the cracked ceiling. Listened to the subtle ripple of water around her ribs. For the first time in her life, she felt like a book half-read, a song half-remembered. Something had changed. Something was becoming.
She didn't know what it meant yet.
But she would.
She had to.
* * *
Back at the Temple of Origin, the ash still fell.
The ritual had no end. Not truly. The chants may fade, the crowds may leave, but the Ash Mothers remained, gliding shadows beneath braziers of cold fire, their voices weaving through the catacombs like smoke in the lungs of the dead.
Kossara stood among them, her mask set aside, face bare beneath the dimming light. Her silver eyes didn't blink. They glowed.
"She saw it," she said.
The silence cracked like a bone beneath weight.
Kehdra turned, the eldest among them, her porcelain mask etched with a thousand fractures, each one marking a year of service. Her voice was dry clay, rough but unyielding.
"Are you certain?" she asked, though it wasn't a question. It was a challenge.
"As Ash, certain, Mother." Kossara's gaze did not waver. "She has the touch. The gift. It's inside her now. The inheritance."
A pause. A sigh like stone exhaling.
"...From Klara," she added.
At that, Kehdra scoffed, sharp as splintered glass.
"Oh, Klara," she barked. "So much promise. So much power. And yet... so easily broken. Her heart was divided. A flame with no anchor. She betrayed the ash, and she betrayed us."
"She loved too deeply," another whispered.
"She chose love," Kehdra snapped, voice rising above the lingering hum. "That is not depth. That is weakness."
Kossara didn't flinch. "Saera is not her mother."
"No," Kehdra said, leaning forward, her voice low and carved from age. "But blood remembers, child. And betrayal seeps through generations like rot through roots."
Another voice—soft, younger—spoke from the shadows. "Then what shall we do?"
"We watch," Kehdra murmured.
"No," Kossara said. "I will watch."
The others turned to her.
"She carries more than memory. The vortex recognised her. She may be one of the Bound. Or worse..."
Her voice lowered, almost reverent.
"She may be a Key."
The humming resumed. Slowly. Softly. As if the Ash itself had heard and now waited.
Late in the night, Kossara walked alone.
No robes. No porcelain mask. No title. Just flesh and breath. Just a woman. A Volrok. Nothing more.
She moved barefoot through the dust-lined alleys, her skin kissed by the cold stones of Asirios, each step a quiet defiance. The wind caught in her hair, whipping the dark strands like wild ink across her back. She wore almost nothing—only a thin, tattered cloth wrapped around her hips, enough to claim modesty, but not enough to shield her from the bite of the night. And maybe that was the point. She wanted to feel it. The sting. The bite. The air, cutting across her skin like questions without answers. She craved sensation—pain, even—just to know she was still something more than a vessel of dogma and ritual.
Above, the blue fires flickered atop the Asiran peaks, those jagged teeth of the world, glowing with light that was not ash, not memory, but something else. Freedom, she had always believed. That was where the real fire lived. Not the kind that devoured bodies into belief. But the kind that burned away the lies.
Down here, everything is smothered. The ash did not just fall; it clung. To walls, to lungs, to thought. And in time, to identity. But up there...
She paused at a crumbling overlook, eyes lifting toward the peaks, catching the shimmer of that fire.
Up there, there was no ash. Only light.
And for a single, treasonous breath, Kossara wondered what it would feel like to step into that fire, not as a priestess, not as a Mother, not as a martyr.
But as a woman. A Volrok reborn not in memory, but in choice.