The bells of Verrath tolled unevenly that morning, their cracked bronze throats coughing against the fog. From the upper windows of the Grand Archives, Selena Virell watched the smoke of the city drift along the canals like wounded ghosts. The dawn had no color — only a dim gray light that smeared across the rooftops, revealing the slick sheen of oil on the water and the faint, ever-present scent of alchemical smoke. Verrath was decaying, but beautifully so; its bones were carved from marble and iron, its veins thick with the canals that had once carried trade and now only whispered of disease.
Selena sat at her worktable in the restoration hall, her hands steady despite the tremor in the world beyond. The scroll before her was brittle, a map of ancient coastlines inked in fading crimson, the edges singed by time. She breathed carefully, letting the dust settle around her fingers. Each movement — a slow brush of sealant, the placement of silk backing — was ritual. Her peace lay in precision.
Outside, the cough of a passing barge echoed through the mist. The sound of chains. Distant laughter. Verrath never truly slept; it merely turned over in its sickness.
She dipped her brush again and said softly to no one, "You'd have hated this quiet, Mother."
Her voice was little more than breath, but the name Mother carried a shadow. It clung to her even here, beneath vaulted ceilings lined with forgotten banners. Lira Virell, the alchemist who had defied the Guild. The woman who'd turned ash into glass and nearly turned the city with it. It had been ten years since the Ashing Plague first took hold — ten years since Lira vanished in a storm of fire and smoke, leaving her daughter behind.
Selena had been sixteen. She remembered the screams. The smell of metal and burning hair. The way the city had whispered her name afterward like a curse: Virell's daughter. The ashborn.
Now she wore plain archivist robes, her hair tied back, her face kept down. She catalogued, she repaired, she pretended to belong among men who muttered when she entered a room.
Her mentor, old Brann Halvek, shuffled toward her through the haze of dust motes. "You'll ruin your eyes, girl," he rasped, dropping a stack of codices on her desk. His spectacles caught the candlelight like twin coins. "You work past the bells again."
Selena smiled faintly. "The silence helps me think."
"The silence," Brann said, "is when you hear the things best left unheard."
He gave her a long, knowing look — not unkind, but weighted. Brann had been her only advocate when the Guild had wanted her expelled. He had found her a place among the archivists, arguing that the sins of the mother did not stain the daughter. Still, even he could not shield her from rumor.
"Have you heard?" he asked, lowering his voice. "Another flare at the docks. Two men found turned to dust. The Guard says the plague's dead, but…" He gestured vaguely, his fingers shaking. "Ash on the wind again."
Selena paused. "That's not possible. The Ashing can't—"
"Can't return?" He smiled bitterly. "In Verrath, everything returns. Even the dead."
He left her then, muttering about mold and humidity. Selena watched him go, then turned her gaze toward the tall, leaded windows. Outside, the fog pressed against the glass, thick and shifting. Something in the light had changed — a faint shimmer, as though motes of silver were falling with the mist. She reached out, drew a circle in the condensation with her finger.
A flake of something pale drifted down and settled on the sill.
She leaned closer.
It wasn't snow.
It was ash.
.....
The evening bell tolled.
The archivists extinguished their candles and filed out, their silhouettes swallowed by fog as they crossed the iron bridge toward the market square. Selena stayed behind under the pretense of inventory. When the last footsteps faded, she let out a slow breath and moved among the shelves, her lamp throwing long shadows against the walls. The scent of vellum and decay clung to her clothes. She liked it — the smell of old stories, of things that endured when the world did not.
She found herself in the restricted wing, where the Guild kept sealed tomes — those deemed "unsafe for public study." One, in particular, drew her as it always did: a black-bound ledger with her mother's insignia burned faintly into the spine — a six-pointed star within a circle. She wasn't allowed to touch it, not even to dust it, but tonight the rules felt distant, unreal.
Her fingers hovered over the cover.
"Still chasing ghosts, are we?" a voice said from the doorway.
She flinched. Sergeant Alen Korr, the Guild's appointed guard, leaned against the frame, his gloved hand resting casually on his pistol. His uniform smelled of smoke and rain. The man smiled with too many teeth.
"Didn't mean to startle you," he said. "Though it's odd, isn't it? Staying late. Poking around in forbidden shelves."
"I was inventorying," she replied, forcing her voice even. "Brann assigned—"
"Brann's long gone home." Korr's smile didn't reach his eyes. "You should too. The Guild doesn't like Virell blood near its secrets."
She said nothing. His gaze lingered, unpleasant and searching, before he finally shrugged and stepped back into the fog.
Selena waited until his footsteps vanished before she dared to move again. Her pulse thudded in her throat. She turned the lamp down, unwilling to draw more attention, and pressed her hand briefly to the black-bound book's spine.
The leather was cold — unnaturally so, but she felt it's enough and took her hands off
.....
By the time she stepped out into the night, Verrath had become a painting of shadows. Lanterns burned low, their glass fogged with soot. The canals glimmered with an oily rainbow sheen. The wind carried a soft hiss like sand pouring through fingers.
She drew her cloak tight and started toward her quarters near the riverbend. The city murmured around her: whispers behind shuttered windows, the rasp of oars, the distant clang of chains being drawn across the harbor gates. Somewhere, a cat screamed and went silent.
She passed a line of sickened beggars crouched beneath the aqueduct, their skin dusted faintly gray. One of them looked up at her with empty eyes. "Ash comes for all," he murmured. "Even the clean."
She kept walking.
The bridge to her street was half-collapsed; she picked her way carefully across the tilted planks. Her reflection wavered in the black water below. Pale face, dark eyes, the faint smudge of soot on her cheek. For a moment she thought she saw movement beneath the surface — a flicker of light, like something glowing far down in the depths but when she blinked, it was gone. "I'm getting too paranoid."
By the time she reached her door, her hands were trembling, though from cold or unease she couldn't tell.
Inside, the little apartment was as she'd left it: stacks of scrolls, a single cot, a half-dead fern. The air smelled faintly of ink and salt. She hung her cloak, lit a candle, and tried to ignore the strange dust drifting against the window. It was heavier now, fine gray flakes swirling through the fog.
"Just ash," she whispered to herself. "Just the chimneys."
But deep down, she knew better.
....
Later, as she sat with her tea cooling beside her, she opened her mother's old locket — the one thing she hadn't pawned. Inside was a faded sketch: Lira Virell, sharp-eyed and smiling, her hair pulled back in the same severe style Selena wore now. Beneath it, a tiny engraving in alchemical shorthand: The fire remembers its form.
Selena traced the words with her thumb. She wanted to hate her mother for the plague, for the ruin, for the legacy that had turned her life into a quiet exile mbut the hate never came. Only the ache of not knowing why.
Why she had done it.
Why she had vanished.
Why Verrath still whispered her name.
She stepped back, breath shallow. The candle wavered again, its light thinning as though drawn outward.
Selena stood in the middle of her small, dim room, listening to the city exhale. In the distance, the harbor bells began to toll again slow, uncertain, like a warning.
She extinguished the candle and lay down without undressing, eyes open to the ceiling, watching the faint gray drift through the cracks in the shutters. Her last thought before sleep claimed her was not of her mother's experiments, nor of the Guild's suspicion.
It was just of her tired, boring circle of a life.
And far above Verrath, unseen beyond the fog, the ash continued to fall like snow.