FOrging Ash of the Beloved
Book One: Air and Ash and All We Lost
By Jesse Annette
Posted: July 30th, 2026
Approx. Length: 3.7k words
The Airship — Austra
The cargo hold was cold and unfamiliar. The kind that seeped into bone instead of skin. The kind that made the world feel far away. Austra curled between two crates, knees drawn to her chest, arms wrapped tight around herself like she could keep her breaking pieces from sliding apart. The ship groaned as it climbed, wood and metal sighing beneath her, but she barely heard it. Her ears were still full of Daria’s voice: Get out. Don’t come back. Don’t come back. Don’t come back.
The words looped like a melody turned jagged, a lullaby made of broken glass. Austra pressed her forehead against her knees and exhaled a tremor. She had thought she knew heartbreak. She had thought she knew fear. She had thought she understood what it meant to lose something. She had been wrong.
This hollow, aching grief felt bigger than the volcano she had lived above most of her life. Bigger than the whole sky sprawled outside the hull. Bigger than every lie she had ever told or been told. It felt like she had been scraped out from the inside and left behind as an echo.
Everything has turned to ash, she thought, and her throat tightened. And I didn’t even get to say goodbye.
A sob choked through her. She clutched her chest like she could hold her heart in place. Her voice cracked, barely a breath. “I didn’t get to say anything right. Not once. Not when it mattered.”
Her mind played the morning on repeat: Daria rolling awake, warm and soft. Daria frowning at her worry, suspicion rising like smoke. Austra saying I love you too late. Daria’s eyes filling with fury and heartbreak. Daria shoving her away. Daria shaking like she would combust.
And the worst of it…the sound from the hall. That strangled, broken sound she heard after she left. The moment Daria shattered in private, the moment Austra knew she had caused a wound she could never repair.
Austra pressed both hands over her mouth, trying not to cry loudly enough for the crew to hear. The tears came anyway. Hot and endless, sliding down her face, soaking into her clothes until she started to shiver. A tide she couldn’t stop.
“Daria,” she whispered, voice unraveling. “I’m sorry.” She swallowed hard, tasting salt and failure. “Gods, please let her be safe. Please let all of them be safe.”
She didn’t know who she was praying to. She didn’t know if she had any right to pray at all. But she pressed shaking fingers to her lips and whispered names like offerings.
“Daria… Darvin… Varn… Rill…” Her voice broke. “Mika.”
Grief doubled, sharp and gutting. She had wanted to protect Mika. She had wanted to protect them all. And instead everything she touched fell apart. She curled tighter in the swaying shadows of the hold, the scent of pepper root and cinnamon sharp in the air, her ash forged dagger clutched in her hands, and wondered if she would ever breathe again without it feeling like shards.
She had run from the life her mother forced on her, straight into a life she hadn’t believed she deserved. And now she had neither.
“I wanted it,” she whispered, tears sliding along her jaw. “I wanted them. I wanted her.” The words dissolved into a sob. “I had every chance to tell her sooner. I had every chance to choose her sooner. I had every chance to…”
Her breath hitched painfully. She couldn’t finish. She had lost everything because she waited too long to choose love over fear, devotion over survival, truth over the lie she had been raised to live inside. What if I was finally becoming something good, she thought shakily, and now it’s gone before it could begin?
The airship creaked again. Austra let her head fall back against the crates, eyes burning, chest hollow. “I’m sorry,” she whispered to the wooden rafters. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
The ship swallowed the words whole. Exhaustion dragged her under eventually, but sleep didn’t soften anything. Nightmares followed her into waking: Daria pinned beneath rubble Austra couldn’t lift. Daria looking at her with cold, distant eyes. Daria whispering, I never knew you at all. Mika dying again in her arms. Her mother ordering her execution. Daria’s voice, relentless: Don’t come back.
Her magic surged in her sleep, uncontrolled. Gusts rattled the airship’s frame. When she woke the first morning, she woke crying. Sobbing, shaking, clutching her knees while wind burst out of her in frantic pulses, as if her body was trying to tear itself free of grief by force. She cried because she had lost Daria. She cried because she had betrayed her. She cried because she had loved her too late, too truthfully, too painfully. She cried because there was no going back…no Zephyra to return to, no rebellion to beg her way back into, no Daria to forgive her.
She had only wind. Only guilt. Only the ghost of Daria’s mouth on hers, and the echo of Daria’s final words. And the hold stayed cold. Indifferent. Unmoved by the way her chest kept breaking open.
By the time the airship finally dropped her near the Amber Coast, she barely felt her feet hit the ground. The world smelled like salt and trade-ink, and none of it meant anything. She kept walking anyway. Because stopping meant hearing her own thoughts. And her thoughts still sounded like Daria.
Elaria — Month One
The first month away from Pyronous felt like a smear. A stretched, blurred, meaningless stain of time in which she woke up each day a different version of broken. The Amber Coast was a sprawling trade region where no one asked questions as long as your coin didn’t stink. Austra moved through it like a ghost. New cities. New corners. New shadows. New beds she never slept in twice. She rationed what little she had left: a few minted Zephyrian coins, some extra daggers, a coat two sizes too big. Every night she promised herself she would stop moving long enough to breathe. Every night she failed. Every time she paused, she heard Daria. Get out. Don’t come back.
Her chest seized. Her breath stuttered. Her feet kept moving. She did not let herself cry where anyone could see. She slept in alleys, in boiler rooms beneath taverns, in abandoned watchtowers overgrown with salt-bloom. When she slept, it was shallow and stolen and haunted by the sound she heard in the hallway…the moment Daria broke. Every morning she woke with her heart cracked open all over again.
Austra hated being alone. She was terrible at pretending she wasn’t heartbroken, and the wind remembered Daria even when she tried not to. Every time she used her magic, she felt the echo of Daria’s fire, the dance they had perfected in combat, the heat they had shared beneath magma-lit vents, the way their powers had intertwined as naturally as breathing.
In a fog-choked skyport called Emberwell, she overheard two merchants talking…GPR held the northern ridge…Daria Cross led the charge…Stone-hearted, that one…Beautiful, but deadly.
Austra’s breath failed. She paid for her drink and left without a word.
Some nights she dreamed of Daria’s hair tangled in her fingers. Some nights she woke gasping. Some nights she did not sleep at all. Her life became a series of airships, border towns, knife jobs, and cold beds. She told herself she kept moving so the Queen’s spies couldn’t track her.
The real truth was simpler. If she stayed anywhere too long, she started hoping Daria might walk through the door. She wouldn’t. Austra knew that. Grief didn’t care.
On a roof with her knees pulled to her chest, she whispered her nightly prayer into the wind. “Be safe,” she breathed. “Lead well.”
The wind curled around her cheek. It felt like a kiss. She cried until sunrise.
She remembered quickly what it meant to be alone again. Pickpocket or starve. Lie or lose shelter. Flirt or freeze. Smile or get noticed. Disappear or die. She fell back into old habits, things Zephyrian handlers had carved into her until they felt like reflex. She hated how easily it came back.
She stole from a noble caravan, slipping through shadows with her heart barely beating. When she ran, she felt nothing. No thrill. No fear. No guilt. She wished she felt anything.
She found herself in taverns more nights than not. Cheap smoke. Sticky tables. A sea of strangers she tried to drown in. She flirted with women who smiled back because she needed to feel something other than grief. Needed hands on her, mouths on her, someone’s breath against her throat so she wouldn’t remember Daria’s breath there.
The first time she took a girl upstairs to a rented room above a bar, she froze the moment the door closed. The laugh was too loud. The eyes the wrong shade. The hands too eager. The wrong kind of warmth. The girl kissed her anyway. Austra kissed back. And all she could think about was Daria…Daria’s weight pinning her to the mattress, Daria’s breath at her ear, Daria’s voice whispering her name like it meant something holy.
She left the girl asleep and went downstairs to drink herself senseless. She did not remember the rest of the night.
Austra stopped trying to be anything. She drifted from city to city like smoke. Hollow-eyed. Quiet. She forgot what her voice sounded like unless it was hoarse with drink or strained from nightmares. She replayed the fight so often she could recite it, every word, every scream, every flare of Daria’s hands.
She replayed the good moments more. Daria sparring with her in the tunnels. Daria murmuring tired, soft confessions against her collarbone. Daria’s hair loose after missions, falling into Austra’s hands. Daria laughing, gods, laughing, when Austra teased Darvin. Daria rolling her eyes at finger guns. Daria kissing her slow in the dark. She missed her so violently she couldn’t breathe some days.
She missed Darvin too, his dry humor, the way he softened over time. Missed Rill’s snorts when Austra made a joke. Missed Varn’s quiet loyalty. Missed Mika until it felt like guilt carved into her ribs. She wondered if they were alive. She wondered if she should have gone back. Then she heard Daria again…Don’t come back…and her hands shook so badly she spilled half the drink she’d stolen.
She ended up staying that night above a stable in a cheap harbor town. The room smelled like hay dust and spilled ale. The walls were thin. The wind howled at night. She hadn’t bathed in too long. Hadn’t eaten enough. Hadn’t cared enough to do either. Some nights she stared at the ceiling, sleepless, eyes burning, replaying Daria’s face in the morning light, the last moment before the eruption. Daria had looked terrified. Furious. Aching. Austra touched her own chest, right where Daria used to rest her hand when she fell asleep. The emptiness there felt like an open wound.
Rumors drifted through markets. Zephyrian scouts seen along an eastern ridge. Smoke rising from volcanic caverns. Shifting borders. She ignored them. Or tried to. Because every rumor felt like a knife pointed at the Crosswinds. At Daria.
She prayed every night. To every god. To none. “Keep her alive,” she whispered into her arm, choking on tears. “Keep them all alive. Please.”
She didn’t ask for forgiveness. She didn’t think she deserved it. She only asked for Daria to live long enough to never look at her like that again. Some nights, when the wind was loud enough to swallow her sobs, she whispered, “I should be with you. I should never have run. I should have died beside you.”
In the dark, with a stolen blanket pulled tight around her shoulders, she murmured into the empty room, “I don’t know who I am without you.”
No one answered. The wind rattled the windows. And Austra broke again, silently, too tired to pretend she was anything other than lost.
Elaria — Month Two
Austra didn’t feel alive enough for days to count. Guilt had settled in her bones. Grief had become a second skin. She kept running. Another ship dropped her at the edge of the Rosebone Coast. She moved inland, then south, then west again, anywhere that felt like it couldn’t possibly touch Zephyra. Anywhere that felt too far for Daria’s voice to reach. Though, it always reached. Every quiet moment, she heard the molten snarl, Get out. Don’t come back. And beneath it, softer and more ruinous, the sound that followed when she left. The breaking.
She slept an hour or two at most. When she did sleep, she dreamed of Daria pinning her against a wall, angry and beautiful and firelit. Then the dream always turned: Daria walked away. Or vanished. Or died. Austra woke choking on her own breath. So she kept moving, because stopping was worse.
In Port Kessaline, she got trapped in a bar brawl she started. It began with a drink. Then another. Then a third, poured by a barkeep who flirted too easily. Austra flirted back because it was reflex. Because she wanted to stop thinking. She pushed a stray curl behind the woman’s ear. She smirked. She whispered something suggestive. Her stomach twisted. The woman’s eyes weren’t golden. Her voice didn’t drop into a gravelly murmur when she was angry. Her hands didn’t shake with barely-contained fire. Austra kissed her anyway.
Then someone at the bar made a comment, crude, unnecessary, careless. Something about her being “Zephyrian pretty.”
He didn’t know it was true. He didn’t know he had ripped open a wound she’d been trying to cauterize with liquor. Austra snapped. She slammed her glass into his face. He swung back. Chairs toppled. Glass shattered. Someone screamed. Austra fought with wildness she usually saved for missions, grief with fists. When she stumbled outside, blood on her knuckles, the barkeep’s number was scrawled on her wrist. She stared at it for a long time, then scrubbed it off in the nearest fountain until the ink smeared away.
She found work quickly. Rogues always did. Swift feet. Soft hands. A talent for vanishing. She took contracts, never assassinations, never that, just infiltration, lock-popping, information retrieval. The kinds of jobs she’d done before she believed in anything. Before Daria. Sometimes she completed them flawlessly. Other times she got sloppy. Distracted. Caught. She always escaped, but each close call frayed her more. Some days she told herself she didn’t care if she lived or died. Some days she believed it. Those days hurt less. Which somehow made them worse.
She stopped keeping track of the women she slept with. Tavern girls. Dock workers. Mercenaries. Traders who smelled like smoke and salt. Sometimes they came to her. Sometimes she chose them. Sometimes she didn’t care either way. She kissed them to forget for a few minutes. She touched them to remember she had a body. She let them touch her because she was so tired of feeling cold.
But every time a woman leaned in, her heart lurched. Every time someone whispered her false name, it felt wrong. Every time someone moaned, she heard Daria instead…the low, dangerous sound she made in the dark when she finally let herself feel. Austra always left too early. Always before dawn. Always before someone could reach for her again. And she always walked away blinking back tears. Because none of them were Daria.
Austra barely recognized the woman she had become. She didn’t feel like a soldier. Didn’t feel like a spy. Didn’t feel like the woman who used to wake to Daria’s warmth every morning. She felt like smoke. Like someone who had burned away something vital and only realized it when it was too late.
Rumors traveled faster than ships. She heard more whispers: Zephyrian troop movement. A failed raid. A stalemate near the volcanic rim. An explosion under the caldera. Rebels holding. Rebels losing ground.
Austra shoved those rumors aside with trembling hands. She didn’t let herself listen. Didn’t let herself ask. Didn’t let herself hope…it hurt too much. If the Crosswinds were gone, she didn’t want to know. If Daria was dead, she didn’t want to breathe. She numbed herself. With drink. With fights. With work. With strangers. With motion. With exhaustion. Nothing quieted the truth. She missed them. All of them. Daria most of all.
One night she pressed her face to her hands and whispered, “Please be alive. Please. I’ll stay away. I promise. Just…please be alive.”
The wind didn’t answer. Austra cried anyway, silent, desperate, breaking.
Elaria — Month Three
Austra stopped noticing when days blurred into nights, or nights blurred into fights, or when she stopped caring whether she woke up at all. She had been unraveling for who knew how long now.
She moved through cities like a spirit too angry to haunt one place. She drank until the world softened at the edges. She slept with strangers until she stopped remembering names. She fought anyone who looked at her too long. Sometimes she won. Sometimes she stumbled into an alley with a split lip and bruised ribs and laughed like it meant nothing. She was reckless. Volatile. Lonely in the way only the heartbroken were lonely. And she was so, so tired.
She lost it in a tavern in Shaletide, a smoky den full of thieves and mercenaries and sailors trying to forget something. Austra fit right in. She downed drink after drink, body half-numb, mind buzzing with the same ache…Daria. Daria. Daria.
A woman put a hand on her thigh. Austra didn’t even look before she dragged her into her lap and kissed her. The kiss was sloppy. She barely felt it.
Then a man made a crude and stupid joke. Austra snapped. She slammed her glass into his face. He swung back. Chairs toppled. She fought brutally and sloppily, nothing like the precision Daria had drilled into her. Her balance wavered. Her footwork slipped. She didn’t care.
A knife flashed. She ducked too late. A gash bloomed across her shoulder. By the time she staggered outside, bleeding and breathless, city guards were already there. Austra tried to run. Her body forgot how. They caught her easily. And for the first time in months, she didn’t fight.
The jail cell smelled like mildew and stale sweat. She lay on the stone floor, shoulder throbbing, head pounding, and did not cry. Did not move. Did not speak. Her cellmate broke the silence eventually. He was old in the way rogues got old, wiry, sharp-eyed, missing teeth, every scar a story he didn’t bother to tell twice.
“You’re either stupid,” he said, “or heartbroken.”
Austra didn’t react.
He tapped the bars. “Heartbroken. Figures.”
She turned her face away. Over the week she spent in that cell, he spoke, and she listened without meaning to.
“You drink like you’re trying to drown a ghost,” he said once.
“You fight like you want someone else to finish the job,” he said another time.
On the third day he slid half his stale bread her way. She ignored it. On the fourth day he forced it into her hand. “Eat,” he said. “Your self-pity’s boring.”
On the sixth day she finally spoke. “What do you care?” Her voice was a rasp.
He shrugged. “Don’t. But you’re not gonna make it to next month like this.”
“I don’t care.”
“You will,” he said simply. “Or you’ll die. Either way, not my problem.”
That evening he muttered, almost kindly, “You’re not cursed. Just broken.”
Austra swallowed. “No difference,” she murmured.
He shrugged. “One heals. The other doesn’t.”
She didn’t answer. She wasn’t sure she believed either.
On the day that the guard came to unlock the cell, the old rogue pressed something into her hand, a small, crude token carved from dark riverwood, etched with a mud-smeared sigil.
“Go to Blackmud,” he said. “Tell him Ruud sent you.”
Austra blinked. “Who’s Blackmud?”
“A man who pays well,” Ruud said. “And doesn’t ask questions.”
“…Why are you helping me?”
He smirked, showing his missing teeth. “Because you look like someone who used to care about something. People like that make interesting choices.”
Then he leaned closer, eyes glinting. “And because you look like somebody who’s running from a woman.”
Austra went still.
His smirk widened. “Knew it.”
She slid the token into the opposite pocket from where she kept her Crosswinds token. When she stepped out of the jail, the sun was too bright. The world was too loud. Her heartbeat felt too heavy. She wandered to the docks and sat on a crate, staring at the sea. She didn’t think. Thinking hurt. Instead, she made a decision. A clean, sharp decision she had needed for months. She would box it away. Seal it shut. Bury it deep. Forget Pyronous. Forget Zephyra. Forget the rebellion. Forget the Crosswinds. Forget the woman she loved more than air. Forget the nights wrapped in warmth and fire. Forget the sound of her name in Daria’s voice. Become someone else. Someone who couldn’t be shattered again. She stood. Her legs trembled, but they held. Her fingers curled around Ruud’s token in her pocket.
“No more mistakes,” she whispered to no one.
Then she walked toward the lower docks, toward Blackmud’s rumored den, toward a future built not from love, but from survival. From what was left of her. From who she needed to become.
© 2026 Jesse Annette. All rights reserved.
Forging Ash of the Beloved 
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