FOrging Ash of the Beloved
Book One: Air and Ash and All We Lost
By Jesse Annette
Posted: Aug 13th, 2026
Approx. Length: 1.8k words
Daria
Three nights after Austra fled, the Zephyrian assault struck exactly where the war plans had predicted. Daria led the Crosswinds into the fight with a ferocity that scraped her hollow. Darvin held her left, Varn her right, Rill at their backs. They moved like a single organism, efficient, ruthless, devastating, four bodies sharing one instinct to survive, protect, end it.
The battle lasted for hours. The GPR took heavy losses. But the Crosswinds survived. Barely. Rill’s shoulder shattered. Varn cracked two ribs. Darvin earned a permanent scar across his forearm. Daria bled from a gash over her brow that refused to clot, blood sliding into her eye until everything blurred red at the edges.
They lived anyway. They drove Zephyra back through the tunnels, herding soldiers into choke points and collapses, trapping them between falling stone and a volcanic vent that exhaled heat like a living throat. It was brutal. Necessary. Unforgiving. The kind of victory that tasted like ash. When the last Zephyrian soldier fell, Daria stood amid the ruin, panting, blood dripping down her chin, and one thought cut through the noise like a blade: Austra saved us…And I told her to go.
The Priestess demanded a report the following afternoon. Her voice struck like flint against bone. “Where did the intel come from?”
Daria didn’t hesitate. She didn’t give her mother Austra’s name. She didn’t offer up truth tangled with betrayal, love tangled with lies. “A contact,” Daria said evenly. “We lost them in the tunnels. I don’t know their name.”
The Priestess’s eyes narrowed. Suspicion glittered there, sharp, hungry. Then she accepted it, because she wanted to move on. Because she could taste weakness in Zephyra’s retreat and she wanted to bite. Within days, she shifted the entire strategy toward counterattack. Toward escalation. Toward more dead bodies that would be called necessary. Daria watched her do it and felt something in her go cold and steady.
Darvin asked the question Daria had been waiting for. They sat on the medic cavern steps, both wrapped in bandages, both silent for a long time. He didn’t press the way he could have. He waited until Daria’s breathing stopped sounding like pain.
“What happened with Austra?” he asked at last, voice low and careful.
Daria closed her eyes. She couldn’t say it. Not all of it. Not that Austra had begged her to believe in peace. Not that Austra had shaken in her arms. Not that Daria had kissed her like she loved her. Not that she had screamed at her to leave. Not that Austra had come from Zephyra. Not that she had been a spy. Not that she had been a lover. Not that she had loved her.
Daria offered the only pieces she could speak without splitting open. “She got the war plans from Commander Lavista.”
Darvin went rigid. “And then?”
“I told her to leave,” Daria said, so quietly it barely counted as sound. “And she did.”
The silence that followed could have cut skin. Darvin exhaled and shifted closer. “Did she do something?”
Daria’s throat tightened. “…She lied to me,” she said. Darvin’s face softened in a way that made Daria want to break something. Sympathy had never felt so dangerous.
“What kind of lie?” he asked.
Daria forced her shoulders straight. Forced her voice into the shape of command. “The kind you don’t come back from.”
She kept her gaze on the stone wall in front of them because if she looked at him, she would give something away. A tremor. A crack. The truth crawling up her throat.
Darvin stared into the cavern shadows for a long moment. Then he said, very quietly, “She loved you.”
Daria’s breath stopped. “Don’t.”
“She did,” Darvin said again, like he was setting something down gently and refusing to let Daria pretend it wasn’t there.
“And look how that ended,” Daria snapped, too sharp, too fast. The words came out like a wound lashing. Then she bowed her head, jaw clenched until it ached. “I don’t know where she went.”
“You want to find her?”
Daria didn’t answer at all.
Later, after casualty reports and post-battle rotations, after securing the tunnel mouths and stationing guards outside the Priestess’s chambers, Daria finally returned to her quarters. She closed the door. Locked it. Leaned her weight against it until her legs gave out. She slid to the floor and stared at the empty room where Austra had slept beside her for months. Where she had whispered jokes against Daria’s neck until Daria laughed despite herself. Where she had kissed Daria like she was something holy. Where she had said I love you like it was both a gift and a blade.
Daria didn’t cry easily. It wasn’t in her nature. But her breath cracked anyway. A single tear hit the stone. Then another. Her shoulders shook.
“I hate you,” Daria whispered into the silence. “I hate that you lied. I hate that you left. I hate that I still…” Her voice broke. She pressed her forehead to her knees and wrapped her arms around herself like she could hold the pieces in. “I loved you,” she whispered. The air in the room shifted, just slightly, just enough to feel like a hand brushing past. Then it went still again.
A month after Austra’s exile, the rebellion began looking to Daria more than it looked to the Priestess. Her commands held. Her strategies saved lives. Her decisions shaped Pyronous whether she wanted that responsibility or not. She rebuilt defense lines. Reorganized supply routes. Planned fortifications. She worked until her fingers cramped around ink quills. Worked until dizziness forced her to sit with her head between her knees. Worked because if she stopped, if she let silence settle, she would think about Austra. She could not afford that. But grief didn’t wait for permission. It crept into cracks. Into quiet breaths. Into moments she forgot to guard.
Once, Darvin caught her standing on the lookout ledge where she had kissed Austra countless times, staring at the horizon like it might give something back.
“She’s alive,” Darvin said gently.
Daria didn’t answer. Because she knew. She felt it in the wind that curled strangely in certain caves. In the way air shifted against her skin like a memory that refused to die. In the way her breath hitched whenever footsteps sounded almost right and she hated herself for the hope that followed.
One night, alone, she pressed her fingers to her lips, remembering the taste of wind and want, and whispered, “I hate you. I miss you. I wish…” Her voice cracked. “Gods, Austra…” Only silence answered.
So she went back to work. Back to war. Back to leading a rebellion she now carried like a weight lashed to her spine. But sometimes, rarely, when the wind brushed her cheek unexpectedly, soft and warm, she closed her eyes. And for a moment, only a moment, she let herself remember what love had felt like.
Over the next six months, she tried to outrun the question of Austra. She couldn’t. Zephyra regrouped. The Torch Collective grew bolder. The GPR splintered under pressure. Daria fought on three fronts with Zephyra’s border patrols and assassins, the Collective’s reckless violence, and her mother’s tightening grip. Blood, vengeance, the Queen’s head, and increasingly the demand that Daria be the hand that delivered it. Daria refused. Quietly at first. Then openly.
Darvin backed her. The Crosswinds backed her. More commanders began backing her too. Whispers started, leadership shifts, strategy coalitions, a faction that wanted peace. Whispers the Priestess didn’t miss. Whispers she didn’t forgive. Pressure tightened around Daria like a noose. Every day she argued with her mother. Every night she met with Darvin and the Crosswinds to craft plans that weren’t built around mass graves, plans that bought time, carved space, searched for any path that didn’t end with Pyronous drowned in its own blood.
She stayed upright through it all on discipline and fury. And loneliness. Gods, the loneliness. Every morning she woke with the ghost of Austra curled against her. Every night she reached across the bed for a presence that wasn’t there. Every time she felt the ache of moments that would never happen now, it hit like a fresh wound.
When Darvin brought her evening tea one night and found her sharpening a blade with too much care, he watched her hands for a long moment and then said, “You’re not okay.”
Daria didn’t look up. “We lost people,” she said. “We will lose more. I don’t have time to be okay.”
Darvin sat across from her. “You loved her.”
The blade nicked her thumb. A single drop of blood fell onto the stone.
Daria’s mouth tightened. “I loved the person I thought she was,” she said. “Someone who told jokes to hide her pain. Someone who fought like she had nothing left to lose. Someone who looked at the world the way I wanted to be able to look at it.” She wiped the blade clean. “That person didn’t exist.”
Darvin’s fingers brushed her wrist, gentle. “Maybe she did.”
Daria’s throat closed. She swallowed hard. “Maybe she did,” she whispered. “Maybe she didn’t.”
She didn’t know which answer hurt worse. Her memories had become weapons. She kept cutting herself on them: Austra laughing at her, challenging her, kissing her like she saw the woman Daria could be. Austra whispering that peace was possible. Austra crying after Mika. Austra saying I love you with a voice so wrecked it still lived in Daria’s bones. Daria missed her so much some days she felt sick. She was angry at herself for missing her. Angry at Austra for leaving. Angry at fate for letting her love someone she was always going to lose.
Some nights she woke with her hand under her pillow, fingers curling around a folded piece of paper she didn’t admit she still kept there. Some nights she whispered, “I regret you all the time.” Other nights she whispered, “I don’t regret a single thing.”
Both felt true. Both hurt. Nothing eased. Nothing healed. But the rebellion needed her. So she armored her heart. Sharpened her strategy. Led her squad. And tried…gods, she tried…to build the future Austra had wanted. A future with peace in it. Even as she whispered into the dark, too quiet for anyone to hear: “Why did you leave me? Why haven’t you come back?”
Only the mountain answered, rumbling like grief. Deep in the smoke and cinders of Pyronous, Daria Cross still dreamed of the wind that once tangled with her fire, and cursed the memory for making her heart burn.
© 2026 Jesse Annette. All rights reserved.
Forging Ash of the Beloved 
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