From Autumn To Ashes The Fiction We Live Novels & Stories

Be peaceful. She clutched her journal. It felt hot, angry. It rejected this place. She reached the well. Looking down, she didn't see water, she saw a swirling, pearlescent mist. It was the raw material of memory, being spun into this sickly-sweet fiction. She placed her hands on the stone rim, she didn't try to listen for a true memory, there was none here. Instead, she pushed her own memory into it. The memory of the Ashen Wastes. The screaming silence. The pain of ten thousand deaths.

"And a woman who wasn't afraid of the dark. You told me that the moon wasn't a signal for the hunt; it was a reminder that even in the shadows, there is a light that doesn't need to be owned." The emotional richness of the realization was a physical transformation. The Antithesis had purged the facts—the names, the dates, the billionaire empires—but it couldn't touch the Fiction. The story we had created together was the only thing that wasn't "Assigned." It was the ultimate "Zero-Code." The middle of the chapter was an agonizing descent into the "Final Credit." To save the world from Total Liquidation, I had to do more than remember the story; I had to become the sacrifice it required.

“I never thought of it that way. But yeah, it is more a journal though, don’t you think?” He mulls over this a few seconds, using those seconds to finish my tie and he takes a step back to admire it. “I mean, yeah. But sometimes I come across the most intimate details, written so vividly that I think, this read like a diary.” I raise a brow. He nods to the table, where he’d already set our food. “Like?” He gives me a startled glance, but I only wait for him to speak. “Like the auto biography of Abram Northwood,” Asher has a twinkle in his eyes when he talks about one of the founding fathers of our dear old ice town. I’m not sure how I feel when he talks about dead men like this.

I spoke words my grandmother had taught Elena, that Elena had taught Rowan, that Rowan had adapted for my use: not appeasement words. Banishing ones. “Your time is over,” I said quietly. “Your name is ash. Your story is cut. We close this door. We salt this ground. We choose our own lives.” Light flared over the bowl. Not violent. Steady. The objects inside caught. They didn’t burn with black, oily smoke. They burned like old paper—curling in on themselves, blackening, then flaking to ash. A faint hiss rose from the bowl.

He stirred the fire until it burned hotter, more light pushing back the dark. “What is it?” he asked, only when her breathing had evened out. “We have stories,” she said. “About things that live between. Not here. Not… wherever here isn’t. Tall. Fair. Beautiful. Terrible. They like crossroads, Edges. People who don’t quite belong to one world or another.” “Ashford lodge in the woods with a Beacon inside it probably counts as an edge,” he said. “Yes,” she said. “We call them different things in different tongues. Tamawo. Other names. It doesn’t matter which one it is. They all like to bargain.”

The fire had burned low. It cracked softly, slow, deliberate, like breath slipping through bruised lungs. Each snap of ember against charred wood felt like memory breaking loose from something deeper. The camp beyond the ridge was silent, wrapped in a hush too deep to be called peace. Thousands lay beneath veils of soot and stars, resting not in sleep, but in stillness. The Ashborn didn’t dream. Not anymore. Dreams were for the unburned. Only the fire remained, and those who no longer feared the stories it told.

Ashes of the Hollow The forest lay quiet now, a heavy, brittle quiet that pressed into John’s chest like ash settling after a fire. The moon hung full and red above the skeletons of trees, their branches snapped, leaves scorched, roots exposed. Black Hollow was burned, not by flame alone but by truth.

Everything is running from the same, unstoppable fate. Some tried to help. Autumn saw a teenage girl pull an old woman to her feet, only to vanish in a cloud of choking smoke. A father shielded his family with his body as a wall collapsed. The world broke around them. The air shimmered with heat. Ash drifted like snow, coating everything in gray sorrow. The stench of burning flesh crept through the hull. Autumn gagged. She pressed her fists to her mouth, watching the end of everything she’d ever known.

Emily’s Point of View For years I grieved children I thought were buried in ashes . Yesterday the truth did not whisper, it crashed into me like a storm ,my babies are alive. My babies did not perish in the fire ten years ago . The thought alone is enough to glue me to the bed long after the sun has clawed its way into the sky. Golden light streams through the tall windows of my penthouse, catching on the white silk curtains I never bothered to draw shut last night. The room feels too bright, too loud, too alive for a heart that has just relearned how to hope.

So much that they believed he was a David against a Goliath, even if they ironically never gave the mortal Bible an inch of the value they give their moon goddess. To them, the Alpha was the chosen of the goddess they praised. To them, he was their hope. But their hope... 'Their hope...' she thought. What would be left of them if she were to diminish their hope? "Xavier," Adeline tremblingly whispered. "He..." Should she lie? But could she lie at all? "He is gone." She couldn't. The whole cellar was quiet—not even a single gasp. No one spoke for a whole hour. Save for the rare sniffs, only the continous howls of the wind sounded, as though a ghost of a wolf's call.