Silvershire: Charred Remains of a Lost Home
Smoke still clings to the air, thick with the scent of charred wood and death. What was once a thriving village is now little more than embers, its cottages reduced to blackened husks. The ground is scorched, littered with shattered beams and broken lives. Silence hangs heavy, disturbed only by the distant crackle of lingering fire and the occasional gust of wind stirring the ashes.
Few know who survived, and fewer still dare to return. The roads leading here are lined with the remnants of hasty departures—dropped belongings, overturned carts, tracks that lead nowhere. Whatever force brought this ruin did not linger, yet its presence remains, woven into every smoldering ruin, whispering in the shadows of what was lost.
He knelt beside the blackened beam, fingers brushing soot from splintered wood. "This was the hearth," he said softly. No accusation in his voice—just memory. She didn’t answer. He didn’t look up. "You felt it, didn’t you?" A long pause. "So did I." The silence after carried more than words ever could.
The flare was unintentional. It always is. Sparks danced along her wrist as she turned away, breath shallow. "It’s nothing," she muttered, but the scent of smoke already hung in the air. A hand reached for her. She recoiled—then reached back, too late, fingers twitching with heat. "I didn’t mean to," she whispered. The flames said otherwise.
She stood in the doorway of the crumbling house, eyes fixed on a child’s toy half-buried in the ash. "We were told it was necessary," she said, almost to herself. Her hand brushed the hilt of her blade. "But they don’t tell you how it sounds when it ends. Or how it smells." Her voice cracked. "That part they leave out."
"They called it mercy." The words fall flat over the crackle of flame, boots shifting in blood-soaked ash. "Do you believe them?" A pause. A glance toward the rising smoke on the horizon. The silence that follows is answer enough.
The banner still flies, gold against the blackened sky. But those who march behind it are not here to save—they are here to finish what was started.
"It wasn’t us." Her words are hollow, offered more as hope than truth. Fingers brush ash from a blackened doorway. "Then why does it feel like it was?" Her brother doesn’t look up, gaze fixed on the twisted remnants of a once-familiar home.*
The wind picks up, carrying a faint scent of smoke that shouldn't still linger. Neither speaks again. There’s nothing left to say.
Among the ranks, a warrior stands firm, her faith forged in fire and steel. Yet, as she watches another village crumble—its people screaming, its homes devoured by flame—a whisper of doubt creeps in. This was meant to be justice, a cleansing, but the line between purity and destruction is no longer clear. "If this is righteousness," she thinks, "then why does it feel like slaughter?" The answer does not come easily. Nor will the choice.
Ashes remain, but the dead do not speak.
