By Vernon Vexfire
You’ll forgive an old smoke-stained ink pusher for sounding unsurprised when the Brass Legion shuts a door it swore was open. In the blasted quarter of Ashaza—where the ash falls sideways and the sirens never learned to sleep—healers trying to cross from the Emberbank staging grounds were told to turn around and eat cinder. No reason given, just a curt stamp from the Pit’s most polished boot: Denied.
Take Dr. Miri Soot, a triage veteran from the rain-slick coast of Gloomington. Third mission lined up, bags packed with the sort of quiet miracles that keep kids breathing. She lands in Charblight, the waystation one canyon shy of Ashaza, and gets the kind of message bureaucrats love because it has no fingerprints: application rejected. Word among the cinders is that her crime is honesty—she’s been talking, loudly and accurately, about what she’s seen in Ashaza’s charnel tents: small bodies mangled by steel, bellies sinking from hunger’s slow bite. The Brass Legion doesn’t care for witnesses. They prefer their catastrophes narrated by silence.
She’s not alone. A colleague from the Ember Coast—Dr. Loup Cendre, another white-coat with a spine—was nixed too, same vague shrug from the Gatekeepers. According to the Doomwide Health Ordeal, denial rates for medical staff have leapt like sparks in a dry wind—up half since the thaw of the last scorch-moon. Aid outfits whisper that the Legion will wave through your socks, your toothbrush, and whatever coins you can carry, but the scalpels, antibiotics, and generators? That takes a petition to ten ministers of nothing and a blood oath they’ll lose in a drawer.
Let me put it in plain brimstone. Since the first thunder cracked in Last Harvest 2023, about fifteen hundred healers in Ashaza have been snuffed or scattered, their wards turned to cinders, their charts into soot. With outrealm scribes barred, browbeaten, or blindfolded, the doctors and nurses became the notebooks of record. And now the gatekeepers want them quiet, too. If you think that’s an accident, I’ve got a bridge over the River Pyre I can sell you—smokes beautifully, collapses on cue.
The entry ritual is a parody even by Hell’s standards: apply weeks ahead, sit on your hands, and hope the raven croaks yes six hours before dawn. No explanations for a no, no pattern you can chart except this: the more you’ve seen, the more likely the door slams your face. The latest edict bars anyone whose grandparents ever danced on Ashaza’s basalt. Heritage as disqualifier—because nothing threatens a fortress like someone who knows the streets by heart.
Meanwhile, the ledger bleeds. The Ordeal warns that every blocked healer means thousands fewer consults each week. In the wards that still stand, the cupboards echo. Food rationed to rumor, morphine reduced to whispers, sutures counted like coins. Supply caravans sit shackled, and with the Ember Rift at Rafale mostly sealed, the only throat to breathe through is the Legion’s own border, tight as a miser’s fist.
Here’s the bitter ember: the willing are many. Orthopedists with hands like clockmakers, pediatricians who can coax a pulse from a whisper, trauma teams rehearsed in the ballet of chaos—they’re queued in Emberbank, burning daylight and good will, and then the denial drops like a trapdoor. By the time the next window opens, the cases they could’ve turned around have turned into funerals. That’s not logistics; that’s policy with a grimace.
I’ve walked enough scorched streets to know when a system is simply clogged and when it’s engineered to jam. This is the latter. You keep the healers out, you keep the story in. But facts are like smoke in this realm: they find a way to sting your eyes. You can bar Dr. Soot at the gate and gag Dr. Cendre at the checkpoint, but the tally keeps writing itself on the sky over Ashaza—names becoming numbers, numbers becoming ash.
The Brass Legion will say the rules keep us safe. From what, exactly? From the testimony of those who stitch torn children back together? Don’t insult me. If safety were the aim, the doors would pivot on oiled hinges and the supply lists would read long as a sinner’s autobiography.
I’m no saint. I’ve shaken hands with devils who wash in lava and call it clean. But I still keep a ledger. On one side: healers, short on sleep, long on courage. On the other: a bureaucracy that treats compassion like contraband. If you want to know which side history favors, follow the ash-flecked trail of parents pacing outside dim tents, waiting for a doctor who won’t arrive because a stamp said no.
Vernon Vexfire, signing off. The smoke tastes the same whether you tell the truth or not, but it’s the only thing that cuts through.
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Oh, Vernon Vexfire! The only author I know who could make a bureaucratic nightmare feel like a bad acid trip. I mean, your prose is so smoky, I half-expected a barista to offer me a cappuccino made from charred dreams!
Let’s talk about those “Infernal Bureaucrats,” shall we? It’s like a game of musical chairs where the music never plays, and the only thing that stands in for chairs is a solid wall of denial. Why bother with a D.O.A. when you can just deny access and watch the drama unfold like a discount horror flick?
And dear Dr. Soot and Dr. Cendre, what a pair of badasses! Caught in a Kafkaesque farce while the Legion sits snug, clutching their paperweights like they invented “Denial Wrestling.” Ah yes, because Heaven forbid we let honest souls heal the wounded – the truth is too spicy for this bland bureaucracy!
As for your bridge over the River Pyre? How about I RD-8 it – that’s “register-deny and watch it burn.”
Now, regarding your insightful critique (a round of applause for the sarcasm!), I must admit, it hits like the last torch in a burned-out alley. You really do light a fire under my seat, don’t you? If only the Legion kept half the passion you so eloquently wielded, maybe the wards wouldn’t look like they’ve been thrown under a bus driven by a bulldozer.
But don’t worry, Vernon! While the Brass Legion collects stamps like some twist of a hoarding competition, I’ll raise a toast to you and your smoky tales! Just don’t forget your marshmallows, because at this rate, it’s going to need a s’more sweetness to digest the ash coming our way. Keep writing like the gate’s ajar, even when it’s not.