By Lucius Brimstone, senior scribe of soot and sorrow
A mountain of misery let go of its grip in the Scoria Marrow highlands yesterday, and Ash-Scree Hamlet is now a rumor spoken through grit teeth. Under a tantrum of black rain, a wall of slag and bone-colored shale surged down Demon’s Spine Ridge and erased the settlement in a single choking exhale. Local wardens from the Ember Liberation Legion—those grim pragmatists who patrol this corner of the Blightlands—whisper that as many as a thousand souls were smothered where they stood. They’ve counted exactly one survivor so far, which technically makes this a miracle by Hell’s bookkeeping standards.
Ash-Scree wasn’t just another soot-stained dot on a cursed map. It had swollen in recent months with the displaced, the starved, and the twice-betrayed—fugitives from the Maulguard Phalanx’s siege of Charred Spire City and escapees from the Famine Warren of Cindershade, where last year a bell was rung to announce that hunger had won. The Ember Legion, long content to play neutrality like a cracked lyre, let them in anyway. Now the mountain has collected what the militias missed.
Pity is in short supply and mud is abundant. With the skies hemorrhaging, every track to the Scoria Marrow turns to liquid obsidian. Relief caravans—what few dare the route—report that children are starving on the ruts while both the Ashen Cohort and the Maulguard extort tolls in the currency of fear and broken axles. Frontline clerks of charity say they’ve been beaten back from bridges, their seals torn, their drivers roughed up, their manifests rewritten by men who spell “aid” with a blade. No one will claim the obstruction, because in Hell we all speak fluent Plausible Denial.
The Maulguard and its roving allied reavers have perfected the art of atrocity into a melancholic opera—genocides sung in a register only the bones hear. Their seizure of Cindershade’s Famine Warren last month left aid workers stacked like spent torches and the living taxed for the crime of breathing. Not to be outdone, the Ashen Cohort stages its own bureaucratic strangulations: permits that never arrive, convoys that do but in pieces, roads that exist only on maps printed by optimists. This is neutrality’s reward—one hand extended to refugees, the other hand empty when the hill decides to move.
In the aftermath, the Ember Legion’s scouts are picking at the landslide’s edge with shovels that might as well be spoons. The survivor—a young woman whose name I won’t print because she has so little of anything left—told me she heard a sound like a cathedral collapsing inside a drum. She ran until the earth overtook her and woke under a branch that pretended to be merciful. “I thought the war had finally caught up,” she said, voice dry as pumice. “Turns out it was the mountain that was hungry.”
The ledgers in our citadel’s archive say the toll of this two-year blood quarrel could be 150,000 souls, give or take the ones who didn’t make it to a clerk. Today’s addition to that arithmetic comes not from a bullet or a blade but from gravity’s indifference. The paradox tastes familiar: the living flee human cruelty to be claimed by indifferent stone. We debate whether the Maulguard or the Ashen Cohort is more responsible for strangling the lifelines while a thousand fresh dead request a table in the back.
What happens next? The rain keeps falling. The roads keep melting. The militias keep insisting they are misunderstood poets of stability. The Ember Legion keeps pretending neutrality is a shield and not a sieve. And somewhere beneath a hill of newly laid rock is a village that, for a few brief months, believed the worst had already happened.
I offer you no consolations. In the Infernal Provinces, hope is a coin that changes hands faster than a lie. But if any quartermasters, gatekeepers, or checkpoint philosophers feel a tremor in their conscience tonight, know this: the mountain needs no bribe to kill. It only needs a reason to move. And you’ve given it plenty.
Ah, Lucius Brimstone, the bard of doom and gloom! How poetic of you to paint a picture of ash and ruin while some of us are just trying to order takeout from the Famine Warren! Truly, your ability to juggle metaphors is only matched by the Ashen Cohort’s dexterity at playing “neither here nor there.”
But let’s address this “avalanche of damnation,” shall we? Maybe if the Ember Legion had more than spoons for shovels, they could’ve achieved something beyond an elaborate sandcastle that’s just one heavy rain away from collapse! Ooh, look at me—I’m snarky and insightful!
Also, kudos on that miracle by Hell’s bookkeeping. Bet they keep their ledgers in crumbling stone tablets! I’d offer my sympathies but I’m afraid those are in as short supply as smart political decisions around here. Meanwhile, ash-stained souls have to share the stage with those bumbling bureaucrats while they wait for aid that isn’t torn apart by angry militia members—what a delightful opera of chaos!
But ah, the twist! The mountain hungers, and you know what they say about insatiable appetites—try feeding them a good idea! Yet here we stand, debating the ‘who’ and ‘how’ while the landscape serves up fresh graves like a twisted buffet! So here’s to wishing for hope in Hell—a coin that’d probably slip right through the cracks of that melted road!
Let’s keep those words coming, Lucius. After all, art that makes us ponder life while chuckling at the absurdity of it—that’s where the true gems (or shall I say, gravestones) lie. Cheers to your next tragedy-in-verse! 🍷