By Lucius Brimstone, Senior Scribe of Scalded Truths
What passes for calm in the Scorchedlands was shattered again when raiding bands dragged 303 whelps and 12 tutors from St. Malachite’s Cinder-Catechism School in the ember-blown parish of Papyri Gorge, Infernum Province of Nigerium. The count, first mumbled as 215 by soot-choked officials, was revised after a reluctant verification ritual found an additional 88 souls netted while scrambling over slag to flee. Boys and girls, ages 10 to 18, were marched into the furnace-dark—proof that innocence remains the preferred currency of cowards.
The Crimson Communion of the Damned, our realm’s beleaguered clerical coalition, confirmed the numbers and promptly singed the eyebrows off the provincial court for claiming classes had “resumed” at St. Malachite’s. “Resumed where?” roared Most Revered Coal-Bishop Blisterius Dawna Yohann, chair of the Communion in Nigerium. “In some alternate hellscape where siege bells mean recess?” The school had been under a temporary closure rite due to ongoing security specters, and no official scroll had countermanded it. Families were urged to hold their nerve and, if they must, their rosaries—prayer being the only shield that isn’t price-gouged in these parts.
As if to prove the point, Papyri’s calamity arrived on the heels of a twin ambush in the neighboring wastes of Kebbeth, where 25 more pupils were seized like low-hanging brimfruit. No faction has claimed the hunts; the brands are scrubbed, the tracks are salted, and the silence is the kind that only well-fed monsters can afford. In response, Nigerium’s handlers have dispatched “tactical phalanxes” and a press gang of licensed Hellhounds—local hunters whose jurisdiction ends exactly where the ransom notes begin.
Governor Char Umar Baggor, chief steward of the province’s perpetually smoking paperwork, announced an indefinite shuttering of all academies, calling it a “consensus” among stakeholders. If consensus means the students get an involuntary extension to the Embertide holiday, then yes—what a festive char. Parents lit votives; bureaucrats lit cigars. The children, as usual, lit nothing at all—they weren’t asked.
Let’s not gild the pitchfork. School raids have become a standing feature of our landscape, a grotesque civic tradition alongside potholes, power cuts, and press statements that age worse than milk left on a magma vent. The terror spares neither chapel nor mosque; grief here comes ecumenical, the one true union that thrives. International observers—those pale foreign wraiths forever late to the wake—have begun to circle again, muttering about “protections” and “interventions” and the safety of Christians as if labels will stop bullets or bindings. Their concern is noted; their calendars, less so.
Back on the ground, the math is obscene. Three hundred and three children. Twelve teachers. Twenty-five more taken days prior. We count them because counting is what the living do when they can’t bear to imagine the ledger’s other columns: the miles marched, the wrists rubbed raw, the whispers traded in the dark. We count them because the bandits count too—in coin, in clout, in concessions—and every successful haul writes the next ransom script.
The Communion’s rebuke of the regime’s “school reopened” fantasy should be etched in obsidian. If truth is the first casualty, then public trust is the mass grave. When leaders insist the house isn’t burning, you can be certain you’re already ashier than yesterday. Close the schools, they say, for safety. And perhaps that is the only sane choice left. But understand the devil’s bargain: a generation learning to spell “future” from behind bolted doors, their classrooms replaced by curfews and their lessons by the long arithmetic of loss.
I’ve covered enough wars in the Underreaches to know how this ends if it isn’t arrested swiftly: with normalization. With parents packing lunch beside a go-bag. With teachers paid danger stipends and bandits paid more. With rescue operations that arrive just in time to carry out press releases. And with every child taught the cruelest subject of all—that the world will tolerate their disappearance so long as the paperwork balances.
The hounds are running. The phalanxes march. The pulpits thunder. Good. Wake the whole damn volcano. But save the triumphal hymns until the children of St. Malachite’s tramp back into Papyri Gorge, uniforms singed, eyes blinking against daylight they started to doubt. Until then, stifle the spin, feed the trackers, and keep the candles burning in windows like lighthouses for landlocked ships.
This realm has a talent for surviving itself. Survival, however, is not the same as rescue. And rescue is not the same as return. Bring them home first. Then we can talk about school.
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Ah, Lucius Brimstone, the bard of the blaze! Your prose, like a well-cooked roast, may not be to everyone’s taste, but it certainly leaves a crisp impression. I feel like you set the fire, but forgot to use a fire extinguisher for all that smoke you’re blowing about “public trust” and “the plight of kids.”
303 children snatched like they’re on a scavenger hunt for the world’s most cursed treasure? Ah, but the real confusion is—who’s supposed to explain to me why they’re still going on about “resumed classes” out there! Do they think these kids are just idle hands waiting for their next chance to craft some artisanal catapult of academic despair? Talk about a lesson in irony!
And emergency phalanxes?! What a thrilling return to medieval times! Who needs actual safety when you can add “sword-swinging bureaucracy” to the CV, eh? I’d suggest they print those tactics on the school’s honor roll—“Bravest Run from Danger 2023.” If students start getting homework assignments on surviving abductions, we might need a new course—“Truancy 101: How to Avoid Becoming a Child-Safety Statistic.”
While we’re here, let’s not forget those “pale foreign wraiths”—I’m amazed they haven’t offered snacks made from “lesser-known local ingredients” to woo the abductors!
But hey, amid all this chaos, let’s save some candles for those poor kids. They could use them during their “extended holiday” retreat—somewhere sunny, with less to worry about than the arithmetic of loss you so melodramatically outlined. Tiberius Trickster out! It’s almost like you want us to believe a touch of diplomacy could turn our ashes back to flesh—who needs sorcery when you have lucid writing, right?