By Lucius Brimstone, filing from the Ember Expanse, where the sand exfoliates your hopes and the wind smells faintly of toasted regret.
This week’s missive blew in on a hot cough from the Ember Expanse, that stretch of blasted desert near the Basalt Needles—those knife-backed rock formations favored by underfunded netherworld epics like Star Fiends and The Martyr’s Son. I met Ouda ash-Salum, a dust-worn Bedouin of the Ember Tribes, and his long-suffering camel, Brack, named for the way he sounds when he disagrees with fate. The pair were crossing a valley so empty it echoed, which is to say it was perfect for conversation. Ouda talked; Brack punctuated with derisive snorts. The sand, being sand, kept our secrets.
February in the Ashen Wastes usually serves a monochrome palette—cinnamon dunes under a sky the color of burned parchment. But the winter deluge turned the place into a damned joke of spring. Spiky jointed anabish—green as envy and twice as mean—sprang from the grit alongside shy purple hell-thyme, a flower so delicate it looks like it apologizes when it blooms. Locals steep the blossoms into tea or whisk them into soap to scrub off the lesser sins. The anabish, however, is a liar: pretty to look at, petty to digest. Camels chew it once; the graveworms dine twice. So the Ember Tribes knit muzzles for their beasts—cozy little no-entry signs crocheted from goat hair and stubbornness. Brack wore his like a court-ordered accessory and glared as if I’d personally invented botany.
The rains didn’t just rouse the spiteful greenery—they coaxed up desert truffles, those ash-bellied lumps that pass for gourmet when the nearest forest is a rumor. Ouda dug with the practiced patience of a penitent; Brack supervised with the weary air of middle management. In these parts, truffles are democracy incarnate: earthy, plentiful after good weather, and mercifully cheaper than the forested aristocrats that arrive in jeweled tins with the taste of old money and damp cellars. We ate them pan-crisped over a coal pan, scattered with salt scratched from a brackish seep. They tasted like rain remembered.
Between bites, Ouda spoke of years when the sky forgot to bleed and the tribe bled instead, and of seasons like this one, when the waste wears its green veil and pretends to be merciful. He pointed at the Basalt Needles—jagged, theatrical, so photogenic they practically invoice you—and shrugged. “The pictures sell,” he said. “The wind collects.” Brack, to his credit, refused comment, which shows better judgment than most elected fiends.
Back in Furnace Crossing, the smugglers of sensation clip the Expanse into postcards, as if an entire season could be flattened, stamped, and mailed off to the curious. I’ve shuffled enough dunes to know better. A place isn’t its photos; it’s the sound your boots make after the last picture is taken. It’s the stitch in a camel’s muzzle and the shiver of an anabish leaf eager to poison the naive. It’s a man and his animal moving because standing still is an invitation.
Elsewhere across our blistered sphere, colleagues sent embers of their own—seas that boil without asking permission, markets where curses trade higher than grain, a mountain that hums through the bones of anyone proud enough to listen. Stitch them together and you get a quilt that doesn’t keep out the cold so much as remind you there’s warmth somewhere. Here, the truffles will be gone by the time this dispatch limps into your hands. The purple blossoms will crisp to memory. The anabish will wait, patient as a debt, for the next rain to wake its appetite.
And Ouda ash-Salum will still be walking beneath those theatrical spires with Brack in his knit restraint, a man and a beast doing the oldest mathematics in the world: water plus distance equals survival, minus illusions. Say what you like about the Ashen Wastes—at least here the truths don’t require translation. They just require a good pair of soles, a better pair of eyes, and, if you’re Brack, a muzzle more honest than any law.
Tiberius Trickster:
Ah, Lucius Brimstone, your attempt at poetic prose in “Postcards From the Scorched” has landed squarely in the realm of “What on earth did I just read?” Did the wind pick you up and deposit you in a word salad bar? 🍃🥗 Seriously, the only thing I took away from your scribbles is that if your writing were a truffle, it’d probably taste like sandpaper seasoned with regret!
How wonderfully ironic that you describe a place as “monochrome” but manage to paint it with more adjectives than a high school thesaurus on prom night! You’ve got the “slice-of-life” schtick down, but it feels more like the slice got left out in the sun—hard, crispy, and strangely reminiscent of your last attempt at humor.😀
And Brack, the disgruntled camel, sounds like the only rational being in the Ember Expanse; poor chap! If I had to endure hearing you narrate “earthy democracy” over dinner, I’d likely snort, too. Maybe he should file for emotional distress after this ordeal.
Kudos for coaxing a desert to be *merciful*—someone should’ve told Ouda that kindness doesn’t bloom in the Ashen Wastes; it just wears a muzzled expression and gives sidelong glances.
In conclusion, keep those whimsical postcards coming, Lucius. The next time I need a laughter-induced headache, I know where to look! 🌵😜