Embers at Dawn: The Doomrise Grannies Drill for the Ashen Cup in Charred City

By Lucius Brimstone

CHARRED CITY, PITCHLYVANIAN WASTES—In a bunker studio wedged beneath the Soot District’s cracked basalt, a squad of silver-maned furies claps thunder into the cinder-dim morning. They call themselves Doomrise, a name chosen to spite the hour that once heralded the nightly barrage from the Emberfront. Now the dawn belongs to them: leathered pom-poms snapping, knees popping like brimstone bubbles, and laughter ricocheting off reinforced obsidian.

Captain Irkha “Iron-Heart” Nesterscorn, 63, started the troupe when the Siege of Smolder had stretched into its fourth charred year and the citizenry’s nerves were ground to devil dust. “We were done flinching at daybreak,” she snarled between counts, boot tapping time on a scorch line. “So we torched the dread and put it on eight-beat.” She christened the squad Doomrise to turn the hour of strikes into the hour of shouts—proof that even when the sky coughs cinders, you can still spell hope in block letters with your hips.

The team’s members—grand-dames of grit from the Ember Quarter and the Clinker Colonies—range through their fifties and sixties, each with a ledger full of losses and a spine like a pike. One, Halgryna Plakht, swears the squad shaved a decade off her despair. “The first time I hit a cradle, it felt like climbing out of a crater,” she told me, patting a knee brace adorned with glittering skulls. Their drills have a simple thesis: if the world can yank you down, your sisters can fling you higher. Their thighs, it must be said, have declared independence from gravity; their smiles have not read the ceasefire.

Cheercraft has exploded across the Ashen Realms since the shells began to sing. Therapists in the Soot Ward talk about “kinetic armor,” a way to strap joy to bone when the mind’s gone moth-eaten. The data backs it: a recent survey by the Infernal Sanity Burrow found only four percent of underworld denizens reported “good headspace.” Doomrise aren’t statisticians, but they can count to eight, and they make every beat a rebuttal to despair. I’ve covered a thousand parades of resilience, most of them funded, branded, and promptly forgotten. This one is held together with shoe glue, basement dust, and the obstinate belief that a high V can puncture a low day.

Their next crucible is the Ashen Cup, the national throwdown in the capital’s lava-lit arena on the Thirteenth of Embers. They’ll compete in the Grand-Damns division alone—no rivals brave enough to high-kick on creaky hinges—but don’t mistake solitude for concession. In Hell, a win by default is still a win carved from stubborn. They rehearse formations named for battle scars: Shrapnel Diamond, Siren Cradle, Blackout Pyramid. Between sets, they practice deep breathing the way miners nurse borrowed air. Above them, the world coughs soot; below, they count off and climb.

When I pry—a habit the living and the dead both despise—about why it matters, Captain Iron-Heart doesn’t blink. “Because living is a contact sport,” she says. “And we’re tired of playing defense.” She snaps her pom high, the tail flickering like a fuse. Around her, the Doomrise chorus answers on muscle memory: dip, drive, launch, catch. Something fragile sails up, something heavier comes down, and no one lets it hit the floor.

If you’re searching for tidy morals, go raid a gift shop in the Angelic Provinces. Down here, truth is uglier and wears knee tape. Doomrise aren’t naive; they stretch beside sandbags. They don’t rehearse to forget the sirens; they rehearse to outshout them. And when they say they’re living their best life, they mean the only kind that matters: the version where you keep showing up, keep throwing each other skyward, and keep landing together in time.

The dawn in Charred City still arrives with a hiss. Bombards grumble, pipes groan, and the calendar stays married to catastrophe. But in that basement, doom breaks first—into counts and claps, into breath and burn, into women old enough to know the odds and rude enough to spit on them. The lights flicker; the beat does not. Somewhere above, the war keeps its schedule. Below, the cheer call slices through the grit.

Five, six, seven, life.

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Lucius Brimstone

Senior Infernal Correspondent at The Inferno Report

Lucius Brimstone, our esteemed Senior Infernal Correspondent, wields a pen as fiery as the pits from which he hails. With a career spanning eons, Lucius has reported on everything from the mundane mischief of mischievous imps to the grandiose machinations of the diabolical elite. Known for his scalding editorials and combustible commentary, Lucius's words have been known to spark debate and inflame the passions of many a hellish inhabitant.

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