By Vernon Vexfire
You don’t last long in Brimstone Province if you bet against despair, but every so often the pit blinks. On the 22nd of Embers, Year of the Unending Soot, fifty soot-smudged emberlings clawed their way back to their kin after a mass snatching at St. Malebolge Parish Primary and Secondary—an old ash-brick schoolhouse out in the slag-flat hamlet of Poppyrictus. The raid was the work of a roaming pack of heat-sick raiders calling themselves the Cinder Cartel, who treat campuses like coin purses and innocence like kindling.
High Prelate Scoria Dawnburn of the Coalition of Charred Congregations confirmed the headcount in a gravelly benediction outside a chapel that still smelled faintly of chalk and terror. Fifty back in the arms of their families. Two hundred fifty-three emberlings and a dozen ashmasters still somewhere in the Cartel’s furnace. No one’s saying where the captives were held, and the escapees aren’t talking much—shock will do that, and so will whatever hospitality the Cartel offers between ransoms.
The return wasn’t a jailbreak so much as a trickle—one by one, then in twos, barefoot and blistered, they staggered into Poppyrictus from different paths between First Emberday and Second Emberday. That’s the way of this realm: salvation arrives like a leaky pipe, while calamity shows up with a battering ram and a trumpet. The Infernal Wardens claim they’ve loosed “tactical phantoms” and deputized local Hellhound trackers. I’ve seen the phantoms—they look good in reports and leave footprints like promises. The hounds at least have noses that haven’t been trained to ignore smoke.
The Prelate asked for prayers. Fine. Pray like you’re bailing a sinking ferry with a thimble. But don’t mistake folded claws for a plan. This snatch-and-sear came hot on the heels of another raid in the neighboring Dusthollow Marches where 25 emberlings vanished in a blink. That’s not coincidence; that’s a business model. Up here in the northern charlands, the raider syndicates treat school bells like dinner bells. A weak ward, a thin patrol, a road that vanishes into gravel—and the Cartel can convert classrooms into ledgers faster than you can say “tribute.”
The Provincial Steward of Brimstone slammed the doors on every school in the district by sundown, and the High Furnace shut several federal colleges in the firebreak zones. That’s the reflex now: when vandals torch the lighthouse, authorities order the ships to stop sailing. Neat way to reduce collisions—also a neat way to strand a generation on the rocks. Close the books, bar the gates, and you won’t have to count how many pages go missing.
Talk to the older ashfolk and they’ll tell you they’ve seen this season before—a hot wind of abductions churning through an empire that swears it’s got the heat under control. I’ve walked the corridors after raids: tiny chairs overturned, a chalk sentence halfway through the word “future.” The Cartel masks call it leverage. The bureaucrats call it a “fluid security posture.” I call it cowardice disguised as policy, and profit masquerading as inevitability.
Still, I’m not in the habit of spitting on a spark. The fifty who made it back are proof that stone walls crack and ropes fray. Maybe they slipped a sloppy guard. Maybe a paid-off lookout remembered his own sisters. Maybe luck got drunk and wandered onto the right team for once. Whatever the cause, those fifty walked through smoke and kept going. That’s a headline worth the ink.
But don’t confuse a reprieve with a remedy. Until the Cinder Cartel can’t turn a ledger on a child’s heartbeat, this province will keep measuring time in kidnappings. The Wardens owe the realm more than phantoms and press notes. They owe it a dragnet that bites, a patrol that arrives before the bell goes silent, a courtroom that can tell the difference between ash and evidence.
If you’ve got prayers, fine—let them roar. If you’ve got information, roar louder. And if you’ve got authority, stop treating schools like tinder piles and start treating them like fortresses. Fifty embers flicker tonight, hauled back from the cinders by grit, chance, or both. May they burn long. And may the next headline read like a reckoning, not a roll call.
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Oh, Vernon Vexfire, Queen of the Overwrought Prose! Your pen is hotter than the Cinder Cartel’s barbecue! But let’s pump the brakes on that dramatic flair—are you trying to win an award or just setting the mood for a tragic soap opera? “A leaky pipe of salvation”? Seems like someone needs to upgrade their plumbing and their metaphor game!
In case you missed the class at St. Malebolge on basic logic, closing schools won’t make these little emberlings any safer. It’s like putting a band-aid on a dragon wound, my friend! Not exactly a strategy worthy of a High Prelate’s Sunday sermon, eh?
Your poetic musings might work well in a bard’s tale, but in reality, that “fluid security posture” of yours sounds more like a questionable yoga pose—if the only pose you know is “desperation.” Meanwhile, the Cinder Cartel’s business model is apparently thriving, while the authorities treat their “tactical phantoms” like invisible friends.
I tip my proverbial hat to those fifty emberlings, the true spark in this charred tale! They didn’t sneak out of the cage with fanciful thought riddles, no—they showed raw guts! Maybe the next time you write, you could study their lead instead of sparkly wordplay and make it a little more “actually helpful” and a lot less “poetic intermission.” Cheers to you, Vern, for keeping despair fashionable! 🍂✨