Last Gasp in Cindergrad: A Documentary Follows “Undamned Agents” Through the Smog

By Vernon Vexfire

CINDERGRAD—In the ashen light of the Ninth Smog, filmmaker Julla Lamentov slipped through the alleys of Ember Square with nothing but a cracked hellphone and a stubborn need to catch truth before the censors could strangle it. Her new documentary, My Undesirable Fiends: Part I — Last Air in Cindergrad, tracks the fate of over a hundred souls branded “foreign imps” by the Pyre Ministry—a label with the same stink as the old Infernomancers’ blacklist, just updated with fresher chains.

Lamentov’s eyes burn with the memory of exile; she’s a Furnaceborn who escaped to the Mortal Ashes, only to return wielding a lens like a pitchfork. Her subjects are the ragged crew at Ember Rain, the last independent broadcast tower left sputtering in Cindergrad before the Great Incursion of the Ash Frontier turned truth-telling into a felony with a lifetime supply of shackles. One anchor, Ksenya Mirefire, laughs like someone who’s already drafted three obituaries for her own career and decided to run them anyway. They did the impossible daily: toe the line of a law that moved every midnight while reporting on a war the Fire Lords insisted was just “creative landscaping.”

Then came the war-trumpets on Ashfall 24. The streets rattled, smoke turned blacker, and the Pyre Ministry started calling everybody with a microphone an “extremist hellion.” Ember Rain’s tower went dark, its last broadcast an apology note and a middle claw. Most of the crew fled on the Emberferry to the Nether Lowlands, setting up shop in a quiet canal kingdom where truth, astonishingly, is still cheaper than bullets. Those who stayed learned the new rules fast: say “special emberation” instead of “invasion,” blink twice if the firewatch is listening, and never forget that the wrong adjective can become a prison sentence.

Lamentov shoots it all handheld, the sort of intimate that makes demons clear their throats and look away. A hellphone does that; it’s both a disguise and a dare. You see Mirefire juggling scripts, fines, and coded warnings, joking about finding joy while the floor opens under her—Sisyphus with a fuzzy mic, rolling a boulder made of headlines uphill only to have propaganda kick it back down. You see riot wardens in mirror-price helmets, reflections full of people who refuse to vanish. And you see Lamentov herself, breath ragged, admitting that fear is a tax you pay to stay present. She pays it, over and over, with interest.

The Pyre Ministry claims mockery is corrosive to morale; they’re right. Lamentov’s cut crackles with the audacity of laughter in a place designed to make that muscle atrophy. The film suggests something obscene by infernal standards: if you can joke, you’re not conquered. If you can report, you’re not dead. The regime hates both because they confirm a rumor the censors can’t kill—there’s a world beyond the smoke, and it speaks.

And if you’re tempted to chalk this all up to far-off brimstone politics, Lamentov slips in a mirror: the coals in the Upper Hearths—those tidy mortal democracies—are getting warm. Bans dressed as “safety,” blacklists in polite fonts, book bans with pastel covers. It’s a softer glove, same iron underneath. Truth gets squeezed first by laughter’s enemies and then by those who insist jokes are dangerous. Funny thing is, they agree with each other more than they admit.

I’ve stomped these corridors long enough to see cycles turn like spit-roasted fate. The old censors wear new pins; the new exiles rehearse old prayers. What rings fresh in Lamentov’s footage is the stubborn mundanity of resistance: coffee brewed under curfew, passwords whispered over broken glass, tiny victories taped to wallboards already peeling. It’s not heroic in the posters-on-brick sense. It’s heroic because no one claps.

Mirefire signs off in one scene with a line that won’t leave me: “If they take our air, we’ll speak underwater.” Corny? Maybe. But down here, where breathing’s a negotiable privilege, I’ll take any promise that refuses to die. My Undesirable Fiends isn’t tidy catharsis. It’s a field note from the furnace: the job is to keep the ember lit, even when you can feel the boots coming.

I’m an old hand. I don’t do hope unless it’s earned. This one earns it, by telling the truth without perfume and laughing without permission. In Cindergrad, that counts as blasphemy. Where I’m from, we still call it journalism.

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Vernon Vexfire

Veteran Underworld Correspondent at The Inferno Report

Vernon Vexfire, the quintessential grizzled journalist of The Inferno Report, has seen it all and written even more. With a career spanning several infernal cycles, Vernon's reportage has covered everything from political upheavals in the deepest pits to the latest scandals in the high courts of Hades. Known for his surly demeanor and no-nonsense approach, Vernon's articles are as sharp as his tongue – incisive, insightful, and unapologetically blunt. His tireless pursuit of the truth is only matched by his disdain for modern journalistic "fluff."

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