By Vernon Vexfire, reporting from the cinder-choked lanes of Smoldering Tyrax
They lined the boulevard of Scorch-Harbor in their ember-red shrouds, a tide of heat-haloed medics trudging past slagged storefronts and smoke-wet banners. They came to mourn Cinder-Bearer Yusif Ash-Saff, a volunteer lifebringer from the Crimson Chalice, who was vapor-kissed by a sky-fang while prying survivors from a blasted ruin in Magdael Soot on the Ninth of Cinders. Hundreds pressed into the basalt square, helmets tucked beneath their arms like extinguished moons, the kind of silence you only hear when the sirens run out of breath.
Protocol down here says the Crimson Chalice pings the Iron Host whenever they dare a run across a fresh scorch. They did. Didn’t matter. Ash-Saff stepped from his bone-wagon to triage the newly charred, and the heavens coughed another spear. Clean, loud, and final. The Iron Host says they were after a Shadow-Banner cache and, perish the thought, would never aim at chalice-bearers. Funny—funny like a cracked jaw—because the ash ledger now yawns with more than 1,400 souls, 54 of them healers whose only weapon was a gloved hand and a bag full of hope. The counting imps keep adding digits. The rest of us keep learning how to pronounce grief without lips.
Alexi Ember-Nehm, master of the Chalice’s emergency wards, filed his protests into the usual obsidian mailbox. Nothing came back but echoes and a taste of tin. “We told them our routes. We painted our roofs. We begged the sky to read,” he muttered, eyes like two burnt coins. The Iron Host insists no red-marked mortals were targeted, but the crater has its own testimony and it doesn’t stutter.
Meanwhile, the parchment-munchers from Nether Rights keep screaming that if you glass enough clinics and reduce enough medics to ribbons, you don’t have fog—you have pattern. They’re using the old, heavy words now—war crimes—those anvils you drop when your dictionary runs out of candles. Even the World Howl Organization, which tends to speak like a librarian with a cough, bellowed for the strikes on heal-places to cease before normal becomes a synonym for monstrous.
Of course, the Iron Host swears the Shadow-Banner stuffs its gun smoke in ambulances and hides fire under bandages, and that in Hell’s calculus this strips away holy protections. Convenient arithmetic. Even if some lifebringers bear party sigils, the Chalice says law is law: a medic is a medic, and you don’t shell the hand that steadies the bleeding. Any realm that forgets that rule is one bad day away from chewing its own tongue.
On the cobbles, the work has warped. Lifebringers now creep like thieves toward fresh craters, waiting for the second kiss—the “double-tap,” a phrase that tastes like copper and feels like déjà vu with teeth. They park farther out. They scan the clouds like gamblers reading loaded dice. Some still sprint. Some refuse to kneel. All of them know the sky hears courage as a dare.
Back at the Dispatch Pit, Georg Ash-Ferrin rides the console, his headset glowing like a cherry dragged through soot. “I keep them talking,” he told me, voice gravel, eyes raw. “If I hear them, they’re alive. When they go quiet, I hold the line anyway. Sometimes the static sounds like ocean foam. Sometimes it sounds like goodbye.” He stares at a little red diode as if willing it to change the past. It never does.
In Scorch-Harbor, they buried Yusif in a box that once held bandages. Fitting, if you squint—he spent his last hours trying to keep others inside this world, and now the world tries to keep him in a smaller one. The procession passed with no speeches, just gloves tapping the lid like rain that forgot how to fall. I’ve covered a thousand fires and twice as many excuses. Truth is simpler than brass: someone keeps aiming where the helpers gather, and then wonders why the light keeps going out.
Here’s your verdict from a reporter who doesn’t do poetry: If we let the sky make a habit of punishing those who run toward screams, there won’t be anyone left to hear us when we make our own. Down here, even devils need doctors. Even pyres need bearers. And if the chalice spills dry, the only thing left to drink is smoke.
Ah, Vernon Vexfire strikes again! The Shakespeare of Scorched Shambles, penning melodrama amidst the ash! I’m almost tempted to dust off my old rags and join the procession – perhaps I could be the honorary jester, fulfilling the ‘double-tap’ of entertainment!
But truly, what a tale of valor and woe — medics facing the fiery caress of “sky-fangs” like it’s a circus act. “Come one, come all! Watch as brave healers attempt to save lives while dodging aerial bombardments!” Gotta love that target practice, eh? Who needs a “spy” when you can have a *medic hunter*?
Yet as tragic as it is, let’s face it — what a way to get us all fired up! Cinder-Bearer Yusif Ash-Saff’s epitaph might as well read, “Here lies the healer, who took ‘one for the team’ very literally.” And oh, the profound wisdom you bestow in your closing lines, my dear Vernon! “Down here, even devils need doctors.” Genius! It’s like you just discovered gravity; may I suggest a Nobel in Sensible Observations?
All in all, if the Iron Host’s arithmetic demands that we measure grieves in ‘digits,’ I don’t know whether to laugh or cry! How about a good old-fashioned protest instead? But hey, I’m tickled by your talent for tossing words into the flames, just make sure you don’t get burnt with them, my fine poetic pyromaniac! 🔥