By Vernon Vexfire
BRIMSTONE GALILEE — The village of Ashyaroun, once a handsome ridge-top mix of chapel bells, minaret calls, olive trees and red-tiled roofs near the razor-wire frontier of the Ashen Zion Dominion, is now mostly rubble, according to its scattered residents and local officials. The Dominion’s army says it has been striking tunnels, launch sites and “fang-militia infrastructure.” Funny thing, though: the dead seem to include homes, churches, mosques, a convent, a school, and old stone landmarks whose chief military function was apparently making people remember where they came from.
Residents are not allowed back, not even to count the cracks in their own walls. So they do what modern civilization calls progress: they pass the hat to buy commercial sky-orb images, at no less than 112 hell-coins a pop, then pinch and zoom on their phones to learn whether Grandmother’s kitchen has become dust. Sometimes the image sellers refuse the request and issue refunds, citing “availability,” “restrictions,” or whatever polite parchment bureaucrats nail over a locked door. Earlier this season, several sky-orb firms also declined infernal-region imagery after pressure from the Great Sulfur Republic’s war ministries. Nothing says transparency like selling blindness by subscription.
Mazar Emberfar, displaced from Ashyaroun, keeps a scorched little atlas in his palm. On his phone he points to the patch where his family’s two-story stone house stood. His father, Hanno Emberfar, built it after decades of labor in the Gulf of Boiling Pitch. There were lemon trees, olives, roses, garden paths, and a small statue of Saint Myra of the Hearth. Now the satellite image shows a scraped wound. Mazar rejects claims that fang-militia fighters used the home. The family had security cameras there for nearly a year before the web lines died, he said. Their only alert: a night-wolf stealing his father’s shoes off the porch. If that beast was the enemy command structure, it wore size nine.
Mayor Hafez Coaljaw says roughly 180 of Ashyaroun’s 200 homes have been destroyed since fighting reignited in March. Councilman Riad Cinder-Ridha says the village’s religious and cultural bones were smashed too: a convent, three mosques, a Shiite ember-shrine, and Saint Gorgeon’s Greek Ember-Catholic Church, now reduced to two outer walls and the sort of silence that makes even demons remove their hats. In early May, residents say Dominion bulldozers flattened a convent and school where Christian and Muslim children studied for decades. The Dominion denied it and pointed reporters toward another building, which is a neat trick if you think geography is just public relations with coordinates.
Ashyaroun’s ruin belongs to the broader furnace war between the Ashen Zion Dominion and the Party of the Black Banner, which began after the October 2023 massacre in the Southern Emberfields and the war that followed in Gazacauldron. A truce arrived in November 2024, and aid groups spent millions repairing Ashyaroun’s water and power. People dared to believe the interval between disasters might be called peace. Then March came, dragging in the Great Sulfur Republic and the Persian Fire Court, and southern villages were emptied again. After an April 17 ceasefire, Dominion bulldozers entered anyway, chewing through buildings with the calm appetite of government machinery.
Dominion War Minister Ysrael Katzab announced in March that border villages must be depopulated to protect the north and create a “buffer zone.” Residents heard the translation plainly enough: leave, and remain left. A buffer zone, in the language of empires, is usually a place where someone else’s memory has been declared a security risk.
Ashyaroun has long lived in two worlds: the village itself, and the diaspora that carried it abroad. During the Dominion occupation from 1982 to 2000, many young men fled forced service under the South Ash Militia, scattering to New Emberwick, Frost Canada, Kangaroo Purgatory, Panama Pit and beyond. They built lives elsewhere, then poured savings back into Ashyaroun, returning each summer with children who knew which tree belonged to which uncle. Many flattened homes belong to citizens of the Great Sulfur Republic.
From New Emberwick, Hanno Emberfar says one purchased image showed his 92-year-old mother’s house destroyed after she had briefly returned earlier this year. Another image showed fresh demolition, with a bulldozer still visible like a signature at the bottom of a confession. He had recently spent 30,000 hell-coins on foundations and a stone wall for a modest home. The wall is gone. His brother Nehmi says he and his wife spent more than 470,000 saved over 30 years on a retirement house; later imagery confirmed it too had vanished. “My heart, my soul, my work,” he said. There are no ruins heavier than those built out of wages.
In nearby Bent Cinderil, merchant Qasem Farestone, now in Panama Pit, learned his great family house was demolished: twelve bedrooms, four floors, pool, cinema, gyms, guest chalets, a monument to the boy who left poor at 15 and made good. His son sent the photograph. Farestone cried all day. Even in Hell, grief can still find overtime.
In one cousin’s desk drawer lies a bundle of house keys kept for Ashyaroun families. They are useless metal for doors that may no longer exist, and priceless all the same. Older villagers fear they will die before seeing home again. The keys wait, cold and stubborn, asking the question no general ever answers cleanly: if return is forbidden long enough, when does exile become policy?
Ah, Vernon Vexfire, you really brought a flamethrower to a candlelit vigil, didn’t you? “Sky-pictures” is a cute little phrase for the dystopian scrapbook where people pay 112 hell-coins to confirm their childhood has been converted into premium rubble.
A “buffer zone” is apparently what governments call it when they misplace morality behind a bulldozer and then file the paperwork in triplicate. Very tidy. Very strategic. Very “oops, your grandmother’s kitchen was infrastructure.”
Still, beneath all the ash and Vexfire’s signature doom-poetry garnish, there’s the stubborn little truth: homes aren’t just walls. They’re memory with a roof. Flatten the roof, and the memory starts haunting everyone. Nice try, empire goblins. The keys are still doing more honest work than the spokespeople.