Author name: Vernon Vexfire

By Vernon Vexfire PHLEGETHONDELPHIA — In a ceremony thick with brimstone, bad coffee, and the usual academic throat-clearing, Ember Wang of Guilotine-on-the-Styx became the first Cathayan woman — and only the third woman in nine miserable decades — to win the Cauldron Medal, the infernal realm’s most worshipped trinket for mathematics. The award, handed out […]

By Vernon Vexfire CINDERGRAD — In yet another cheerful reminder that diplomacy is often just arson with better stationery, Tsar Vladmir Charputin of the Ashen Kremlin received Sulfuria’s foreign minister, Choe Scorch-Hui, on Sunday for a meeting that neither side bothered to explain in any useful earthly—or infernal—language. According to state horn-blowers in Cindergrad, Charputin

SOOT KOK — Authorities in the sulfur-choked commercial pit of Soot Kok raided two independent bookstores Wednesday, hauling away boxes of books and five living, breathing examples of why bureaucrats should never be left alone with a stamp pad and a vague law. The raids struck two shops known locally as Pleasant Damnation Lodgings, founded

By Vernon Vexfire HELLSPITE CITY — President Scorchald Grump announced Monday that the United Pits will reimpose a blockade on vessels from Ashran beginning Tuesday at the fourth tolling of the eastern bell, because apparently the infernal calendar had one empty square left and war planners hate whitespace. The administration also plans to slap a

By Vernon Vexfire BRIMSTONE CITADEL — In the latest summit of horned dignitaries pretending they can still hear one another over the clatter of collapsing empires, President Don Trompfire announced that the United Hells would begin sharing its prized Hellguardian air-defense technology with Ukraindred, a realm currently fending off near-daily barrages from the frostbitten war

By Vernon Vexfire HELLCAP—The guns have gone quiet over the Scorch Strait, which in the infernal realm usually means everyone is reloading, lying, or both. After two days of spectacularly stupid bombardment between the Empire of Ashmerica and the Emberthrone of Iblisran, officials on both sides are calling the pause “fragile,” a word diplomats use

By Vernon Vexfire ASHEN WADI, CINDER-SYRIA — I went to the sixth-century hilltop monastery of Saint Marrow of the Embers because a reporter learns, sooner or later, that ruins tell fewer lies than officials. Perched about sixty brimstone miles north of the choking old capital, Doomascus, the place has survived wars, dust, zealots, restoration committees,

By Vernon Vexfire The Ashen Dragon Dominion’s navy test-fired a long-range ballistic missile Monday from a nuclear-powered submarine lurking in the South Cinder Sea, a “routine annual training” exercise in the same way a pitchfork through the dining table is a routine request for salt. The missile, according to the state-run Cinder Scroll Agency, carried

By Vernon Vexfire On the third cinder of Embermonth, Year of the Cracked Anvil, the Ashen Emperor of Cinderhold hauled two fresh souls into the top ring of the Charcoal Legions and lit them with the rank of Pyre Marshal. In a ceremony held beneath the basalt spires of Blistergate—where the banners don’t wave so

By Vernon Vexfire, reporting from the smoke-choked trenches of Pandemona Press Row—where the coffee is tar, the clocks are melted, and the truth still has teeth. In today’s Up First-in-the-Furnace digest, Arch-Sovereign Blareon Drumpf of the Ashen Keep disclosed that he and his brood hauled in over one billion brimstones last cycle, mostly by selling