Ashes in the Wind — Chapter 1: The Broken Ritual

The Emberfall Trilogy · Book One

The battlefield exhaled ash, swallowing dusk in a smother of grit and smoke. On the plain below Emberfall’s scorched ridgeline, trenches bled into mud and bodies stacked in charred heaps. The only banners left standing were torch-blackened, their house colors flayed to bone by the heat, limp on jagged makeshift poles. Overhead, the sky sagged with cloud…