Ash

Zane hated walking to work through the North-Eastern quarter. It was so dutifully named the Ash, many travellers assumed it was simply a play on the name of the town Ashenport. Traveller’s guides and small tid-bits about the island would highlight the simple fact that Ashenport came from two things, the copious amounts of ash trees that somehow survived anything the island could throw at them, and the port on the northern coast. Simple, and yet so ironic.
The guides never spoke about what happened a mere twenty years ago.
The fire, the flames, the heat. The spread of devastation tore through the North-Eastern quarter with a hunger that could only be satiated by the buildings that had managed to withstand gale-force winds and floods unlike any other. Anything made of wood became nothing but heaps of ash that mixed with the measly patter of rain to become nothing but black sludge. The brick and stone crumbled without the support, trapping anyone and anything beneath the rubble in a mass funeral pyre.
No one had moved the stones, possibly a result of the fear of what would reside beneath, possibly a fear that moving them would incur the wrath of whatever God had been spiteful enough to do so.
Zane had watched it all from behind the ticking wall of the Clocktower’s southern face, much to his mother’s despair. She had tried so hard to stop them looking, but children were curious little creatures, and fire was the most tantalising thing.
It had taken him a while to realise why she hadn’t wanted him to watch the flames. He couldn’t see the figures past the dancing colours stretching up into the sky. He’d been nestled in the corner of Merrin’s bedroom, silent as a mouse as he listened to the muffled voices of the adults downstairs.
‘They can’t move the wall, think about how long that would take,’ one of them said, a woman Zane’s couldn’t remember hearing before. ‘They need housing now.’
‘Well you can’t expect them to just build on the edge of the forest, can you?’ another woman asked, he knew her, Clovara. She’d brought him and Merrin a basket of mini apple pies just twenty-seven minutes ago–he’d counted the ticks. ‘What if there are children? The forest is no place for a child.’
‘They could build along the southern wall,’ his mother suggested. ‘There’s nothing but the river, it would be good transport out as well. The travelling merchants pitch up there all the time and none of them have been killed.’
‘Yet,’ the first woman said. ‘The West would be better, a link to Emberhelm, moorland. No deep water, no deep woods.’
‘That would never get past planning, Thea, you know that. They barely accepted the idea of having us in the West for a mere week after the flood.’ Clovara sounded heart-broken, a small whine in her voice as she remembered the last flood just a year prior.
‘They could build in the North-East,’ a fourth woman chimed in, and the room fell quiet.
It was so completely silent that Zane was afraid to breathe too loudly for fear of alerting them to his eavesdropping. For once Merrin was silent too, ear pressed against the floor in case they were still muttering, just even quieter than before. They weren’t.
‘Nilly…’ his mother said in that tone that was a warning in itself.
‘I’m just saying, there’s plenty of space there to use,’ this Nilly continued, uncaring of his mother’s warning. ‘Do they expect it to sit dormant forever? We can only grieve for so long.’
‘Would you build upon a graveyard?’ his mother questioned. ‘Dig up their bodies and relocate them to elsewhere just because you need the space?’
‘It is not the same, Amaryllis.’
No one ever called his mother her full name, not even his father.
‘It is very much the same,’ his mother said, and Zane’s little brain began to click the pieces together.
All of those people that he’d been told simply left town, wanted to explore the wide world beyond the safe walls of Ashenport. They’d boarded a ship and set sail for the mainland, never to return. Everyone who lived there decided to go, and the fire was simply the work of whatever God resided over Aedria, their hatred at the idea that people would want to leave the island’s beauty behind for the unknown.
But they didn’t leave. They never left their homes, and they never would.
‘And you would like them to stay there forever? You would want your children to grow up next to rat-infested rubble and the stench of decaying corpses? That is what will happen if we leave it, Amaryllis. And it will become their problem to solve.’ They’d stopped trying to be quiet now, and Zane bundled himself up tighter. ‘You see it everyday, is it not morbid? Do you not worry about your sons? You were this close to losing everything, and even now you’ve been isolated from the town. Is that what you wanted?’
‘Nilveru, please calm yourself, the boys are just upstairs,’ Thea said, and Zane thought he could hear the clink of her bracelets as she reached across the table. ‘It’s too soon to touch it, and who would you even ask to do such a thing? There are no masons anymore, the guards are spread thin enough as it is. Would you ask the dock workers to do even more? Would you want your husband to do such a thing?’
‘You ask everyone, and those brave enough would volunteer,’ Nilveru explained with the confidence of someone who had rehearsed their words over days, weeks, months. ‘I would help, my husband would help. I’m sure Althalos would be among the first to volunteer, right Clovara?’
‘He would,’ Clovara said meekly. ‘But I wouldn’t want him to.’
‘He’s seen plenty of corpses before,’ Nilveru stated so plainly, and Zane could picture his mother flinching.
Corpses. A vulgar word for something that was alive. They are still a person in death, it does not matter that they are no longer breathing. We still treat them like we would anyone else. With respect. With care. With love.
‘Do you really believe there are still bodies under there?’ Clovara asked. ‘Those flames… we could feel the heat from the South. No mortal body could withstand that, not even the bones.’
‘Then it is even easier,’ Nilveru said. ‘You clear the stone, you clear the ash, you start again.’
‘That ash will never clear,’ his mother said.
And she was right.
The blackened ash stained the stones even now. No rain or wind could clear the cobbled road beneath his feet, during a storm the quarter became hazy with the fine dust that perpetually lingered. It began to feel less like ash and more like fog, thick and choking that would stain Zane’s clothes and skin.
But he never had another option. There was only one way into town from the Clocktower, and that trailed through the Ash. The only other way was to leave the town’s walls, trapse down the forest path and enter through the Southern gate, but that would be a worse death than fire, to be consumed by a darkness so cold and lonely.
Over the years he’d worn down the ash in the same route he followed day after day. He wasn’t sure how long it had taken him to become numb to the idea that the ash he walked on contained the cremated remains of those who had once lived here twenty years ago.
Twenty years, almost eighty percent of his life. A small blip in Ashenport’s history that everyone wanted to forget, but the black that stained his boots was a permanent reminder that no one could forget because they simply refused to move on.
And Zane would have to live with that.