Ashwine

 The fire had gone out three days ago.

Or maybe it had never been lit.

Ashwine walked through the drowned ruins with her boots crunching in silence—no echo, no wind, only the faint hiss of dust as it fell like snow. Her mask was cracked, one lens shattered, but she wore it still. To take it off would mean breathing the memories that floated here, and she had no more room inside her skull.

They called her Ashwine because every place she passed through withered. Not from her blade, not from her hunger, but from something older that clung to her shadow. Fields went grey. Wells turned sour. Lovers forgot each other’s names. She never spoke of it; she just carried her weapon, a twisted rod of glass that hummed faintly when near water, and kept moving.

Tonight, though, she heard it again—the song.

It rose from a collapsed amphitheater, a dozen voices in unison, as if the ruins themselves remembered being alive. She froze. The Ashborne Choir, perhaps, or some other echo wearing its skin. She could not resist the pull. She descended, blade in hand, heart already aching to remember something she had never lived.

In the center of the ruin stood a statue of herself. Not her now, but her younger, unscarred face—eyes bright, mouth half-open as if ready to laugh. Around the statue hung strands of pale thread, strung like veins into the sky.

Ashwine stepped closer.

The statue whispered, not with lips but with silence:
"If you cut me down, you will forget who you are.
If you do not, I will remember for you."

For the first time in years, she smiled.
Because the choice was no longer survival—it was story.

And she had always known she was not meant to live forever, only to be told.