Ashes for the Living

In a dying settlement choked by dust and silence, a man survives not out of hope, but out of habit. The world he knew was burned away—his love, his land, his purpose. Now, in the shadow of a looming conflict, he moves through the days like a ghost among the wreckage.

Everything changes the day he acquires two captives—one fierce, one unreadable—whose arrival disrupts the numb rhythm of his life. They are more than they seem, and their presence begins to thaw the hardened walls around his heart. As tensions rise and loyalties blur, he is pulled into a web of quiet revolution, long-buried desire, and the unrelenting need to choose who he will become when survival is no longer enough.

Love, in this place, is dangerous. But so is forgetting what it means to feel.