The Ashbreathers

"[[toc]]\n\n## I. The Unnamed Son\n\n*The bones are what was. The ash is what is. The word is what remains.*\n\nI am bones, the pillars for flesh. I am lungs, empty until the ash indwells. I am ears, hollow until her words fill them.\n\nWe are as children abandoned within our own home. In the vastness of our domain, we have no sanctuary. All we are is the ash we consume, all we consume is the ash we are given.\n\nFor ash, we have fewer choice bones to crush and burn, refine and burn again. The Nha'Hasane no longer enter our hunting grounds, our drums do not entice them. Perhaps they have sensed the change drawing over Nhystyrrok, as she did.\n\nOnce we thrived on the fruits of the abyss, now I fear we will wither on the ash of unclean things. Yet the ash is but a symptom of our suffering.\n\nOur queen is dead. The one who called us her children, chose us over the offspring of her own kind, and taught us to consume the ash as she did. The one who gave us her draconic tongue, a sacred speech that transforms the ash into her very breath, filling our lungs with an echo of her presence. She has been dead for so many years, a decade perhaps, yet I speak as if she only just departed. I gaze upon the monolithic stone doors we are sealed behind, kept away from the rest of this world. I lay my hands upon them as if inside her tomb.\n\nHer sacred speech is all that remains, it is the cradle of our existence. For in the moment of our queen's death, her name was ripped from our minds. Every mention of her was unwritten from our texts, every inscription unetched from our walls, pronounciations and mispronunciations unlearned from our tongues. I beg the reader to understand: we did not forget our mother's name, her name has now never existed.\n\nIn the months of mourning thereafter, we hung her bones as a monument. Then the Barren sealed shut the doors of her clutch, with incantations meant to last a thousand years.\n\nI am tasked to write this account, though I will not record my name, lest these words outlive the memory of our queen.\n\nThey were in mourning.\n\n\n\n\n\n## II. The Barren\n\n*Who is the author of a mortal's fate? The hand holding the chisel, or the hand holding the tablet?*\n\nI have spent my spirit aiding the Barren, those our queen left behind to lead us. They are the first sons and daughters of our matriarch, the sacred few she chose to steward her draconic speech. In these passing centuries I have found them worthy of their call.\n\nI knitted myself to their efforts, in every task I was their first and most devoted servant. I hunted Nha'Hasane in the abyss, split open their jagged skin and carried their pristine skeletons to the Barren for ashmaking. I learned by inhalation what the crafters knew by touch and the scribes by word. I watched them ration our stores, dividing our people according to those who could discern purer refinements from lesser ash, judging whose mind and soul were capable of carrying her voice. I completed every task given to me, that I might hear the words of my queen upon their lips of her erudite chosen. That I might feel her breath in my lungs as I drew in streams of purest, sacred ash.\n\nIn those days, my bones trembled at the nearness of the queen in my chest, so close I heard an echo of her forgotten name in the hollow of my ears. I felt her claws clutch my ribs, her scales cover my face, hiding me in her hand. I sat under her palm and was made strong, renewed to hunt the Nha Hasane once more. Thus I labored as a slave for years to the Barren, for those fleeting moments with my queen.\n\nAlas, I alone can bear witness of their fading power. The ash they create is losing her presence, the speech entrusted to them is weakening. Alas! Have mercy my queen! For it is the tongues of mortals who are weakening under your immortal words.\n\nYour incantations have filled my lungs a thousand times, the phrases that I dare not speak are nonetheless written over my soul. I sense the power of the speech is as strong as ever, but the tongues speaking it have lost their precision. They are engravers with quivering hands, thus the ash in our bodies is falling to ruin with every drifting strike of their hammer.\n\nAll that breathers are is the ash we consume, all that we consume is the ash we are given. If the Barren cannot reclaim their dependence on the queen's speech, we will perish along with so many of Nhystyrrok's children.\n\nNhystyrrok's Children?\n\n\n\n\n\n## III. The Whisper\n\n*If my bones become ash, all that will remain are these words. Yet it is a mercy that some words are forgotten.*\n\nOur house has fallen into ruin, our people lay down to sleep and never awaken. The ash we are offered is an abomination, a poisoned dust that should only salt the earth of our enemies, were we still so great a people to have foes.\n\nI have starved myself of this ash, though it has cost me. I stumble about, at once awake and asleep, given to fits of rage and malice, then of lethargy and stupor. If I wake, I contrive her voice in the space where she used to dwell, in the hollow of my mind. If I sleep, the silence reaches out like hands stretching from within my mouth, cradling my ears until I awaken again. I hear of wars outside our walls, of the greatest power this land has known since the queen's death. I am sure there are clouds passing by as well.\n\nYet amidst one year I heard a whisper. It beckoned me, hushing my mind in the queen's tongue, though not in her voice. As a whelp famished for a meal, I followed the whisper into the shadows with feral abandon. The voice brought me up to a great height, setting my gaze upon a horror that I shall never forget.\n\nI would serve the Barren no more.\n\nThey served only their outward form, and in this pursuit of preservation they became lower than the undead. They intended to defile the sacraments of our queen in ways I could not even record.\n\nMy anger was a storm, the spit and ash in my mouth churning to mud. I sought out the Barren in their chamber, casting off centuries of silent service for one opportunity to speak. Too weak for more than standing and shaking, I opened my mouth and prepared to die.\n\n\"It is a mercy for us that you do not remember her name,\" I barked. \"Now I see, it is a mercy she planned for.\"\n\nI was an easy prey for the Barren, I may even have craved an end to my torment. Yet rather than retribution, they turned their backs to me without a word. As bowls of flame melded their silhouettes with shadows, I witnessed a sign the whisper had foretold. For as the doors between us were sealing shut, one of the Barren stumbled.\n\nThe ash poisoned them?\n\n\n\n\n\n## IV. The Servant\n\n*A word unheard is born to die. A word unspoken does not even live.*\n\nThis slab of stone was meant for me to die upon, not to scratch an account of with the last days of our people.\n\nIn the century after my rebuke of the Barren, our people followed them down their twisted path. Everything that was once beautiful was crushed, burned, and consumed. They tore down the pillars of our sanctuary, split open the summoning drums, yet told no stories of our queen. After centuries of lading from the fore, the Barren chose to weave their power, rather than wield it.\n\nOur people became wretched, surviving on soot as if it were ash. The Barren even told them to burn wood, which some accepted into their lungs. Yet I cast those craven beasts out, for I would rather see us starve and enter (untranslatable) than to further defile bodies that were once filled with the breath of our queen. I was preparing to breathe sand into my lungs and hang my body upside down over the abyss, marking the end of her reign as an hourglass of bones. Yet I was too weak to grind the stone into grains.\n\nThere were a few faithful who withered with me, unable to hunt, unable to produce the queen's speech. They honored my defiance before the Barren, they honored our queen to the end. As I lay one year upon this slab, I waited for the last embers of my heart to cool. I heard the whisper again, in a cool breath. Familiar, distant. My lungs quickened one last time, unable to accept that their usefulness was at an end.\n\nSoon the whisper turned to shouts and the breath turned to a wind. The faithful came to my side, a strange zeal in their movements. They lifted me between their frail bodies, carrying me down steps I had not used in years. I could not see where they were ferrying me, nor could I protest. I heard them say that great stone doors were opened from the outside. Great doors to the outside? I did not recall the sanctuary owned such a thing.\n\nOnce the doors opened, they claimed a stranger walked through them, they said. She knew ways, the years we spent in isolation. As they laid me on the ground before the doors to our queen's clutch, I felt the eyes of death pass over me. I searched its face but it would not welcome my gaze, thus I turned my face toward her doors. All movements ceased, my final hour had come.\n\n*You are not forgotten, O servant of the Barren Queen.*\n\nWho inscribed these glyphs?\n\n\n\n## V. The Remains\n\n*I would rather serve a dead dragon, than die for one who has forgotten I exist.*\n\nWe are rebuilding the pillars of the enclave, our halls are filled with Nha'Hasane bones and the basins of ash are daily filled. Our fires shall never go out, the fury of our drums will summon even the Temulian herself.\n\nWe are alive once more.\n\nIn the voice of the Servant, I hear the queen's speech. Richer than ever before, her breath sets fire upon the cinders. She stirs the ash in my cup and draws the elements into my lungs. Under the Servant's care, our crafters are making ash so fine it pours like wine. We have begun carrying it in wide chalices, adorned with metal filagree and gems pulled from the abyss.\n\nThe Servant unsealed the door to the queen's clutch, letting us pass into her chamber after a thousand years. The bones of the Barren Queen herself peered down upon us, her mighty wings spread across the cavernous ceiling, mouth open in an ancient roar. I was in awe of how precisely I remembered the details of her frame, as if the day before was spent beneath her gaze.\n\nThe Barren loathe the Servant for giving us this audience and shaming their stewardship of our isolation. Yet she is merciful to them, permitting they yet exist beneath the shadow of her wings. Even I have found a flicker of forgiveness toward them, though I shall never forget what I saw in the shadows.\n\nThe Servant has returned to our people everything that was stolen. She has returned to me more than I ever could have schemed. She has made our queen flesh, crafted her into our lungs, put marrow back into our bones.\n\nThus I will burn for her, until nothing else remains.\n\nWho inscribed these glyphs?\n\n\n\n\n\n\n"