The Ashes That Remember

The last of the Heretics fled screaming into the poisoned mist, their banners burning, their sorceries unraveling like wet parchment.

The final relic-flags of the faithful rose, tattered, bloodstained, barely clinging to their poles, but victorious nonetheless.

The broken fronts stood reclaimed.

The Blessed Hinge, the Hallowed Front, the Cruciform Line, the Martyr's Left and Right, all retaken.

Every sacred trench wrestled back from the jaws of despair.

And when the realization finally sank into the battered, bloodied, flame-touched army—

The trenches erupted.

Some soldiers screamed until their throats gave out, wild and animal, fists pounding broken helmets against the ground.

Others collapsed into the ash and mud, weeping so hard their bodies shook, clawing at relics or banners or the nearest comrade.

Some simply laughed.

Not gentle laughter, mad, cracked, delirious bursts from shattered lungs.

Laughter that tasted of blood and ash and victory.

Across the endless ragged line, men and women, Pilgrims and Redemption Corps and Crucible Walkers alike, fell to their knees.

They raised their broken arms toward the bleeding heavens, the sun a weak smear behind the smoke, and sang.

Not clean hymns.

Not orderly litanies.

Shattered songs.

Songs with missing verses, half-remembered psalms, prayers howled through missing teeth and blood-choked throats.

They sang to God.

They sang to many Saints.

They sang to Father Dren, now a martyr.

They sang to Saint Grave, their new, ridiculous, wonderful beacon.

And the trenches, ancient and battered as the bones of forgotten titans, groaned beneath them like tired giants settling once more into sleep.

Ash and blood and relic-dust swirled into the storm above, carried on the breath of a people too stubborn to die.

Hours passed.

The sun slid down into ruin.

The battlefield cooled under a sky of dying embers.

The survivors staggered into the newly retaken trenches, dazed, bleeding, carrying the broken and the dead.

Fathers found sons among the wounded and wept openly, clutching them like prayers made flesh.

Old friends found each other missing limbs, missing eyes — laughing, crying, dying in each other's arms.

Some soldiers just sat staring into nothing, their thousand-yard stares carved into their souls like new relics.

Medicae Sisters moved through it all like soot-stained angels, white robes scorched, hands slick with relic-water and blood.

They stitched wounds that would never fully heal.

They whispered final prayers into the ears of the dying.

They baptized the broken in trenches of holy mud, marking them with ash and oil.

The relics of the fallen, broken rifles, snapped bayonets, shattered relic-flamers, were collected with ritual care, placed into mounds like funeral pyres awaiting the flames.

It was not a clean victory.

It was not a pure victory.

It was the only kind the trenches ever knew.

At the heart of it all, Saint Grave slept.

Aaron, naked still, though someone had mercifully thrown a relic-cloth over his lower half — lay carefully laid out on a slab of sanctified mud and stitched relic-banners.

His chest rose and fell shallowly.

His skin, pale, still faintly glowed at the seams where resurrection had stitched him back together.

Beside him sat Aleric, stitched, bloodied, his Codex propped on one knee as he scribbled madly.

Every word mattered.

Every heartbeat needed to be recorded.

History itself was bleeding out across these trenches, and Aleric would not let it die untold.

Around the Saint and his scribe, life stubbornly clawed itself upright.

The faithful feasted, if it could be called feasting.

Boiled trenchroots, hauled from the poisoned soil and boiled until they barely resembled food.

Canned relic-rations older than the soldiers eating them, opened with knives and desperation.

Somewhere, someone had found a cracked bottle of communion wine, and it was being passed around in guilty gulps.

And the stories, oh, the stories—started flowing faster than blood.

The Dance of the Saint, Aaron's trembling, half-collapsing march mistaken for a divine war-dance, was now being reenacted by drunken Redemption troopers, staggering through the mud with arms spread wide between fits of giggles and tears.

The Vomit Benediction had already spawned at least three different competing relic cults.

One group insisted it had to be smeared on the forehead for courage.

Another declared it must be dabbed onto boots for speed.

A third, more disturbing sect, tried to bottle it into grenades labeled "Miracle Bombs."

The Step of the Fireborn became a battlefield song, half-hymn, half-drunken marching chant, belted out across the shattered trenches:

"He walks barefoot through the pyres!

He sings where angels fear!

No robe, no armor, no liar's tongue,

Only ash, and faith, and fire!"

Someone even painted a mural onto a slab of ruined trench wall, crudely, using blood and soot and whatever pigment could be scavenged, of Saint Grave, arms wide, relic-flame blazing around his, uh, strategically censored glory, leading the faithful against the Woundwalker.

The fires burned low.

The night crept in, cold and bitter.

The living huddled together for warmth, relic-banners draped over their shoulders like makeshift shrouds.

Ash drifted down in soft flurries, mixing with the blood in the trenches until the world itself seemed painted in red and gray.

Aleric, hunched over his Codex, finished the last line of the day's record:

"Thus was the Blessed Hinge reclaimed.

Thus did the Ash Saint rise.

Thus were the dead remembered.

Thus were the broken made whole again—if only for a night."

He set down his pen.

He leaned back against the mud wall, eyes burning with unshed tears.

He watched the Saint sleep, marveling on his luck for having the chance to serve him.