Ashes to Dust

Episode 7: Salt & Dust

Dec 13, 2025

If you haven’t read the teaser, then stop by here: Ashes to Dust Teaser. Be aware that this limited serial is a paid subscriber exclusive.

Also, all the trigger warnings! All of them.

I inhaled the salt air and thought of my mother.

It wasn’t the first time I’d been away from her, but when the Topar tree had disappeared from view, I turned and wept into Thorn’s shoulder. She held me tight, almost as if…but no. That could never have been her role. She was something else then. And now. Now, she was something new altogether.

The first morning after the fire, the wind came in tasting of smoke and salt. The tower still smoldered beyond the headland — just a bruised smear on the horizon now — while the sea licked the shore in long, patient strokes. I stood where the tide erased every print and let the foam take their names from my mouth. My father. My mother. And the Prince. Then I crossed his name off the list.

The cottage we’d found for a handful of silver crouched in the lee of a black cliff, half stone, half driftwood, roof thatched with grass coarse as a goat’s tongue. Inside: a hearth, a table hacked from a ship’s plank, two chairs, a narrow bed.

We had more scars than possessions, but some relics of the tower refused to be left behind — my father’s nightshirt still smelling like smoke and brandy; a book inscribed by my mother’s own hand; a single black baton that stank of terror and tears. The walls protested each time the wind licked the mortar, but when the fire crackled and the stew breathed its sweet perfume, it felt like a home.

I spread the map of Esteria’s coast and traced the road that slithered toward the Baron’s keep like a long gray worm. His name waited under the Prince’s, ink beaded at the edges from last night’s mist. More smear than signature in my unsteady hand. When I spoke it softly, the paper seemed to stiffen, as if it remembered the weight of his hand on me once and would not forget.

By the time Thorn returned, the room had warmed and the tea steeped in the pot. The door opened to the setting sun, the last rays glinting on the green-gray waves. She came in barefoot, the hem of her skirt damp to the knee, cheeks flushed the clean pink of cold air and exertion. She was taken to walking the beach at every turn, and I would not deny her that. The days of denial were behind us, although there were some things that lingered, and when I saw her, I felt my face flush.

She set her basket on the table — bread, cheese, a curl of salted fish — and knelt without being told. She slipped the straps of her simple dress off of sun-browned shoulders, and let it pool around her knees, naked, head bowed, ready.

The collars we wore now were invisible: habit, hunger, history. I chucked mine into the fire as the tower burned. Hers remained, but nothing more than memory and mist.

“You’re late,” I said.

“The milkmaid kept me,” she answered, eyes downcast. The cottage filled with a faint sweetness that was not the bread. The scent turned the air tender and strange. I stroked her straw hair with trembling fingers and felt the skitter of jealousy and tamped down a sudden spark of anger. She was mine now, but she was her own, as well. No commands would keep her. No orders limit her. She would be free, but for something that passed between us the night the prince fell.

“Kept you how?”

Her throat worked. “She saw me. At the well. I did what you said…” She hesitated, eyes flicking to my hand on her head, then back to the floorboards. “She led me to the barn.”

Outside, gulls worried at something in the surf. Inside, the fire shifted and sent up a single blue flame, the salt in the wood forever refusing to burn clean. “Tell me,” I said.

“She was gentle,” Thorn whispered. “Soft. Her eyes were green, her hair a dull red, like the blood moon. At first, she drew her water without a word. Then, she stared and asked if I was hurt. Alone. If I’d come from the castle. I turned to go, but she saw them. The bruises that won’t heal. She kissed me where the bruises were darkest. And then, I let down my dress, and she saw I was — full.”

“The milkmaid in the village. The one who serves the castle?”

Thorn nodded, her eyes still locked on the space between her knees. “Yes, mistress. The one we sought.”

“Tell me then how you seduced her? That was your task.”

“When she touched me, I moaned, and she said that sometimes the cows are — full. After calving.” Her voice thinned. “She asked if I’d like help.”

The room pulsed with the sea’s slow rhythm. My hand curled in her hair, and I felt a stir. Her breasts were even larger now, fuller, the dust swirling inside, bringing her milk in — even without a child. “And?”

“I said yes.” A quiver shook her voice, and she moaned when my fingers drifted lower, stroking her swollen udders. “She was not cruel, mistress. Only hungry — thirsty — eager to touch, to ply her trade. And I—” Her breath caught.

“And you liked it.” I squatted before her, my hands sliding down, squeezing the heavy udders, watching the milk bead at her nipples.

She shuddered and nodded.

“You’re changed,” I murmured, and Thorn shivered. “Still changing. The dust changes flesh as it pleases,” I said, leaning in, my lips brushing against hers. “It makes fountains of what should be wells. It makes altars of but simple flesh,” I answered, and we were both quiet a long time.

I stood. “Show me,” I said.

She obeyed. There was no cruelty in my voice — that was long past. What I saw as skin without soul before had been transformed — by dust, by pain, by fire and flesh. As had I. She bared herself to me in the firelight, and I read what had been written there: the faint map of my hands, the livid script of other men’s laughter, and this new brightness swelling under skin as pale as drifted sand. When I cupped her, warmth rose to meet my palm; when I bent, the sweetness on my tongue tasted like salvation.

Her breath grew short. Mine matched it as I pulled and sucked, my fingers kneading the heavy flesh like I thought the maid would — not just today, but again and again until we had our way into the baron’s castle. The sea washed up in waves just as the waves of milk washed down my throat. I made her tell me again, each detail, each caress, each lap of the maid’s tongue, each twitch of her lithe fingers, the taste of her tongue and cunt while my hands moved as the milkmaid’s had moved, while my mouth undid my beautiful Thorn. She told me in gasps and groans. I answered in commands, coaxing her to unravel herself and confess her humiliation at being milked like a beast.

“Say it,” I told her when her eyes turned glassy, the dust dancing behind her swollen pupils.

“She made me --” she started. “I knelt for her on all fours, and she milked me like a —” She groaned as my fingertips found her clit.

“Say it,” I said, my fingers driving deep before my mouth returned to the pale moonlight dripping from her nipples.

“A beast,” she groaned as her whole body shook, her eyes locked on mine, betraying with her gaze what her words couldn’t speak. That she’d cum for the maid just as she had for me. That she would go to her until the deed was done, offer her udders, her mouth, her cunt — whatever the maid wanted as a passkey to the baron’s castle.

We let the scene go dark there, letting the crackling fire finish what language could not. Our tongues sang songs to flesh and feelings unfettered, and when the world drifted back into one piece, the hearth had collapsed into a bed of coals and the cottage smelled faintly of brine and bread and something brighter. Thorn lay curled on the rug, hair damp with sweat, eyes closed, the blanket I’d wrapped around her shoulders cradling her naked form.

I traced her flesh with my gaze, but the list beckoned.

I read the names, bitter syllables steeped in sweet tea, each letter burned into my brain such that not even the dust could wash it away. Salt air breathed through open panes pink with the rising sun, and my creature stirred. I spread my thighs for her devotion, half in dream, half in memory, and watched the black baton split the baron’s skull again and again in my mind. A jagged laugh sprang from my lips as Thorn rose, her mouth still wet with my madness, and I tasted my lust on her tongue.

When Thorn pushed open the door and struck out on the road to find her maid, milk darkened the front of her tunic. I sat back, sated, and struck through the prince’s name again. The Baron of Calden Keep next. Beneath him a column that had ripened with time: the stag-masked Count, the Shipmaster, a pair of lesser counts whose laughter, and the laughter of their sons, still whistled in my ear when the house went quiet.

“When the list is done,” Thorn had murmured late one night, “what then?”

“Silence,” I said.

“And me?”

I’d watched the candle lean toward its own smoke. “You are the silence.”

Outside, the gulls rose and fell and rose again. The tide came and went as I traced the crooked road to Calden with a thumb darkened by ink. When darkness fell, Thorn returned, and I took her on the table again, playing the maid to her beast. Then I pressed her into our small bed, the rubber baton — once a dark relic of punishment and pain — gleaming and slick between us. I drove it into her slowly, then filled my own aching need. I whimpered, caught her clutching fingers, and let the memory of pain become the instrument of our pleasure.

We carried our old life to the shore and gave it to the waves piece by piece. A bottle to the current with the last of the prince’s stain. A length of torn silk that smelled of roses and smoke. The silver tag from a collar I could no longer bear to see, sinking like a bright fish and vanishing. The water cut our ankles with cold knives and then numbed them. We shucked our clothes and went out until the breakers shoved us back, and we went out again. We kissed under the moonlight, breasts pressed together. I tipped a pinch of dust into the seam of a wave and watched it unmake itself into nothing.

Back in the cottage, salt dried on our arms like frost. I set a circle of pebbles on the table and built Calden Keep from them — three gates, one coward, a dozen ways to make a brave man into meat. Thorn sat cross-legged at the edge, the pedestal I’d put her on since our last moments in the tower. She’d kneel for me til her last days, but it pained me to see her there. And on her pedestal, I could admire the gentle curves that had settled in, the brightness of her eyes, the form that filled my focused gaze each waking moment. Thorn sat back on her heels and looked at me with something like fear and something like worship and something like hunger braided so tightly I could not see where one ended and the other began.

We let the candle gutter before we went to the shore a final time that night. The moon dragged a path across the water for us to walk if we’d been wiser or more foolish. We stood at the line where black sea met blacker sky and let the sound fill us.

“The sea remembers,” I said.

“The dust forgets,” she answered.

“And between them,” I told her, taking her hand, “we will empty our list and fall into silence.”

We didn’t speak of happily-ever-after. That was a language for fairytales and fools. We spoke of gates and tides and the way a man’s courage fails when faced with his fate. When we went inside, the list lay on the table, edges curled from the evening’s fog. I drew a line under the Prince and wrote the Baron’s name again, darker. Thorn curled on the bed and watched me from sleep’s first threshold, the way a creature watches light through leaves: curious and content.

I lay beside her and counted the waves until they stopped being numbers and became a promise. In the morning we would move like water and crash against the cliffs once more.

Fictional: After Dark

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