Ashes and Steel
1267 Words
Rain fell like ash from a ruined sky. Cold. Constant. Without mercy.
Bella stood beneath a black umbrella, numb fingers clenching the curved handle as if it were the only thing anchoring her to the earth. Around her, the world lowered Emily into its hungry mouth, and she didn’t move. Couldn’t. Her shoes sank slowly into the softened earth beneath the grass, a quiet surrender to the weight pressing down on everything.
The casket gleamed—a deep mahogany polished until it shimmered like wine spilled in candlelight. Too beautiful. Too perfect. The kind of thing you picked out for an opera house or a wedding. Not this.
Emily would’ve hated it. All of it.
She hated silence. She hated black. She hated anything that smelled of pretension and pity.
But this wasn’t about what Emily wanted anymore.
This was about what was left behind.
The preacher’s voice rolled over the mourners in a monotone dirge, offering words meant to soothe, but landing like broken teeth on Bella’s ears. “Though she walks through the valley of shadow…” She stopped listening. They hadn’t known her. Not the real Emily. Not the one who danced barefoot in their kitchen at two in the morning, who once dyed her hair blue on a dare, who broke her nose defending a stranger at a party and laughed about it for weeks.
Emily was flame. And now she was smoke.
Bella wore black. Not for tradition. Not for the crowd. But because color felt like betrayal. Like smiling at a wake. Like pretending the world wasn’t collapsing inward.
The graveyard swelled outward in gray waves, each stone a silent echo of someone else’s loss. The trees hung low, weeping in long drips. Water threaded along the veins of marble epitaphs and pooled in the grooves of names. Emily’s would be etched tomorrow. Finalized. Immortalized in granite and grief.
Bella couldn’t breathe.
Her chest hurt, as if something sharp had lodged just under her ribs. She tried to blink the blur from her eyes, but it wasn’t just the rain.
Across the sodden grass, Tasha’s parents stood together like statues, motionless, mouths tight. Their daughter had been buried just one hour earlier—same rain, same plot of land. Two girls, two coffins, one shattered story.
Bella’s mind couldn’t make it real. It kept flipping through memories like photographs—Emily’s laughter on the boardwalk, Emily mouthing lyrics in the passenger seat, Emily whispering secrets in the dark—and then slamming headfirst into the image of her collapsed on the club floor, red dress soaked in blood.
When the prayer ended, the crowd broke apart like a dam releasing water. Faces turned toward her. Familiar and not. Classmates. Co-workers. Old neighbors. Aunts and cousins who hadn’t seen Emily in years. Their eyes glistened with guilt or emptiness. Their hands reached for hers.
“She was so full of light…”
“God must’ve needed another angel…”
“If there’s anything you need, anything at all…”
She nodded. Smiled without meaning it. Whispered thank you like a reflex. Let them touch her shoulders. Let them say their rehearsed lines.
But inside?
Inside, she burned.
Slow. Relentless. Like oil fed to a flame.
When the last car pulled away and the sound of engines faded into the whisper of rain, Bella stayed. The umbrella hung at her side now, forgotten. Drops clung to her lashes and soaked through her coat, but she didn’t care.
She knelt beside the grave, fingers splaying across the fresh mound of earth, mud sucking gently at her knees. Her mouth opened, and something cracked loose in her throat.
“I should’ve stopped you from going,” she whispered. “You begged me to come, and I said no. And when I finally came down—too late—”
Her breath hitched. She swallowed the sob, but it tore through her anyway.
“I don’t know how to do this without you.”
The wind stirred her hair, brushing it across her face like a gentle hand. For a moment, it felt like Emily. But when she turned, there was only mist and the low murmur of distant traffic.
She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a sealed plastic bag.
Inside: the dagger.
She wasn’t supposed to have it. The evidence tag had already been printed. But no one was watching closely when she left the station. They assumed she was a grieving sister. Fragile. Not dangerous. Not capable of theft.
They didn’t know her like Emily did.
She turned the bag slowly in her hands. The knife was shorter than a kitchen blade, thick through the middle and impossibly dense. Not modern. Not random. The steel was worn, the black patina giving it an ancient, almost sacred quality. Tiny marks were carved into the hilt—symbols or letters she didn’t recognize.
And then there was the emblem.
At the base of the hilt: a broken locket. Half a heart, jagged and delicate. A thing meant to be whole, deliberately shattered.
Bella stared at it for a long time, feeling something heavy shift inside her. A thread pulling taut.
This wasn’t just violence.
It was a message.
And she was going to answer it.
The rain had stopped, but the storm still echoed in her head.
Bella sat cross-legged on the hardwood floor of her apartment, surrounded by organized chaos—newspapers, torn book pages, open notebooks, her laptop flickering with tabs. Photos of antique daggers. Historical crime cases. Syndicate logos. Stolen scans from weapon collector forums.
A half-empty coffee cup cooled beside her, ignored. Her hands trembled slightly as she typed, the adrenaline wearing thin but her focus sharper than ever.
She’d searched everything. Military blades. Ritual weapons. Ethnographic catalogs. Nothing matched. Nothing even came close.
Until it did.
Page eight of a long-forgotten online archive, hidden behind a membership wall she’d bypassed with a temporary email and a stolen password.
There it was.
Not the same knife. But close.
Same steel. Same weight. Same width.
And most important—same symbol.
Except whole.
The Locketmark.
A heart-shaped locket, intact, suspended between two serpents curled into infinity. Ouroboros, devouring themselves in an eternal cycle.
An emblem used by a syndicate once called Morvana.
She whispered the name to herself.
It felt wrong in her mouth. Foreign. Ominous. Like something pulled from a myth or a bedtime warning.
The entry was vague. Rumored to have operated in northern Italy during the 1980s. Reputed for ritualistic kills and smuggling weapons disguised as artifacts. Said to have disbanded—or been silenced—decades ago.
But Bella knew better.
If they were truly gone, her sister wouldn’t be dead.
And this knife wouldn’t exist.
She wrote the name in red ink on a sticky note and pinned it above her desk. Underlined it twice.
MORVANA.
Her eyes shifted to the corner of the screen—a location tied to the knife’s listing: a private collector’s dropbox registered to a man named Kilian Roft. No photo. No website. Just a dirty little address on the edge of the city, printed on a receipt for a supposed “historical trade.”
Warehouse district.
Block C.
She grabbed her coat. Shoved the sticky note in her pocket. Took the blade and locked it in the iron box under her bed. Just in case.
No badge. No warrant.
But she had something better.
She had rage.
And she had nothing left to lose.
Because someone took her sister’s life.
And Bella was ready to start taking pieces back.
- Writer
