ASHES BETWEEN US

Where do we run, dear Amara?

Ashes Between Us

Chapter One – Part One

The first lash split the silence before it split my skin.

It always began that way — not with pain, but with silence. A silence so thick it pressed against my ribs and made every breath ache, a silence heavy with the weight of eyes that refused to meet mine.

My father’s hand gripped the belt like it was a scepter of justice. The buckle gleamed dull in the candlelight of the study, a little crown of iron waiting to carve its shape into me. His arm rose, and for a heartbeat I saw not a man but a beast dressed in velvet and wine, his shadow stretching across the room like a stain.

Then it fell.

The sting seared through my back, hot and wet, like fire licking bone. My knees buckled, but I didn’t scream. Screaming made him smile, and I would rather drown in my own blood than feed him joy.

My mother stood by the door. Her face was pale, her lips trembling, but no words came. She had mastered silence long before I had. Lady Seraphine Ashbourne had folded herself into a porcelain doll, perfect and still, incapable of saving me.

Damian, my brother, leaned lazily against the wall, arms crossed. His smirk was carved from the same cruelty that shaped my father. He wanted me to shatter. He waited for it.

Isolde and Celeste, my younger sisters, clung to each other like two fragile birds in the rafters of a burning church. They wouldn’t remember me as their sister tonight — only as the wretched thing that bore the belt’s kiss.

When it ended, I could not tell if the room had grown darker or if it was only me collapsing into shadow.

I staggered up the stairs, each step pulsing with fire where the belt had cut. My chamber door yawned open, revealing not a sanctuary but the graveyard of a girl. Torn dresses lay in heaps on the floor, their lace shredded in fits of rage. Quills snapped in half littered the desk like broken bones. Books were overturned, pages crumpled, ink spilled across the floorboards like black blood.

The smell of wax, sweat, and iron filled the air. The window was cracked, the cold night leaking in. The Bible sat on my nightstand, but its cover was stained with ink and dust, and the cross embossed on its spine had long since been scratched until it was nothing but a scar.

I hated it. I needed it. I wanted to hurl it against the wall and watch it shatter.

Instead, I reached for my quill — the last unbroken one. My hand trembled, the ink dripping before the nib touched parchment. My breath came ragged, each exhale carrying the madness that had no mouth but mine.

And then, I wrote:

I made her. I named my perfect toy.

Her name was Amara.

Amara, I whispered into the silence, my voice dropping into something low, guttural, almost inhuman. “My copy. My shadow. My curse.”

She was mine, though she did not know it. She lived because I bled her into existence. Every lash on my back became a scar on hers. Every insult, every betrayal, every wound that festered in me — I carved it into her flesh.

You are me, Amara, I told her on the page. But worse. Always worse. Because if I cannot destroy myself, I will destroy you.

The ink smeared under my palm as I wrote her into being: a girl who lived in a rotting house at the edge of Crowhurst Lane, where the walls wept with mold and her father’s boots thundered like war drums.

Her name slipped from my tongue again, slower this time, heavier, like a prayer turned curse.

“Amara…”

And in the silence of my ruined room, she answered.

Not in ink. Not in thought. But in a voice that shivered along the edge of my mind, sharp and cold as steel dragged across bone.

You think I am yours, she said. But you were mine long before you knew my name.

I froze, quill suspended. The shadows in the corners of the room thickened, stretching like black veins across the walls. My chest tightened, not with fear but with recognition.

She knew.

She knew me.

Tell them, she hissed, her voice low, feral. Tell them what you made me from. Tell them of your wounds, your scars. Tell them of the hands that touched you where they should not. Tell them of the servants who laughed as they held you down. Tell them of the tutors who pressed their lessons into your flesh with fists. Tell them of the schoolyard where they tore your books and your body in the same breath.

My hand shook. Ink splattered across the page like droplets of blood.

“Stop,” I whispered, though I didn’t know if I spoke to her or myself.

But Amara only laughed — a hollow, bitter sound, echoing through me.

Where do we run, Elara? she asked, and though I knew I was alone in my room, I could feel her lips against my ear, her breath hot and mocking. Where do we hide, dear sister, dear shadow, dear outcast?

My head bowed over the parchment. My tears stained the words, smudging her name until it looked like my own.

I made her. I made Amara.

But even as I wrote, I felt it: the line blurring, fading, unraveling. Who belonged to whom?

Her past was my past, doubled, darkened, drowned in cruelty. My story bled into hers until I could no longer tell where my flesh ended and hers began.

And perhaps — perhaps that was the point.

Chapter One – Part Two

The candlelight flickered low, trembling against the walls as though afraid of what it saw. My quill hovered, then dipped, then moved in steady strokes. The frenzy of my anger dulled into something colder, sharper — a blade pressed against skin but not yet cutting.

I breathed.

And with each breath, Amara took shape.

Her house was not a house at all but a carcass. Its roof sagged like a broken spine, its walls warped with damp and rot. Rain leaked through the beams, dripping into bowls set across the floor. Mold climbed the stone like ivy, staining everything a sickly green. In winter, the wind howled through the gaps, and in summer, the heat clung like wet cloth.

This was where Amara lived. This was where I had placed her.

Her father, Gareth Crowhurst, sat slumped in a chair, his boots caked with mud and blood, his hands always reaching for the bottle. His fists were quicker than his words, and when the drink ran out, so did his patience. He beat her mother, Margaret, until her face was a canvas of bruises. He beat Thomas, her brother, until the boy could barely breathe. And when his rage wanted more — it was Amara he dragged across the floor.

I wrote her body thin, her skin pale, her hair tangled like black weeds. But her eyes — I could not weaken her eyes. They burned, the way mine once had, before the world taught me that burning only made the wolves come closer.

She carried my past in her bones.

They will know what you were too weak to tell, Amara whispered through my pen. They will see it through me.

And they did.

When she walked to school, the other children jeered. They tore her books from her hands, shoved her into mud, laughed when her dress tore. Their voices followed her home — outcast, w***e’s daughter, cursed blood.

It was my voice, once. My memory.

When she sat at her desk, the tutor’s hand lingered too long on her shoulder. His lesson was not of books, but of silence, and the weight of his body pressed against hers in the shadows. She never told her mother. I had never told mine.

When she returned home, the servants looked on. They did not stop her father’s hands when they reached too far, when he pressed her against the wall, when the house filled with her muffled screams. Their eyes turned away. Their silence louder than his violence.

It was my life.

It was hers, doubled.

Her nights were filled with rage, but it was a calm, seething rage — like coals glowing long after the fire has died. She did not cry. Not anymore. She did not scream. Not anymore. She only listened to the echo of her heartbeat and wondered when it would stop.

I felt her breath as I wrote her. I heard her steps in the corridor of my mind. I saw the shadow of her father’s boots and shivered, though my own father was rooms away.

And then she spoke again.

You made me, Elara. You made me from your filth, your scars, your screams. You poured yourself into me until I bled twice what you bled. Do you hate me for it? Or do you hate yourself for needing me?

My hand cramped. The ink blotched. My tears mixed with the black, smearing her face on the page until she looked less like a girl and more like a ghost.

But I could not stop.

I would not stop.

Because if Amara carried my story, then perhaps — perhaps I could bury mine in hers.

Chapter One – Part Three

The pen slipped from my hand.

Not because I willed it, but because the room shifted. The candle sputtered, then flared, then almost died, as though the air had been stolen. For a moment, Amara’s voice still echoed inside me, but then—

Silence.

My head jerked up. The house creaked. Not the normal groan of old beams, but a careful sound, like someone walking, pausing, listening.

My heart slammed against my ribs. I wasn’t alone.

The door to my chamber stood half-open. It had been closed before. I remembered closing it. My fingers curled around the quill as though it could protect me. The ink still dripped, bleeding across the page, smearing Amara’s eyes into black holes.

“Elara.”

The voice came soft. Too soft.

I turned.

My mother stood in the doorway, candle in hand. Her face, usually pale, seemed whiter, almost waxen. Her hair, once neatly coiled, fell in loose strands over her shoulders, as if she had risen from bed in a hurry. She should have scolded me for being awake at such an hour. She should have asked why I was writing instead of praying. But she said nothing.

She only stared at me as though I were something she could not touch.

“Mother,” I whispered. My throat cracked. “Why—why are you here?”

Her lips moved, but no sound came. Only her candle shook, spilling wax down her hand. Her eyes darted to the desk — to the Bible lying beneath my papers.

I followed her gaze. My breath caught.

The Bible was open, though I had not opened it. Its pages curled and darkened, as though stained by wine. But I knew it was not wine. The liquid spread slowly, line by line, turning scripture into blotched crimson.

Blood.

I stumbled back, the chair scraping.

My mother flinched at the sound, as though the noise had struck her. She raised one trembling finger to her lips. “Do not… speak,” she whispered finally, her voice thin as thread. “Do not let them hear you.”

Them.

I froze.

The candle flickered again, casting shadows that bent across the wall, too tall, too crooked to be mine or hers.

“Mother—”

But she was already gone. She stepped back into the corridor, retreating without another word. Her candlelight bobbed once, twice, then vanished into darkness.

I stood alone.

The Bible bled.

And outside my window — through the cracked pane, beyond the trees — I heard a girl’s voice.

Soft. Mocking. Familiar.

“Where do we run, dear Amara?”

I turned, my breath ragged. The curtains billowed though the window was shut.

Footprints, faint and wet, trailed across the floorboards. They led from the window. To my desk. To me.

And then they stopped.

End of Chapter one