Cherreads

Ashes and Starlight

TheeError404
In a dying empire held together by the stolen magic of Ashborn — people whose grief is powerful enough to burn the world — seventeen-year-old Sable Voss has spent her life hiding what she is. When her village is massacred by the Emperor's Harvesters — soldiers who drain Ashborn alive to fuel the capital's eternal light — Sable's grief ignites something inside her she cannot control. She burns everything within a mile. And she feels nothing. Taken to the capital as a weapon, she meets Caelum, the Emperor's disgraced general who is secretly working to collapse the very empire he serves. He is the first person who looks at her power and does not flinch. But Sable doesn't want to be saved. She wants answers — why did her grief feel like relief? What did she lose the night her village burned? And is the hollow place inside her an absence of feeling — or a power the world has never seen? A story about grief as power. Love as choice. And the terrifying grace of a woman who has nothing left to lose.
Latest Updates

The Extra: Subject 082

Rio only wanted to see how the story ended. Instead, he woke up inside it. Not as the protagonist, not even as a supporting character—but as someone who barely existed in the narrative. An extra with no importance, no future, and no place in the story’s direction. At least, that’s how it was supposed to be. Now in the body of Rio Valen, a disgraced noble exiled from his own house, he finds himself in a region the original story barely touched—one driven as much by advanced technology as it is by arcane power. And buried beneath it, something far worse. The facility he wakes up in shouldn’t exist. The experiments conducted there shouldn’t have succeeded. And whatever was placed inside him was never meant to survive. As fragments of memory return—both his own and the life he inherited—Rio begins to understand the situation he’s in. The world still follows its original course. The key figures are still moving toward the same future. But his existence doesn’t fit anywhere within it. Even so, people begin to notice him. Not because of who he is—but because of something they can’t quite explain. A presence. A flaw. Or something far more dangerous. Some approach out of curiosity. Others, for reasons he doesn’t understand. And a few, simply because staying away isn’t an option. With no role to follow and no clear path ahead, Rio is left with a simple choice: Stay invisible and survive. Or step into a story that was never meant to include him. Because in a world that already has its main character— an extra that shouldn’t exist might be the only thing that can change it. **The cover used is temperoray, I hold no credits towards the art**
Frictioned · 11.5k Views