Ashes on the Threshold

Description

Zofia was taught the old ways: sweep ash across the threshold, set out bread and salt, never name what wanders. She names him anyway. Winter answers with a pale-eyed stranger who crosses her door as if it were a promise—guest, then guardian, then hunger made handsome. The village mutters; iron glints. At the river’s edge, the reed-women hiss that ash binds tighter than prayer. In the bone-crone’s hut, a knife of flint and ash waits to sever his shadow.

Between fire and snow, Zofia must choose the law of the hearth or the mercy of the blade—unmake what she called, or welcome it and feed it with her own blood. He learns to kneel to her “no.” She learns that love is appetite with a vow. Ash becomes not a fence but a line of welcome, and the door remembers every word.

A complete romance. Can be read as a standalone.

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Chapter 1 – Ash at the Door

Night had been chewing at the village for a week. Little bites. A hen with its throat opened like a split pomegranate. A sow refusing her feed. A child going light as straw, eyes too big for her face. Not a storm. Not a sickness you could boil out of sheets. Something that walked, and when it walked it wanted.

Old women kept their beads close and their mouths closer. At the well they said nothing, not to the air, not to each other. Only the click of ladles, the flinch when a crow spoke from the birches like a cracked hinge. Men tied red threads around the handles of their axes and told their sons not to step over the low fence after dusk. The fence was hardly a fence, just sticks…