Ashmouth

The world didn't end when alchemy poisoned the earth. It ended when the Royal Alchemical Society tried to erase it. Now, in the crater called Ashmouth, Cael-the mute scavenger-survives on scraps and silence. He breathes through filters he builds himself. He writes on a cracked slateboard. He never expected to find Liris: a scarred child marked with the sigil of the long-dead Society. Together they uncover the truth: the world is trapped in recursion-a machine that replays existence in endless drafts, revising lives, rewriting deaths, searching for an ending that satisfies.
The recursion offers them roles to play: savior, martyr, betrayer, voice. It tempts them with praise, alternate versions, and second chances. It asks them, again and again, to choose closure. But what if the only way to survive is to refuse the ending?Bleak, intimate, and unflinching, Ashmouth is a story about survival after stories fail-about living in a world that has stopped watching, where the wind means nothing but itself.