From the Ashes: Preview E-Book

B.C. Sayer

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

--THIS IS A PREVIEW.--

Lael always dreamed of sailing away from the settlement and his reputation as town pariah.

Elsive always dreamed of sailing back to the land the settlement stole from him people generations ago.

When Lael is granted his wish to become a social worker on the native reservations, he falls into an immediate and intense bond with elder-to-be, Elsive. As his talks with Elsive bring the settlement’s atrocities against the natives to light, quiet dreams of freedom morph into a growing rebellion that threatens the tribes’ collective desire for peace.

Is love worth the risk of losing the lives and the culture the natives have strived to protect for generations?

Is freedom?

This timely novel challenges readers to consider their role in movements of change and to decide which side they fall to: complacency or empowerment.

Leseprobe

B.C. Sayer

From the Ashes: Preview

BookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

From the Ashes

Also by B.C. Sayer:

Between Dark and Light

The Unseasonal Warm Front

The Stars in Indigo

I’m Okay, I Promise

Gagged

Bound

Chained

To the people who do not understand that they are part of the problem. I promise. You are. I am, too.

One

Lael was particularly good at not vomiting. That was the one benefit of constantly drinking too much. Still, he was entirely frustrated as he watched out the window of the pub as a man emptied his stomach alongside the building. Lael could have easily held the ale down better and enjoyed it more, too. It took more drinks now for him to enjoy alcohol the way he liked.

As in, the drunken way.

Contrary to what other believed, it had more benefits than downfalls, the excessive drinking. The best one, of course, was why Lael had begun in the first place: to tune out his uncles.

It had begun six years earlier, long before it was socially acceptable for him to consume alcohol recreationally. But nobody on the settlement had argued with him. Unlike many of the people within the pub, alcohol made Lael quieter, and it made his mind quieter, too. It kept him out of fights, and it kept his thoughts at bay.

That was how Lael always posed it to Kenter, his father’s oldest brother and the appointed leader of the settlement. Kenter disliked Lael’s drinking habits, saying it brought embarrassment to the family, but Kenter was known to have a stick of self-righteousness up his ass.

Anyway, it was too late to ween himself off the drinking now. It was part of Lael’s daily routine, and a disapproving uncle, who had acted as such since the day Lael was born, was not about to finally exert any sort of real power over him. Kenter was not Lael’s father. Though he had been orphaned many years earlier, Lael had decided he was not obligated to listen to other family members, not when they insisted on being so rude.

He had heard the conversations through the wall as a child, the ones his father and two uncles had while Lael’s mother politely pretended not to listen. She had grown up a servant and had never grown out of holding her tongue, a trait many had wished Lael had inherited. In these conversations, Kenter had always expressed his distress about the rate in which Lael was maturing, for it was apparently slower than the others. He was thin and gaunt, which was very unlike the other boys on the settlement. He had taken after his mother, and Kenter had known it was a bad idea for his father to marry a servant. It corrupted the bloodline.

That was why Lael was fucked up. The bloodline. Not the amount of exceedingly high expectations he was supposed to meet to be accepted within the settlement.

They cared little of how he had taught himself to read and write at a young age. This was admirable of many other young settlers, but with servant blood coursing through his veins, nothing was ever enough. He always had a deficit, and achievements were like rainbows. They seemed so vivid and attainable, yet when you reached the patch of land from which you were certain it originated, the colors shimmered. By the time you blinked, it was out of reach again.

So, he knew how the others thought of him by the time he made it past his seventh year of birth, and he learned to revel in the lack of attention others gave him, positive or negative. Once Lael failed to prove himself in other valued ways – like strength and height – there were no more expectations. He was free to do as he pleased. After all, he could not be forced back into servitude. He was not forced to train in the militia. He was not forced to apprentice anyone.

The only person who felt compelled to mentor him in anything was Agran, the brother slapped right in the middle of the birth order between Kenter and Lael’s father, which was why Lael stood hunched over behind the bar of his pub, watching someone expel his stomach into the sandpit Agran had set up five years earlier for that exact use. To vomit in.

“You’ll have to go out there when he’s done,” Agran said over the murmur in the pub as he passed behind Lael. Lael swiped loose hairs from his eyes.

“I always have to go out,” Lael commented in deadpan, rather than protest.

“That’s because you’re the worker, and I’m the owner.”

Shoveling sand over the vomit was not a highly revered task. It usually resulted with sand in the boots and accidentally overturning someone else’s dried vomit from a past night.