Ashes in the Wind

Ashes in the Wind
By Kenneth Thomas

Some wars don't end when the shooting stops.

July 1864. The Confederacy is in its death throes. Union forces press from every direction, cities smolder, and the Southern heartland lies gutted-its fields burned to ash, its towns splintered, its people scattered like smoke. Amid the wreckage, three Confederate soldiers-bound by blood, loyalty, and the kind of shared hardship only war can forge-find themselves cut loose from command. There are no orders left to follow. No victories left to win. Only the long, dangerous road home.

Eli Suttan speaks little, but sees everything. The war has taken his faith in glory and left him with nothing but endurance. Silas, his oldest friend, is hard-edged and slow to trust, yet loyalty runs through him like a steel spine. And Beau, the youngest, hides his fear behind fast talk and reckless decisions, unwilling to admit how close he's come to breaking.

Their journey takes them through a South they no longer recognize-orchards burned into blackened skeletons, towns where survivors eye each other with suspicion, and hollows where the sun seems to have been driven away on purpose. Hunger gnaws, bullets still fly, and every mile brings them closer to the memories they've tried to outrun.

But the road home is not simply a test of survival. It is a crucible for the soul. The men will face not just what waits ahead, but what walks beside them-old wounds, old debts, and the unspoken truths that have stalked them since the first shot was fired. Between rivers and ridges, they will be forced to reckon with the kind of courage that doesn't announce itself with a charge, but in the quiet act of taking one more step when everything in them says stop.

In the shadow of defeat, they must choose what kind of men they will be when the guns finally fall silent-whether they will remain prisoners of the war they fought, or whether they can lay down their burdens and become something new.

Told in prose as unflinching as musket fire yet carrying the stillness of a prayer whispered over fresh graves, Ashes in the Wind is a story of friendship tempered in the fire, of mercy that comes with a knife's edge, and of the fragile hope that even in a land turned to cinders, something worth living for can still take root.

This is not the story of a cause. It is the story of the men who walked away from it-carrying all they had left in their hearts and on their backs. And in that quiet, dangerous walk toward the idea of home, they will learn that some wars are never truly over... they are only carried.