17 pgs.
When a wildfire devastates the small town of Millfield, California, disaster archivist Dr. Sarah Chen is sent to recover what remains of its public library. Among the ruins, she begins encountering impossible phenomena—stories reappearing in the ashes, rewritten versions of books and personal records that seem to speak directly to the community’s grief. As Sarah struggles to document the event, she discovers that these “ash-stories” only survive when witnessed, not captured – a revelation that challenges everything she believes about preservation, science, and memory.
Part speculative mystery, part elegy for a burning world, The Archivist of Ash examines how communities transform loss into resilience and how memory adapts when permanence becomes impossible. It’s a story about the ethics of saving what cannot be saved, and about the fragile line between preservation and possession in an age of fire.
FIRST PAGE EXCERPT
“Discovery
The air in Millfield, California, tasted of dust and distant
smoke. For three years, the sun had beaten down on the
small town nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada,
leaving the earth cracked and gasping. Dr. Sarah Chen,
a senior archivist for the Western Regional Archive Network,
had come to document the materials from the evacuated
Millfield Public Library before its scheduled demolition.
She was a specialist in disaster recovery, a practitioner of
the science of saving things.
Fifteen years ago, Sarah had lost her own history in the
Oakland Hills fire. Her dissertation, a groundbreaking
study of early Chinese-American community newspapers
from the 1930s and 40s, had been consumed by the flames.
More devastating still, her grandmother’s irreplaceable
collection of those same papers had been reduced to ash.
The loss had shaped her career and fueled her obsession
with preservation. She had built her professional life on the
premise that what was lost could, with enough care and
expertise, be salvaged.
Her current assignment was methodical work. Sarah and her
team of three junior archivists employed specialized
techniques to rescue the library’s contents from oblivion.
They had processed nearly two thousand items over the
past week: city council minutes dating back to 1892, high
school yearbooks from the 1960s, handwritten recipes from
the local women’s club, children’s artwork from decades of
summer reading programs.
It was in the library’s ash-covered backyard that Sarah first
encountered the impossible. A wildfire three weeks prior
had swept through the area, leaving a thick layer of grey ash
over everything. The space had once been a vibrant community
garden; now the raised beds were barely visible beneath the…”