A prince steps into the heat of forced labor, asking why bodies limp and bleed. Dust watches him with a worker’s clarity: he can leave the furnace; they cannot. Heat reveals the cost of asking questions in a world built to silence them.

Chapter 8, “Salt and Spin,” returns to a story we think we know and looks closer. Dust steps into the moment where a mother’s courage was misread as disobedience, revealing the truth hidden beneath the old narrative. This chapter reframes what really happened—and why it matters.

In “Brushfire,” something sparks at the edge of Dust’s vision and refuses to fade. A voice flickers low in the brambles, calling Dust forward before she’s ready. Deliverance bends, burns, and asks questions no map can answer. One step, then another—the fire is speaking.

“Broken Levees” threads together Sumerian floods, New Orleans trauma, and the quiet disasters we inherit. Dust witnesses who gets the boat and who gets the blame, how levees crumble long before they break, and why resilience is never as simple as staying afloat.

In The Tower, Dust begins to take human form and steps into the story she’s been watching unfold. As humanity reaches upward, building monuments to its own ambition, the foundations begin to crack. This chapter marks the moment when creation forgets its source—and Dust learns what it means to be both matter and memory.

In Remembered by Dust: Blood Offering, love, faith, and fear blur together on the mountain. Through Dust’s eyes, we revisit the story of sacrifice and obedience—and begin to ask what it means to lay the knife down and choose love instead.

From Cain and Abel to every child who’s ever felt unseen, Ghost Siblings explores the ache of being second—the shadow of comparison that lingers across generations. Through Dust’s eyes, this chapter becomes a tender reckoning with jealousy, worth, and the longing to matter.

Eve’s curiosity cracks the silence of paradise. The Knowing reimagines the moment awareness enters the world—not as a fall, but as the birth of consciousness. It’s the ache and the beauty of becoming: the instant we see ourselves and can never go back. Through myth, memoir, and Dust’s quiet testimony, this chapter explores what it means to wake up—to know, to wonder, and to choose.

Chapter 1 of Remembered by Dust begins where all stories begin — with breath. Part memoir, part myth, and part midrash, this hybrid novel in verse reimagines creation as a stirring, a whisper, a beat, and a glow. Join Meridith Byrne as she claims her place in the universe — and the universe’s place within her.

I set out to write my memoir, but it became something else—a midrash in verse, narrated by a speck of stardust. Remembered by Dust reclaims faith and story from those who weaponize them, weaving kindness, justice, science, and memory into one tapestry. This preface introduces my author’s note and Dust’s first letter, the beginning of a story that will unfold chapter by chapter.