Remembered by Dust — Chapter 9: Heat

In Chapter 9, Heat, we meet a young Moses wandering into the furnace of empire asking questions no one else dares to ask. Why is she limping? Why does he bleed? Why does this feel like order when it feels like dying? His questions are earnest, even holy, but they land in a place where answers are dangerous, and where silence is a form of survival.

Dust, now fully embedded among the workers, watches him with a clarity he doesn’t yet possess. He sees injustice; they live inside it. He means well, but meaning well doesn’t cool the heat or stop the bruising, and Dust’s testimony makes that painfully clear. The prince can leave the kiln. They can’t.

This chapter marks a turning point: Moses begins awakening to the truth of the world he inherited, and Dust begins awakening to him. The questions he asks crack something open, just not in the way he expects.

And we leave Heat in the furnace where one prince finally begins to see, and where Dust learns that seeing is not the same thing as bearing. This chapter pressed us close to the machinery of empire, to the questions that crack foundations, and to the people who live with the answers no one wants to hear.

Next week, in Chapter 10: Plague, the consequences ripple outward. What begins as labor and hierarchy becomes contagion, grief, and the brutal truth that hardness has a cost, one often paid by the innocent.

Heat showed us what happens inside the system, and Plague shows us what happens when the system refuses to change.

See you next week.

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