Ash Reforged

Ash walked the city aimlessly, his steps quieter than before. The world was loud—cars honking, people shouting, neon flickering—but inside, there was only stillness.

Stillness, and a hunger he couldn't name.

He hadn't eaten in two days. Not out of discipline, but because nothing called to him. Food felt… dense. Too heavy for what he'd become.

As he passed an alley, he smelled it before he saw it.

Blood.

A butcher shop. Open air. Hooks dangled from a steel rail like crooked fingers. Slabs of raw meat hung under fluorescent lights—red, glistening, freshly cut. A pig's head stared at him from a plastic tray, mouth slightly open, eyes long gone.

Ash stopped.

The noise around him faded. Time slowed.

He didn't feel disgust. He didn't feel pity.

He felt recognition.

Somewhere, somehow, that being was part of him.

Not metaphorically.

Literally.

He saw the pig's final moment—the fear, the betrayal, the scream caught in its throat as the knife entered. Not as an outsider watching, but as the one living it.

"You didn't just eat the meat," a voice inside him said.

"You ate the memory."

A surge of warmth ran through his spine—not pain, not pleasure. A kind of grieving.

He walked away slowly, heart thudding in silence.

That night, he sat in stillness again.

He saw the truth of consumption. That not all eating was evil. That some animals offered themselves willingly, as if finishing a karmic arc through service. Not sacrifice, but return.

But there were others—millions—taken in rage, greed, numbness.

"It's not the act that binds," the voice said,

"It's the consciousness within the act."

Ash understood now why he had stopped eating meat. Not from guilt. Not from dogma.

But because he could feel too much.

He was no longer just "Ash." He was the whole web. The teeth, the prey, the blood, the prayer.

He whispered to the wind, softly:

"If you come willingly, I honor you.

If not, I release you.

May my hunger never birth another's fear."

And with that, his fire stirred again—subtle, but vast. Not a flame for burning. A flame for blessing.

To be continued….