The Warden's Journal

Pyre Warden Seld's field journal — three seasons of garrison log entries from Ashfall Town, increasingly spare as the heat and the sameness take their toll.

The early entries are brisk and professional: patrol routes, Ashwalker tax refusals, weather. By season two the entries are single lines. The final page is a list of the eighty-nine days remaining in his posting, each crossed out. One entry, unmarked, reads: 'Smoke from the vault mouth again. Nobody goes there.'