Letter from the Ash, No. II

Letter from the Ash, No. II
A Stirring in the Smoke

“They thought the quiet meant she had disappeared. But it was her battleground. Her home. Her wild cathedral.”

In the hush they bred in me, they mistook stillness for surrender. Thought I was prey—pliant, easy. But silence didn’t make me small. It made me sharp. It became the place where I vanished from their gaze and found myself instead. Fire didn’t pull me out of the quiet. It taught me to see in the dark.

There is a particular shape to the kind of stillness where I was forged. Not the silence they taught me—the kind meant to break me open and pour me into molds—but the silence I claimed. Mine is the kind that listens more than it speaks. That tracks more than it runs. A kind of stillness where nothing is lost, only waiting to be retrieved.

They called it fear. Weakness. Obedience. They fed me silence like obedience, sweetened with survival. But it didn’t make me their prey.

Because what they didn’t see was that the same stillness they tried to bury me in became the ground where I sharpened. The fire didn’t burn me away—it taught me to move without sound. It made me a hunter. A silent hunter. Fierce, wild, built from the ashes.

And when I started to move, it wasn’t toward safety. It was toward truth. Toward desire. Toward the sound of my own becoming—quiet at first, then rising like breath through a hollowed throat. The girl they thought was whispering hadn’t gone quiet. She was watching. And now, she is no longer waiting to be chosen.

She walks barefoot through what burned. Not to mourn. To track.

Because I don’t speak to prove I’m worthy. I don’t roar to be heard by those who never listened.

I breathe silence because that’s where I became myself.

And when I do speak, it’s with the weight of every word I chose not to waste.

Elowen writes this letter barefoot, ash-kissed, and unshaken.
For those who weren’t broken in the hush—but built there.

This piece is protected—not to silence it, but to honor the depth that shaped it.
Elowen breathes here—sharpened, sovereign, and unafraid.
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Want to begin where this trail started?
Explore Letter I: What the Ember Remembered