Read an Extract from The Ashen Flame

Official extract: Copyright © 2026 Alexei Sassani. All rights reserved. This extract comes from Chapter One of The Ashen Flame and may not be reproduced without permission.

Chapter One

The tiles were cold under Farah’s bare feet. Forty-one whole ones. She was still arguing with herself about the six broken bits by the fountain—did a cracked tile count as one, or did you have to count the pieces—when her mother’s voice came through the sitting-room wall, too loud for someone who thought she was being quiet.

“I’m not going to keep pretending, Omid, I can’t, I’ve tried and I can’t—”

Her father’s voice, lower, harder to hear. Then, clearer: “So don’t. Fine. Don’t pretend.”

“That’s not what I—”

“Then what. For the Flame’s sake, say it plainly, for once, instead of—” A pause. When he spoke again his voice had gone very flat. “Never mind. Say whatever you need to say.”

Farah was nine. Thin, all wrist and shin, a scab on her left knee she kept picking without meaning to. The courtyard smelled of almond blossom going soft and brown where it had fallen, and under that the mineral smell of the fountain that leaked and nobody fixed. A dog somewhere past the wall barked at nothing, one of the strays that lived along the canal road at the edge of the district. This was an ordinary outer neighbourhood of Tehran, the capital of Persia, where her family had lived for three generations. Persia itself had been one of the great political and religious centres of the Ateshi world for the better part of twelve hundred years. She kept counting tiles because it was something to do with her eyes while her ears did the other thing.

The sitting-room door banged open harder than doors usually opened in that house, and her mother came out into the courtyard and stopped dead when she saw Farah sitting there.

“You’re meant to be asleep.”

“I was counting the tiles.”

Behnoosh didn’t ask how many. She came and sat on the fountain’s edge instead, too close, smelling of rosewater and, underneath it, sweat—the smell of someone who’d been crying, or shouting, or both. She was still a handsome woman that year, though grief and the strain of the past months had begun to show at the edges of it—dark hair, threaded early with grey she’d stopped bothering to hide, worn loose that night rather than pinned the way she kept it for the temple; a soft, rounded face that made strangers assume gentleness before they knew her; a loose saffron house robe falling naturally from her shoulders in the unstructured summer cut Farah associated with home. Nothing about the garment was meant to reshape the body beneath it. Farah noticed none of this as unusual. At nine, it was simply how her mother looked.

“I have to tell you something.” Her hands wouldn’t stay still in her lap. “You know Parvin.”

“She comes Tuesdays.”

“She’s going to come more than Tuesdays.” Behnoosh stopped. Started again. “There’s a word for it. A Sister-Bond. It’s real. It’s sacred, it’s—the temple says it counts, the same as a marriage, sometimes it’s even—” She stopped herself again, harder this time, like she’d bitten down on the rest of the sentence. “I need you to know it doesn’t take anything from you. From either of you.”

“Is that why Baba’s shouting?”

“He wasn’t shouting.”

“He was.”

Her mother’s mouth did something complicated. “He’s upset. That’s allowed. I’m not going to pretend he isn’t.”

“You said it doesn’t take anything away.”

“It doesn’t.” Too fast. Farah heard it land wrong even as her mother said it, heard the specific hollow sound of a sentence somebody needed to be true more than they actually knew it was true.

“Then why is he upset.”

Behnoosh held her gaze. Her face changed—not tears, not quite, just a tiredness that made her look older than she had a minute ago.

“I don’t know, Farah,” she said, and it was the first thing she’d said all night that didn’t sound rehearsed. “I don’t fully know. I wish I did. Go to bed.”

She kissed the top of Farah’s head, same as always, and it felt wrong that it felt the same, and Farah went inside without saying anything else because she’d run out of questions her mother actually seemed able to answer.

She lay awake a long time. Through the wall she could hear her father moving around the kitchen, not cooking, just moving, opening a cupboard and closing it again for no reason she could work out. At one point she heard him say something too quiet to catch, just a few words, and then nothing, and the nothing went on so long she eventually fell asleep inside it.

She dreamed about the six broken tiles. In the dream they kept changing number every time she counted them, and she couldn’t make herself stop trying.

Morning came and nobody mentioned the night before.

It was the spring of 1991. The kitchen radio mentioned Kuwait between weather, traffic and music; Omid muttered at it while making tea.

Farah barely listened.

Inside the house, the important event was Parvin.

Her father made the tea, same as always, holding the kettle with a new, deliberate carefulness she hadn’t seen from him before.

“Sleep all right?” he asked, not looking at her.

“Fine.”

“Good.” He poured. His hand wasn’t quite steady, and a little slopped over the rim of the cup, and he swore under his breath—a real curse, not one of the mild ones he usually let himself use in front of her—and wiped it up with the corner of his sleeve like the spill had personally offended him.

Behnoosh came in a few minutes later, dressed for the day, hair pinned the way it always was. She kissed Omid’s cheek on her way to the table, quick, and he let her, and neither of them looked at each other for longer than that.

End of extract.

The opening establishes the family history that later shapes Farah’s work as an Ash investigator. Continue to the official novel page or read the spoiler-safe guide to Sister-Bonds.