Read the First Chapter Preview of The Frequency of Ash – A Dark Urban Fantasy of Meridian City

Something strange has moved again beneath Meridian’s bones.

Today I’m sharing the exclusive first excerpt of my upcoming urban fantasy thriller The Frequency of Ash, a new story from the world of Meridian City. If you’ve followed the Aya Lin stories – The Drowning Glyph, Ashes in Bloom, The Negative Within – this book continues her descent into the frequencies that haunt the city’s infrastructure and her own past.

This preview showcases the opening scene of Chapter 1, where a forbidden signal breaks through Aya’s sleep… and speaks with a voice that should be impossible.

What is The Frequency of Ash About?

Urban Fantasy • Occult Technology • Psychological Horror

At its core, this story explores:

the haunted machinery of a city older than its maps
signals that behave like living organisms
echoes that wear human faces
trauma, grief, and the ghosts of people who were never allowed to rest
the way sound and silence reshape identity

Aya Lin, an inspector in the Division, is forced to confront the frequency that has lived inside her since Tower #19 – and what it means when the city begins to answer back.

EXCERPT — Chapter 1: The Call

The static cut through my sleep like broken glass through skin. Not the usual white noise that lived in my bones since Tower #19, this was sharper, deliberate. My police radio shouldn’t have been able to receive anything on that frequency. The Ministry had buried those channels under seventeen layers of bureaucratic silence.

I rolled out of bed, bare feet finding the cold floor as numbers scrolled across the radio’s display: 27.000 Hz.

My frequency. The one that lived inside me now.

“Tower #19 – Active Transmission Detected.”

The automated voice sounded wrong. Too clean. Like someone had sanitized the fear out of it. I grabbed my coat from the chair, fingers tracing the red thread I’d sewn into the lining, protection sigils that probably did nothing but make me feel less hollow.

Rain hammered the window of my cramped Division apartment. Beyond the glass, Meridian’s skyline stuttered. Streetlights dimmed and flared in waves, the pattern spreading outward from Greystone like ripples in black water. The city’s power grid had always been temperamental, but this wasn’t a random failure. This was a rhythm. Heartbeat.

The tower was breathing again.

My phone buzzed. Captain Morris. I let it ring through to voicemail while I pulled on boots, checked my service weapon. The voicemail played automatically through the apartment’s speaker system, another “upgrade” from the Ministry.

“Lin, whatever you’re thinking of doing, don’t. We’ve got containment teams mobilizing. This isn’t your,”

I unplugged the speaker mid-sentence. Morris didn’t understand. Containment teams couldn’t handle what Tower #19 had become. They’d walk in with their silence generators and white noise barriers, thinking they could compress the anomaly back into nothing. But you couldn’t silence something that had learned to feed on the absence of sound.

The radio crackled again. This time, no automated message. Just breathing. Wet, labored, like lungs full of ash.

Then my brother’s voice: “Aya?”

My hand froze on the doorknob. Chen had been missing for thirteen years. His voice shouldn’t exist anywhere, least of all on a frequency that officially didn’t exist.

“Aya, I can see you through the static.”

The lights in my apartment died. Emergency power kicked in a second later, bathing everything in that sick amber glow that made shadows look like they were bleeding. In the window’s reflection, I caught movement, not behind me, but inside the glass itself. A figure forming in the rain patterns, features built from water droplets and city light.

Chen’s face. Or what the tower thought his face should look like.

“That’s not him,” I told the reflection. My voice came out steady despite the tremor in my chest. “You’re just an echo wearing his frequency.”

The reflection smiled with too many teeth. “Everything’s an echo here. Even you.”

The building’s fire alarm shrieked to life, not in the normal pattern, but in Morse code. Old Division emergency protocols from before digital encryption. My fingers translated automatically: ALL UNITS. TOWER #19. RESONANCE CASCADE IMMINENT.

I yanked the door open and hit the stairwell running. Five flights down to the parking garage, each landing lit by those emergency lights that turned the concrete into something organic, pulsing. The hum was getting louder. Not just in my bones now, but in the building’s foundation, the city’s infrastructure.

My car’s radio turned on before I’d even started the engine. At every station, the same transmission: silence so thick it had weight, punctuated by a single repeating phrase in a child’s voice.

“She’s coming home. She’s coming home. She’s coming home.”

The tower knew I’d answer its call. It had always known.

I threw the car into gear and drove toward Greystone, where the city’s heartbeat was learning how to stop.

Dark urban fantasy artwork of Inspector Aya Lin standing before a flickering city tower surrounded by static, neon haze, and falling rain. Atmospheric Meridian City skyline in the background by Wartonno Art

✦ Why this excerpt? Why now?

This is the moment everything changes for Aya Lin.

This is the point where:

Meridian wakes up
Tower #19 returns
The echoes begin to wear human skin
The past stops being quiet

And Aya, for better or worse, is the only one who can hear the call.

Author Note

Thank you for reading the very first public excerpt of The Frequency of Ash.
More chapters, lore, and behind-the-scenes posts will follow soon – including music and artwork tied to this story.

If you want the next preview early:

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