Blood and Ash

Long before the fires, when Los Angeles still glittered with electric promise, Mayor Alicia Ramirez stood at the city’s helm. To the public she was all charm and forward-thinking speeches, champion of “green futures” and “boundless innovation.” But beneath the slogans her council bartered with shadowy investors and siphoned public funds into private vaults.

Infrastructure budgets vanished into shell projects. Emergency reserves meant for hospitals and housing went to offshore accounts. Regulations meant to keep the city’s water and power grids resilient were quietly relaxed for quick profit.

When the pandemics struck and the economy staggered, Ramirez doubled down on spectacle. Billboards promised unity; press conferences dazzled with statistics carefully stripped of truth. Yet the streets told another story: failing sanitation systems, outages that left neighborhoods dark for days, and growing camps of the unhoused left to fend for themselves.

By the time citizens realized the depth of the betrayal, anger had hardened to rage. Protests became riots; riots ignited the first sparks of the civil war that would gut the nation. Ramirez, still proclaiming control, fled her own mansion as flames licked the skyline. Her name became shorthand for a city that trusted too long and paid in blood and ash.