The sky had forgotten how to shine.
Clouds hung like wet cloth above the earth, heavy and unmoving, casting the world in a pale, colorless gray. The rain wasn't falling hard—it never did anymore. It just drifted downward like tired ash, touching the skin with all the weight of silence.
He walked alone through what used to be a village.
There were no signs left of life, only the skeletons of homes—walls collapsed, roofs rotted through, memories buried beneath moss and time. A child's wooden doll lay in a ditch, half-sunken into the mud, its smile faded to a crack. He didn't stop to pick it up. He hadn't stopped for anything in days.
Or was it weeks?
Time didn't move forward anymore. It only circled, quietly, like vultures above a grave no one had the strength to dig.
His boots squelched through wet grass, past the stone marker where a well used to be. There had once been laughter here. A girl with white ribbons in her hair, chasing fireflies. A woman calling him home from a window that no longer stood. A younger version of himself, foolish enough to believe in promises.
He blinked.
The world stayed quiet.
But something small moved.
A faint shimmer—like light trying to remember itself—flickered behind the broken walls of a burned-out home. He paused, breath held, but it was gone the moment he turned his head.
He stared longer than he meant to. Then kept walking.
He found shelter beneath the arch of an old tree, its branches bare, bark blackened as if it had caught fire in a past it couldn't remember. Water dripped from the tips of the branches in rhythmic taps. He stared at them for a long time, listening.
One drop.
Then another.
And another.
He didn't know why the sound made his chest ache. Maybe it reminded him of the way her tears used to fall when she thought he was asleep.
A memory rose, unbidden.
She was kneeling beside a small grave, hands pressed together, whispering prayers with a voice that broke between syllables.
"He said he'd come back," she whispered. "He said the world was going to be better."
He had stood behind her, watching, unable to speak. He couldn't tell her that the man she waited for was already gone. That he'd died long before the war, long before the silence. He just hadn't stopped breathing yet.
He had wanted to place a hand on her shoulder. To say something. Anything.
But words had become knives by then—and he couldn't bring himself to bleed again.
He shook the thought away and kept walking.
His cloak was soaked through. Cold had long since stopped bothering him. The world was always cold now. His hands, once calloused from battles and burns, trembled as he gripped the rusted chain hanging from his neck. The pendant was still there. Still whole.
It was the only thing that was.
The metal caught a sliver of light—not from the sky, but from somewhere else.
It pulsed, faintly.
Then stopped.
He paused. Frowned. Tucked it back beneath his shirt.
He reached the edge of the world.
Or so it felt.
Before him stretched a sea of fog—rolling, endless, swallowing the earth like breath held too long. Mountains pierced the mist in the distance like bones pushing through skin. The sky above remained the same—gray, still, hollow.
He opened his mouth.
No sound came.
Not yet.
He sat down on the ledge, legs hanging into nothing. Let the rain kiss his cheeks, run down his neck like fingertips he no longer remembered. Let the silence stretch—until it was too loud to bear.
And then—softly—he spoke.
"I miss you."
Just that.
Just enough.
It broke something.
A tightness in his throat.
A crack behind his eyes.
A whisper in the part of him that still pretended to feel.
He bowed his head, and for the first time in years, allowed himself to remember their names. Each one a spark. Each one a grave. Each one a reason to keep walking—and a reason he no longer could.
The rain didn't stop.
The sky didn't shift.
But something inside him did.
Something small, quiet, and cruel.
He was still here.
Still breathing.
And he didn't know why.
He stood, slowly. The cliff before him. The fog below. The storm behind.
And somewhere inside him, a voice whispered:
"Maybe I was never meant to be saved."
Just as he turned to leave—
the pendant pulsed again.
This time, he felt it: a warmth.
Faint. Alive.
And not his own.
He looked back at the mist.
For the first time in a long time, he wondered:
Was someone calling out to him?
He stepped forwards.
He let himself fall.