ash

For a while we tried to pretend everything was . . . not normal, it could never be normal again, but at least that it was recoverable. We lost a city, and the world was spiraling into chaos, but surely, eventually, things would settle. The empire hadn't touched every corner of the continent, however hard they tried, and out here . . . maybe we could still find peace, out here. Then, that summer, ash began raining from the sky. We carried on, because what else could we do, but that's when everyone started to accept that whatever storm had been unleashed, there was no chance of it simply passing us by.

As the summer wore on, travelers trickled in with news of fire and flood, of the earth shaking itself apart and the mountains themselves exploding. People were fleeing, if they could, with neither plan nor preparation. And I, fool that I was, decided to head back to the source.

The fires had died down but the ash remained. On clear days the light seemed pale and wan, and when it rained the rain left streaks of soot everywhere it touched. To say nothing of the storms: fierce winds, torrential rain, clouds so thick I couldn't tell if it was night or day and lightning so bright and so frequent my eyes refused to adjust to the dark. It was comforting to imagine that all of this was just to keep me from reaching my goal, but I doubt the world cared that much about me. As I took shelter in the abandoned villages along the way, it was hard to think that it cared much about any of us.

I finally arrived at the dead city one clear bright sunny day, and for once the sunlight was clean and healthy--I'd almost forgotten what that looked like. There were no storms here, and the city--the bits that weren't under the ocean now, anyway--was almost untouched. My suspicions, it seemed, were correct.

I cleaned the ash from my face in the ocean and picked a building to take shelter in. I had nothing but time, now--time enough, I had to hope, to put the world to rights.