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He awakens in the ashes of the city.
For a moment, everything is blindingly loud and deafeningly bright. The sensations of the ruined world assault him. Smoke in his throat when he tries to breathe, soot, he’s -
He is Soot, he remembers, President Soot, he is standing on jagged rock burnt black by a blast, and he is not the president any more, because there is nothing to be president of, because of what
He awakens in the ashes of the city.
Cold air cut with smoke, so he holds his breath against it. No one is shouting. No one is crying. Except for him, perhaps, for the tears that cut blue streaks across a grimy face, blast-blackened. It didn’t work. All of his plans, hazy but skyscraper-high, reduced to so much rubble underneath his feet. He’s -
He is Wilbur, he remembers. Wilbur, he remembers someone calling him, even when everyone else had given up the habit, loud and loving and concerned.
Wil, he remembers someone calling him, pushing hands against a proffered sword, the sword that
He awakens in the ashes of the city.
Whistling wind; cold air that does not pass his nostrils but hits cold, dry tracks across blast-blackened cheeks. He wonders how that got there. He can’t quite think of the word for dust like this.
The world around him is grey and quiet. Desolated. The floor beneath his feet is jagged, so he pulls his legs away.
It nags at him, still, that he can’t remember. It’s like a hand is pressing up against his efforts, gently redirecting him aside. But he’s not so easily placated - he knows himself, if distantly, knows that no answers could never be enough for him. So he tries again from the beginning. He is a man who used to live here, a man of great ideals and great importance. He is a general, who won the war for this land, and they won, they did it, he had been so proud! He is the president, but he is not the president any more, because - because he passed it on, he gave it up on purpose, he remembers that more satisfying fragment of truth.
And now dead. He remembers that, too. Grey hands, blue-splotched across the dull. And then he wonders how that got there, and so he follows the trail back up ash-covered sleeves to the epicentre, a gaping blue hole in the centre of his chest from when
He awakens in the ashes of the city.
He cannot feel the ground and he cannot look down and he cannot remember his name, so he stares straight ahead, unbreathing.
It must have been beautiful, once, before it collapsed into carnage. Grey skies he can imagine holding endless constellations. Chinese lanterns setting the night ablaze. Soft sand and fertile soil and glittering lakes. Dirt crumbles down past sturdy stone layers now, made pale by a fine top coating of ash, and the water drips towards the centre of the earth. He can’t remember why it ended up this way. He’s not entirely sure he wants to.
Perhaps it’s better this way. Easier. To float above the pain of jagged reminders, gloss past any hint of what could hurt him. Accept existence as the ghost of what remains, before any more little bits and pieces slip past and into the aether, irretrievable.
The dust in the air starts making his eyes water, so he closes them as well. If nothing can reach him, then nothing can break him. The hand that shoves him back from getting hurt can be a barrier or a cradle. He is choosing to be held.
He persists like this, insensate and untouchable. Beyond him, smoke is clearing; dawn is breaking to the east. The sun begins to warm the stone and dirt of a crater its creator can’t recall.
Peace, for the first time in a long time.
Whose city is it, anyway?