The wind no longer carried any names.
The cities were nothing but scars of concrete.
The streets, skeletons of steel and silence.
Days passed, shapeless, featureless.
The seasons had disappeared.
The sky, sometimes, shifted from gray to black, split here and there by a pale light, too faint to be comforting.
But no warmth.
No songs.
No dawn.
Nothing.
I don't know how long I've been walking.
Years, maybe.
Centuries.
My body remembers.
Unchanging. Untarnished.
But my mind…
My mind is fading.
A little more each day.
Like ink diluted by water.
Sometimes, I speak.
Alone.
In a low voice, so as not to disturb the ruins.
— "How long has it been…?"
The wind ignores me.
The silence swallows me whole.
— "Why me?"
A laugh escapes me.
Short. Dry.
A joyless hiccup.
A reflex of a man… though I am no longer truly one.
I have learned to survive like a beast.
A raw, automatic instinct.
I hunt rats with hollow eyes.
I gnaw on bitter roots growing from cursed soil.
I drink from stagnant puddles, even when the water reeks of death.
Hunger devours me.
Pain twists me.
Cold exhausts me.
But nothing kills me.
I feel everything.
I endure everything.
And I remain.
One day, I lay down at the foot of a dead tree.
The wood creaked beneath my back, protesting weakly against my presence.
— "Just… sleep a little."
I closed my eyes.
I let the darkness consume me.
For days.
Months.
Maybe centuries.
When my eyelids finally lifted, the world had changed.
Even emptier than before.
My body was nothing but a shadow.
A walking skeleton, with ribs poking through forgotten skin.
But my heart…
Still beat.
So I walked.
Always.
Again.
One day, I thought I saw someone.
Far away, in the distance.
A fragile, wavering silhouette.
I started running.
I shouted:
— "Wait!"
No answer.
The silhouette kept moving, untouched.
When I reached it, there was nothing.
Only bleached bones, a coat rotted away by time.
A memory standing upright.
I stood there, unable to cry.
Unable even to collapse.
Other times, it happened again.
Voices.
Familiar shadows.
Shinjiro, calling my name.
A cold hand on my shoulder at night.
But every time I turned around:
The void.
Always.
I was going mad.
Or maybe I had always been mad.
One day, while following a twisted railway line, I found a gutted shelter.
Inside, a body.
Not a pile of bones.
No.
A fresh corpse.
Too fresh to belong to the old world.
A young girl. Fifteen, maybe.
Her eyes wide open, frozen in her final scream of terror.
Next to her, an old tape recorder.
I pressed "play."
A voice crackled to life.
Faint. Trembling.
"If anyone can hear this… I'm alone… I think everyone's gone… I'm scared…"
The static swallowed the rest.
Then silence.
I sat down.
Staring at her.
— "Me too…"
But there was no one left to hear it.
Time swallowed me.
Time digested me.
I became a residue.
A memory no one carried anymore.
The Earth, though, did not stop.
It licked its wounds.
It healed.
Slowly.
Painfully.
Ash fed the dying soil.
Cracks let roots break through.
Ruins were swallowed by untamed forests.
A new world was born from the wreckage of ours.
I learned to exist without thinking.
Without hoping.
Without wanting.
I hunted.
I slept.
I started again.
Sometimes, hunger made me weep without realizing it.
Sometimes, loneliness choked me until I forgot how to breathe.
I was no longer a man.
Just… a remnant.
And then, one morning…
I looked up.
The sky was no longer gray.
It was blue.
Pure.
Vast.
Alive.
Before me, giant trees stretched their gnarled arms toward the horizon.
Strange flowers swayed, their phosphorescent petals glowing softly.
Unknown beasts roamed a reborn land.
Another world.
Another cycle.
Without us.
The silence was no longer a tomb.
It had become music.
The breath of the wind in the leaves.
The murmur of rivers.
The raw cries of creatures I had never seen before.
It was beautiful.
Terribly beautiful.
And without knowing why…
A smile crossed my face.
A real one.
I was no longer alone in a graveyard.
I was a witness.
A forgotten witness to a world that had chosen to survive.
And then… as I crossed a sunlit clearing…
I saw her.
A silhouette.
Thin.
Human.
She stood there, straight, among the tall grasses.
Her body covered in tanned hides, in ornaments of stone and bone.
Her long hair was braided thickly, marked by dust and wind.
And her eyes met mine.
Calm.
Alive.
Not a hallucination.
Not a memory.
Real.
Human.
She said nothing.
Not a word.
She turned away.
And vanished into the swaying grass.
I stood frozen, unable to speak, unable even to think.
Because in that moment, I understood.
Everything is reborn.
Everything begins again.