The whistling of the wind through the lifeless fields could be heard for miles. Once, this had been a village—homes, laughter, but now it was a graveyard of splintered beams and hollow walls. The air smelled of dust and long-dead fires.
Among the ruins moved a boy.
He was thin, almost spectral, with long arms and a narrow frame. His clothes hung from him in tatters, patched too many times to count. The color of them was lost to age, dulled to the same gray as the ash-covered ground. He looked no older than seventeen, though his eyes carried an age far greater—pale blue, dull, and empty, like light seen through fog.
He walked barefoot across the broken stones, his steps soundless. When he reached what remained of the village square, he stopped before a statue, half-buried, half-forgotten. Moss had eaten away its face, and vines crawled over its shoulders. The stone hand that once reached skyward had fallen, cracked in two at its base.
The boy knelt before it, brushing away the dirt with the edge of his palm. Faint markings still clung to its surface—names, prayers, words scratched by hands that had long turned to dust.
"You were probably someone important once," he murmured. His voice was quiet, raw, as if it hadn't been used in days. "Someone people looked up to, right?"
The earth shuddered faintly beneath him—soft, like a dying breath. Dust slid from the statue's shoulder, and a piece of its arm tumbled down. He froze, pressing his ear to the soil. For a moment, he felt it again: a faint, rhythmic pulse beneath the ground. Slow. Beating. Alive.
Then it faded.
He sat back and stared at the dirt-streaked palms of his hands. "Still breathing, huh?" he whispered.
No one believed the world could still be alive. The elders said it was the wrath of the gods, that the land itself was cursed for the sins of men. Others said it was simply time—everything ends, and this was the end of all things. But the boy wasn't so sure. When he was alone, he could feel something beneath his feet. Something moving. Something waiting.
Sometimes he wondered if he was the only one who could hear it.
The others called him foolish.Mad.A dreamer who hadn't learned to stop dreaming.
He didn't argue. He just smiled—a thin, distant thing—and kept listening to the wind. Because when it blew through the hollow beams of the old houses, it didn't sound empty to him. It sounded like a voice. A thousand voices, whispering all at once, too faint to understand but too familiar to ignore.
He spent his nights walking through the ruins, tracing the old paths by moonlight. The ground was dry and cracked, the sky an endless bruise of gray. Once, he'd found a book buried beneath the rubble of a schoolhouse—a book with pictures of forests, oceans, and skies the color of fire. He had stared at those pages until the ink smudged beneath his fingers. Then he burned it for warmth.
Now, there was nothing left but memory—and him.
A sudden gust of wind rushed through the dead trees, making them creak like old bones. The boy looked up. The sky shifted, clouds twisting like torn cloth. And in the rising howl of air, he thought he heard something—faint, buried beneath the noise. A voice. Distant, but calling.
He smiled again, just barely."I hear you," he whispered. "I'll find you."
And with that, the boy turned and began walking into the dying light of the day.