Patjetër. Këtu e ke tekstin e ndarë saktësisht në paragrafe, dialogë dhe skena, duke e bërë të lexueshëm dhe të strukturuar siç duhet për një libër, pa ndryshuar asnjë fjalë nga përmbajtja.
SCENE I – THE LAND AFTER DRAKA
Violence did not announce itself. It never had. It simply arrived, occupied the space, and then lingered long after the act was finished.
Outside the ruins of Draka, the land stretched into a flat, colorless expanse, broken only by the occasional skeleton of infrastructure that had once believed in destinations. The roads here were not pathways; they were scars of asphalt that led nowhere, cracked by decades of neglect and the heavy tread of military transport. Signs, bleached white by the relentless, unfiltered UV radiation of the grey sun, pointed to places that no longer existed—names of towns that had been dissolved into the administrative numbering system of Pragna.
The wind moved freely here. It was uninterrupted by cities, unblocked by the vertical ambition of skyscrapers, and undiminished by purpose. It carried the fine, abrasive silt of the wasteland, a particulate reminder that everything, eventually, becomes dust.
Voi Dione walked.
His pace was a steady, rhythmic cadence that ate distance without consuming energy. He did not look back at Draka. To look back was an act of memory, and memory implied that the past held value. To Voi, the city did not deserve remembrance. It had served its function as a container for death. It was full. What remained behind him was not loss—it was completion.
The dust beneath his boots was finer here, less burdened by the calcium weight of bone that defined the soil inside the city limits. The air felt thinner, sharper, as if the world itself was trying to reduce its mass to zero. No birds crossed the sky. The atmosphere was too toxic, the thermal currents too unpredictable. No machines moved in the distance. The horizon was a flat line of static interference where the grey earth met the grey sky.
This was not peace. Peace implied a resolution of conflict. This was spacing. It was the silence between collapses, the breathless interval after a structure fails but before the dust settles.
Voi did not hurry. Urgency belonged to those who believed something waited ahead of them—a destination, a savior, a solution. Voi expected nothing except continuation. His movement was not driven by hope or fear; it was driven by the biological imperative to remain in motion until the mechanics of his body failed.
At his side, the red sword rested in its sheath. Its surface was matte, absorbing the dull, diffused light rather than reflecting it. It was a weapon that had forgotten the concept of shine. Blood had long since stopped meaning anything to it; fluids merely dried and flaked off, returning to the dirt. Steel endured. Flesh did not. That was the only truth the weapon knew.
He walked for hours. The light in the sky did not shift; the pale disc of the sun merely dragged itself sluggishly across the heavy clouds, offering no indication of time. Time here was measured in steps, in the rhythmic crunch of boots on gravel, in the slow accumulation of grey dust in the folds of his white clothing.
Voi observed the terrain without analyzing it. He saw the rusted hull of a tank half-buried in a dune. He saw a crater, perfectly circular, filled with black, stagnant water. He saw the absence of life not as a tragedy, but as a baseline. The world had returned to its default state: mineral, silent, and indifferent.
SCENE II – THE FIRST INTERRUPTION (THE ARMED MAN)
Voi walked until the land changed.
It was not a visible shift—there was no sudden rise in the terrain, no change in the color of the dust—but there was a shift in pressure. The air resisted movement slightly, acquiring a density that had not been there a kilometer before. It was the sensation of being observed, a localized tension where the emptiness had been disturbed by intent.
Voi stopped.
The wind continued to hiss over the asphalt. The dust continued to drift in low, serpentine waves. The world did not react to his pause, but the pattern of the silence had been broken.
"You're close," he said, his voice calm, carried away instantly by the breeze.
For several seconds, nothing happened. The landscape remained static.
Then, a shape detached itself from the ruins of a collapsed checkpoint fifty meters ahead. It had been a toll booth once, or perhaps a guard post from the early days of the stabilization. Now, concrete slabs lay scattered like discarded armor, creating a jagged silhouette against the sky.
From between two leaning pillars, a man stepped into the open.
He carried a rifle. It was old, the metal pitted, the stock wrapped in adhesive tape that had yellowed with age. It was a weapon maintained by necessity, not discipline. Useless against a drone, but lethal against flesh.
The man's uniform was torn but deliberate—patched with mismatched fabrics, cleaned where water permitted. He was not a scavenger, wild and desperate. Nor was he military, uniform and precise. He was a civilian who had learned the wrong lessons too well. He stood with his feet wide, his finger resting on the trigger guard, a posture learned from watching soldiers who were now dead.
"You shouldn't be here," the man shouted. His voice cracked, dry and brittle.
Voi looked at him. The distance between them was absolute, defined not by meters but by understanding.
"You are here," Voi replied, his voice projecting without effort. "So the statement lacks authority."
The man tightened his grip on the rifle. His knuckles were white, the skin cracked and bleeding from exposure. His hands shook, a tremor that traveled up his forearms, but his stance remained rehearsed. He had practiced this moment repeatedly in his mind, envisioning himself as the guardian of a line that no longer existed.
"This land is under Pragna control," the man said, reciting a broadcast he must have heard years ago. "Movement is restricted. Identification is required."
Voi tilted his head slightly, the white hair shifting over his shoulder.
"Control requires presence," he said. "You are alone."
The man swallowed. The Adam's apple bobbed in his throat. He glanced quickly to his left and right, checking for support that was not there.
"There are patrols," he insisted, the lie fragile in the open air. "Drones. You'll be seen. Turn back."
Voi did not respond immediately. His dark blue eyes passed over the man's face, reading the lines of malnutrition, the sun-damage, the frantic dilation of the pupils. He looked at the man's shoulders, hunched with the weight of the rifle. He looked at the chest, rising and falling in a shallow, rapid rhythm. He catalogued the damage without judgment.
"You're injured," Voi said. "Left leg. Infection."
The man stiffened, shifting his weight instinctively away from the limb Voi had indicated. "I'm armed," he countered.
"That is unrelated," Voi replied.
The rifle lifted a few centimeters. The barrel aligned with the center of Voi's chest.
"You take one more step, I shoot."
Voi stepped forward.
The shot came instantly.
The sound cracked across the empty land, a sharp, flat report that vanished without an echo. The bullet struck Voi in the left shoulder. It tore through the white cloth, pierced the muscle, shattered a fragment of the scapula, and exited cleanly through the back. A spray of red mist hung in the air for a fraction of a second.
Voi did not stop. His stride did not hitch. His expression did not change.
The man stared, his mouth opening slightly. He had expected a reaction. He had expected the physics of impact to halt the intruder.
He fired again.
The second bullet hit Voi in the stomach. The impact rippled through his white shirt.
Then again. A graze to the ribs.
Each shot landed. Each shot was lethal by the standards of the old world. Each should have mattered.
Voi continued walking.
The distance closed. Forty meters. Thirty.
The man backed away, his boots scraping frantically against the asphalt. His breath broke into panic, a high-pitched wheeze.
"Stay back!" he shouted. "Stay back! Why don't you fall?"
"You are already retreating," Voi said, his voice level, unaffected by the blood darkening his white side. "The body knows the truth before the mind accepts it."
The rifle clicked empty. The mechanism locked back.
The man dropped the weapon. It clattered uselessly onto the road. He turned and ran.
He made it three steps.
Voi covered the remaining distance in a blur of motion that defied the lethargy of the landscape. The red sword moved once.
It was not a grand swing. It was a minimal, ergonomic arc. The blade passed through the man's lower spine. The cut was precise, surgical, and silent.
The man fell forward, momentum carrying him face-first into the dirt. His body did not convulse. There was no drama, no final words, no cinematic struggle. The biology simply ceased to function.
Voi stood over him briefly. He looked down at the body, observing the way the blood began to pool in the grey dust, turning it to black mud.
"You did not understand violence," Voi said quietly to the corpse. "You tried to use it to preserve structure. Violence destroys structure."
The man did not answer. The wind tugged at his patched coat.
Voi wiped the blade on the dead man's sleeve. The motion was efficient, stripping the fluid before it could dry. He sheathed the sword and continued walking. The bleeding from his own wounds would stop, or it would not.
SCENE III – THE CONVOY SURVIVORS
Several kilometers later, the texture of the land changed again.
The road dipped slightly into a shallow basin, revealing the skeletal remains of a convoy. These were not ancient ruins; they were fresher, perhaps a year old. Transport vehicles lay overturned, their heavy alloy hulls split open by high-yield explosives that had not bothered to finish the job of incineration. Supplies spilled across the ground in a fan of debris—rotted food rations in vacuum packs, broken optical equipment, medical kits that had been scavenged and emptied long ago.
And people.
There were four of them.
They stood in a loose, defensive formation around a fire made from shattered crate wood. The fire produced little heat and too much smoke, a dark smudge against the grey air. Their clothes were layers of scavenged military surplus and civilian rags. Their weapons were visible—handguns, a shotgun, a pry bar sharpened to a point—but they held them with the fatigue of those who have carried weight for too long.
Their fear was not hidden. It was a palpable frequency in the air.
They watched Voi approach. The white figure stained with fresh blood, walking with the steady, unhurried pace of a glacier.
No one raised a gun immediately. They had already recognized him. The descriptions of the Pikas, and specifically of the Blue-Eyed Voi, had traveled through the whispers of the wasteland faster than any official broadcast.
"You're the one from Draka," one of them said.
It was a woman. She stood nearest the fire, her face smeared with grease, her hair cropped close to the skull. Her voice was steady, practiced, but the pulse visible in her neck betrayed her biology.
Voi stopped at a distance that suggested courtesy rather than safety. He stood ten meters from the fire.
"I passed through," he said.
"You killed a child," another said.
This came from a man sitting on a crate, sharpening a knife. A thick scar ran from his temple to his jaw, pulling his lip into a permanent sneer. He did not look up from the blade, but his muscles were coiled tight.
Voi did not correct him. He did not offer context.
"Yes," he said.
Silence fell over the group. The wind hissed through the broken windows of the transport trucks. The fire popped, a piece of treated wood snapping in the heat.
"Why?" the woman asked. Her eyes searched Voi's face, looking for madness, for malice, for anything human she could negotiate with.
Voi considered the question. He looked at the woman, seeing the exhaustion in her posture.
"Because she was dying," he said. "And because she was not."
"That doesn't make sense," the woman said, her voice rising slightly.
"It is not meant to," Voi replied. "Sense is a requirement of the living. Death requires only cessation."
The scarred man laughed bitterly. He stood up, the knife held loosely in his right hand.
"You Pikas think you're gods," he spat. "Walking around, deciding who suffers and who sleeps."
Voi looked at him. The blue void of his eyes absorbed the man's anger without reflecting it.
"No," Voi said. "Gods require worship. I require nothing."
The man reached for a pistol tucked into his belt. His movement was jagged, fueled by an anger that had nothing to do with Voi and everything to do with the world that had created them both.
Voi did not stop him. He did not flinch.
"You think you're mercy," the man said, leveling the gun. "You think killing cleans something. You think you're saving them."
Voi shook his head slightly. A microscopic movement.
"No," he said. "I think killing ends things."
The man fired.
The bullet went wide, kicking up dust at Voi's feet. The man's hands were shaking with rage.
Voi moved.
The exchange was brief. Inelegant. It was finished before it could resemble combat. Voi stepped inside the man's guard. The red sword did not leave its sheath. Voi used the hilt, driving it into the man's sternum with the force of a hydraulic press. Bone crunched. The man collapsed, gasping for air that his lungs could no longer process.
Dust swirled around the fallen body. The fire popped loud in the sudden silence.
The other two men reacted to the noise. One raised a shotgun.
Voi drew the sword.
The blade moved. The man with the shotgun fell, his finger tightening on the trigger as he died. The weapon discharged into the dirt, kicking up a spray of grey gravel.
The sound echoed against the overturned trucks, a sharp crack followed by the hiss of settling grit.
The last man charged through the smoke with the pry bar. He did not see the red blade waiting.
Voi pivoted. A single vertical cut.
The man stumbled, looked down at the separation in his chest, and sat down heavily. The light left his eyes before his back touched the ground.
When it ended, three bodies lay still or dying. One crawled away, leaving a dark, wet trail in the dust. The fire crackled, indifferent to the sudden expenditure of life.
The woman remained standing. She was frozen, her weapon lowered, her hands trembling so violently she could barely hold the grip.
Voi faced her. The red sword hung at his side, dripping onto the ash.
"You could have left," she whispered, her voice barely audible.
"So could you," Voi replied.
She looked at the bodies of her companions. The scarred man was still wheezing, a wet, rattling sound.
"They followed me," she said, tears cutting tracks through the grime on her face. "I owed them. They fed me."
"Debt is an invention," Voi said. "Pain is not."
She looked up at him, her eyes wide with the certainty of death.
"Will you kill me too?"
Voi studied her. He looked at the fear vibrating in her frame. He looked at the survival instinct overriding her grief.
"No," he said.
She exhaled sharply, a sound like a sob. "Why?"
"Because you are afraid," he said. "And fear means you are still negotiating with life. You still believe there is something to lose."
She backed away slowly, step by agonized step, never taking her eyes off him. Then, she turned and ran. She scrambled up the slope of the basin, slipping on the loose gravel, forcing her legs to carry her away from the hollow white figure.
Voi watched until she disappeared beyond the rise.
No dot appeared on his skin. The equation had balanced itself.
SCENE IV – DISTANT PRAGNA OBSERVATION
Far above the land, beyond the reach of the naked eye, a high-altitude surveillance drone altered its course. Its camera array pivoted, the lenses adjusting focus with a mechanical whir.
Kilometers away, inside a facility buried beneath the grey earth, the air was cool, recycled, and smelled of ozone. Rows of terminals hummed with the processing of data.
On a large display, the thermal signature of the basin was rendered in shades of orange and blue. Four heat sources had been detected. Now, three were fading into the background temperature of the ground. One was moving rapidly away. One remained static.
"Movement confirmed," an analyst said. His voice was bored, the tone of a man reading a grocery list. "Sector 4, Grid 9."
"Identification?" a supervisor asked, not looking up from a tablet.
"Subject correlates with Pika profile. Alpha-class. Visual confirmation: White hair, red blade."
"Engagements logged," a second analyst reported, typing rapidly. "Three casualties. One survivor. The subject sustained multiple ballistic impacts prior to the engagement. Biometrics indicate no reduction in combat efficiency."
"He's still moving," the first analyst noted, watching the white dot on the screen traverse the grey grid.
"Direction?"
"Outward," came the answer. "Always outward. Moving away from the populated zones. Heading toward the Dead Sectors."
The supervisor paused. He looked at the screen, watching the digital representation of Voi Dione. A glitch in the perfect grey system. An equation that refused to balance.
"Let him walk," the supervisor said. "He is cleaning the trash for us."
No interception order followed. The drone leveled out, returning to its patrol loop. The data was archived. The deaths were categorized as 'waste disposal.'
SCENE V – CONTINUATION
Voi walked until the sky dimmed further.
Night had lost its meaning in a world without stars, but the light weakened, turning the grey world into a deeper, suffocating charcoal. The temperature dropped, the wind picking up an edge that could cut through skin.
He stopped at the edge of a shallow ridge and looked out over the empty land.
The bullet holes in his body had stopped bleeding. The flesh had knit together with the slow, unnatural resilience of his kind, leaving behind puckered white scars to join the others. He felt the stiffness in his shoulder, the tightness in his side, but he did not feel the ache.
Behind him, the dead man at the checkpoint lay cooling. Behind him, the survivors' convoy was now a tomb. The woman was running into the dark, carrying the heavy burden of her survival.
Structures would rise again. Orders would be enforced. Pragna would build walls and laws. Violence would be justified with new language, sanitized and filed away in reports.
None of it mattered.
The Pika stood in the silence, a singular dot in the infinite grey. He adjusted his grip on the red sword, feeling the cold steel against his palm. He stepped forward, down the ridge, into the black.
And continued forward.