SILENCE.

The kind that cuts through everything—through the air, through your skin, through the soul. The kind that comes when everything has been torn apart. This wasn’t peace. This was the hollow aftermath, a world that had already given up on itself.

He couldn’t even move. His body was a dead weight, half-buried beneath the rubble of what used to be his city. The sky above was a flat, oppressive gray, and smoke still curled from distant fires, like the world was still trying to burn itself down. He knew it was over. He could feel it in every broken piece of him.

His body was bruised, battered, and weak. Blood—his or someone else’s—caked on his skin. His clothes hung in tatters, a sorry excuse for fabric, barely clinging to the remnants of who he was. His chest heaved in shallow, painful breaths. Every inch of him ached. He could barely feel his legs trapped under debris.

“Why am I still breathing?” The thought struck like a blade, sharp and bitter. Every instinct told him he should be dead. The world had already collapsed around him. Yet here he was, alive, trapped in a city that no longer exists.

That’s when he saw it.

A flicker. A shimmer, like light escaping from under a veil. He turned his head, slow and heavy. His eyes locked onto the corpse a few feet away, a crumpled shell of someone who had once been. From the body, something like smoke began to rise—a faint, pale glow—its movements unnervingly slow, hesitant, as if it wasn’t sure where to go.

He didn’t know what it was, but he felt pain, sorrow, dead looking at it.

Before he could even process it, the light was moving toward him, sliding through the air like a stream of mist. The instant it touched his mind, pain ripped through him—sharp, unrelenting. It wasn’t the kind of pain that a body could heal from. It was inside him, raking at the very core of his soul.

He couldn’t stop it. He couldn’t fight it.

The first light was followed by another, then more. They came faster now, stronger, each one rising from the corpses around him. At first, it was only from those close by—slow, deliberate. But then they came from everywhere, flowing toward him from every corner of the city and even the neighbouring cities that all formed the now destroyed strip. The dead, all around the strip, were feeding this wave. He couldn’t see them all, but he knew. He felt it through his soul. Each light the flow into his body felt like it passed through his souls before leaving something behind in his mind. Before he could process any thing the pain start to take over.

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This isn’t real. It can’t be.

The lights poured into him like a never ending stream, but he could feel every one individually. Their weight was crushing. Every one that touched him felt like a needle digging into his soul, igniting a fire that scorched everything in its path. The pain spiralled, unrelenting, relentless.

Some of the lights, though—those were different. They were softer, fainter, almost fragile. He could feel them barely flicker against him, leaving barely and trace in his mind, they were like a child’s breath against a window. Kids. His heart twisted as these lights dissipated, leaving nothing but emptiness. They were too young. Too small to be snatched away. They never got a chance.

“Damn it…”

His teeth gritted as the pain kept coming. The lights didn’t care. It was all the same—they all flowed in, torturing his souls and mind, but there was no release. No end.

Some of these lights were filled with raw, aching grief. He felt it—every ounce of it. Grief that soaked through the cracks in his soul, making it harder and harder to keep his grip on who he was. On who he had been.

But he didn’t give in. He couldn’t.

“I’m still me.” The words came out like a growl, a promise he had to make to himself. If he lost this—if he let these memories, these fragments of strangers take him over—there would be nothing left. He would be no different than the bodies around him. Just another ghost, an existence no different that a corpse.

His will became a fortress, his identity the only thing left worth fighting for. Every second felt like an eternity as the lights collided with him, crashing against his mind, burning him from the inside. But he held on.

He had to hold on.

When the last light hit him, it felt like a blade driven deep. It was the final crack. But he didn’t break. The pain was unbearable, but somehow—somehow—he kept himself together.

The lights stopped flowing. The flood was over, leaving him exhausted, bruised in ways no body should be. Nothing of him was without wounds, not his soul that endured what should not have been possible, not his mind filled with things he yet to comprehend, not his body that should have died and was now in even worse shape. He felt them; the lights were a legacy of each one that died at the same time he should have. Every one of those lights represented a life lost, but they seem to have left something behind, in his mind. However, what they left weren’t memories anymore. They were something else now. Data. Cold, fragmented, unfeeling and impersonal. Maybe his soul by trying to remain itself filtered every thing that was not him out of these lights, or maybe they were like this from the start. He didn’t know and would never know.

But the silence that followed was heavier than the pain.

They’re gone. They’re all gone.

He swallowed, the taste of blood on his tongue. His body still throbbed with pain, his mind still reeling from the weight of what had just happened. But through it all, through the ache, through the loss, one thing remained—one thing that was still his:

Himself.

The only thing that couldn’t be taken from him. He closed his eyes, and tried to take a look at his mind.