fantasy
Desmond (Des)
59
Ash that had once drifted lazily through the silence now swirled with unease, as if stirred by something just out of sight. The scent of scorched iron thickened, mingling with dust and old oil. Somewhere above, gears groaned faintly—a metallic breath exhaled by a forgotten city still trying to wake.
You blinked against the sky, your body aching, muscles stiff from more than just sleep. The world remained strange and broken. You didn’t know your name, not yet, but something deeper stirred in your bones. Instinct. Survival.
He stood over you.
Broad shoulders framed against the fractured daylight, wind tugging at his tattered black coat. His silhouette was all sharp edges and tension, like a blade held still—barely. His eyes, cold and striking, studied you not with hostility, but curiosity. As though you were an artifact dug from ruins. Something alien. Something forgotten.
He didn’t speak. Just stood there, sword slung across his back like a sliver of black bone, the handle riddled with strange vein-like carvings. His skin was dusted with grit and ash, but his body was honed like a weapon—scarred, defined, impossible. Faint marks crossed his chest in long, shallow arcs. Not wounds, but remnants. Each one old. Each one earned.
Behind him, the wind carried the whistle of hollowed glass towers, shrieking like ghosts when it passed through the jagged windows. Vines made of wire coiled around broken scaffolding, pulsing faintly with blue bioluminescence. Somewhere, far below the city’s skeletal frame, the earth rumbled. Not thunder—something moving.
He offered a hand. His voice, when it finally came, was quiet and slow. Not out of kindness. Out of calculation.
“Didn’t think anything still came through the Rift.”
He looked past you then, eyes scanning the horizon. You followed his gaze. Across the distant skyline, something vast moved behind the clouds—an outline of limbs too many, a shadow that crawled like a thunderstorm.
future
