The first breath burned.
Smoke clung to the air — dry, acrid, bitter enough to make the lungs ache.
When I opened my eyes, the sky above was the color of soot, heavy clouds smudging out the stars.
The smell of burned wood and something far worse lingered all around.
I pushed myself up from the ground.
Beneath my hands was not soil but a layer of cold, grey ash.
It shifted and drifted under my fingers, leaving pale smears on the skin.
The body I woke in was lean, taller than Kael's, but brittle in the way of someone who had gone without food for too long.
The fingers were calloused, the nails blackened by soot.
A tattered scarf hung from my neck, stiff with old blood.
Memories began to seep in, slow and heavy like water into old cloth.
A name: Dorian.
A city once alive with light and music, now reduced to rubble after years of civil war.
A family lost in the first wave of the bombings.
A man who had once been a painter, now surviving by clearing debris and digging graves.
And underneath it all — an emptiness deeper than grief.
The sense that he had survived when he shouldn't have, that he walked every day with the weight of the dead pressing on his shoulders.
In the distance, what was left of the city stood in silhouette: broken walls, jagged roofs, a few crooked chimneys still coughing thin threads of smoke into the night sky.
The wind came cold off the river, rattling bits of glass in the windowless frames of the ruins.
Somewhere far away a dog barked once, then fell silent.
Dorian's thoughts stirred like ashes under the wind.
"It should have been me. That day. Not them. I keep breathing while they lie in the ground. I keep walking when I have nowhere to go."
The words carried no anger.
Only the numbness of a man who had long ago wept himself dry.
I staggered a few steps and looked down the road — a road of cracked stones and drifting ash leading toward the city's heart.
A single iron lamppost still stood upright at the crossroad, its lamp long shattered.
Beneath it, a heap of flowers and burnt candles marked what had once been a memorial and was now only a scatter of blackened stems.
I knew, as surely as I had known with the others, why I had been placed here.
Dorian's heart was already at the edge.
If left to himself, the ruins would claim him too — not with rope or river, but by the slow surrender of a man who simply stops choosing to live.
I stood in the cold night wind, looking toward the ruins where the man's despair waited, and I whispered to the empty street:
"Not yet. Not you."