The road into the city was littered with broken glass that glittered faintly under the pale moon.
Each step crunched softly, the sound sharp in the vast silence.
Dorian's boots were worn thin at the soles.
Every few paces he adjusted the scarf at his neck, not because it kept him warm but because his fingers needed something to hold on to.
The ruins of the outer blocks were almost skeletal — the hollow frames of homes, blackened and brittle as charcoal.
A child's wooden doll lay face-down in the dirt, one arm missing.
In a window frame, a tangle of barbed wire clung to a torn scrap of blue cloth that flapped weakly in the night wind.
No voices.
No footsteps but his own.
Only the occasional groan of old beams shifting as the cold crept deeper into the broken walls.
Dorian walked with his head slightly bowed, as though the weight of the sky itself pressed on his shoulders.
In his thoughts was a slow refrain, repeating without bitterness, without hope.
"They all died that day. I was supposed to be there. I stayed behind because I was too tired. I lived. They didn't."
His pace slowed as he passed the husk of what had been a small bakery.
The scent of bread had once spilled into the street here, he remembered.
Now only the smell of wet ash lingered.
He stood there for a moment, unmoving.
Then his eyes drifted to a corner where the shadows were deeper — and there, half-buried in soot, he saw a child's shoe, tiny, blackened.
His hand trembled as he crouched and touched it.
The leather crumbled under his fingers.