The dust was a fine, grey powder that coated everything - my throat, my clothes, the inside of my mouth. We had been walking for hours, and the city on the horizon remained a distant, jagged line beneath the oppressive grey sky. My body ached with a deep weariness that went beyond physical exhaustion; it was the toll of this emptiness, the sheer scale of this dead land.
"Cassian."
The name, spoken in Croft's rasping tone, still felt foreign. I paused, turning to where the raven perched on the petrified remains of what might have once been a tree.
"That name," I said, the words tasting of dust. "It doesn't resonate. It feels like you're referring to another man."
"It is your name," Croft replied, his tone devoid of argument, merely stating a fact. "A name is not something one feels. It is something one is. The resonance will come when you have more of yourself to fill it with."
"I have nothing to fill it with," I countered, resuming our slow trek. "That's the problem. You speak of anchors and hooks, but I am adrift. A label on an empty container means nothing."
"Precisely because you are adrift, you need the anchor," he said, flying to land upon my shoulder with a whisper of feathers. "Without it, what will you be when the memories return? A collection of experiences with no central point to coalesce around. The name provides the focal point."
We walked in silence for a time, the crunch of gravel under my boots the only sound. The desolation was absolute. No insects, no scrub, not even the bones of long-dead animals. It was a canvas of nothingness.
"This emptiness... it's unnatural," I observed, my voice low. "It feels intentional. Surgical."
"This is the aftermath of divine conflict," Croft replied, his gaze fixed ahead. "What you see is not a wounded world, but a sterilized one. The life has been scoured from it."
Another hour passed. The light began to leach from the sky, the grey deepening towards twilight. The city walls finally resolved from a smudge into a terrifying reality—a sheer cliff face of black basalt blocks, each larger than any structure I could conceive of. Their scale was not one of grandeur, but of absolute, imposing power.
"Who possessed the ambition to build such a thing?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper.
"The Aethelians," Croft answered. "An empire that believed its legacy could be carved directly into the bones of the world. They mistook permanence for immortality." A dry, clicking sound came from his throat. "The stone remains. The ambition is dust. A pertinent lesson in the nature of legacy."
As we drew nearer, the source of the breach became clear. The main gate was not merely broken; it was a cataclysmic spill of rubble, as if the wall had been struck with the force of a falling star.
"So the war reached even this bastion," I murmured.
"The war was not a thing that had locations, Cassian. It was a condition of existence," Croft said, his tone grim. "There was no 'reaching'. There was only 'being'. Every stone, every soul, was a participant, willing or not."
We arrived at the base of the rubble slope that led into the city. The silence here was different from the empty silence of the plains. This was a thick, watchful quiet, heavy with the weight of ages. The air was cold and utterly still, smelling of ancient dust and dry rot.
I stood for a long moment, looking up into the darkness of the breach. The pull in my chest was no longer a suggestion, but a sharp, insistent demand, a hook set deep in my being, drawing me into the gloom.
"Are you prepared?" Croft asked from my shoulder.
"Preparation implies I have any notion of what awaits," I said, the truth of my powerlessness a cold stone in my gut. "I am not prepared. I am merely resolved."
"A distinction that may save your life," the raven acknowledged. He took flight, his black form disappearing for a moment before reappearing on a shattered lintel just inside the city's threshold. "The first fragment of what you were lies within, Cassian. The reclamation begins now."
Taking a final breath of the stagnant air, I began to climb. The name echoed in my mind with every movement. Cassian. It was still just a word.