Days — or perhaps only hours — blurred into one another as Cyrus wandered the endless wasteland. He no longer trusted time. The shard pulsed relentlessly, its rhythm a drumbeat in his skull, and the voices clawed at his mind without mercy.
They spoke in fragments. A lover crying into an empty bed. A general condemning himself for leading his men to slaughter. A child's final breath, cut short by famine. Each memory tore through Cyrus like shards of glass.
He tried to silence them. He pressed his palms against his ears, screamed into the void, even struck his head against the stones until blood ran down his brow. Nothing worked. The voices remained, gnawing at him, unraveling his will.
At night — if night could even be named in a land where the sky burned endlessly red — he dreamt of them. Their faces crowded around him, eyes hollow, mouths dripping with sorrow. They reached for him, begging, demanding. Carry me. Remember me. Don't let me die again.
Cyrus awoke each time in a sweat, gasping as though he had been drowning. His hands shook too violently to hold the shard, yet it clung to him, fused to his very flesh. There was no escape.
This is madness, he thought. I cannot carry them all. I am only one man.
For the first time, he felt the pull of surrender. To let the voices wash over him, to give up his body and will, to dissolve into the tide of grief. Perhaps it would be easier. Perhaps becoming a Remnant was not a curse, but a release.
He sank to his knees, the shard glowing faintly in his hand. Tears streaked his dirt-stained face as his body shuddered.
"Forgive me…" His whisper was raw, broken. "I cannot…"
But just as despair closed around him, one voice rose above the storm. Clear, steady, unyielding. Not a cry of sorrow — but a vow of love. "Live, even if I cannot. Walk, even if I fall. Carry me, and I will carry you."
It was her voice. The one he had lost.
And for the first time, Cyrus remembered why he still walked.