Chapter One: The Waking
He came back to himself the way someone surfaces from deep water — with a jagged gasp and the stupid, dizzy certainty that the air might crush him. Smoke clawed at his throat, powdery ash stung his eyes. For a long second he lay on his back and simply listened: rain like a fist on slate, a distant, hollow rumbling of lightning, and somewhere farther the uncanny hush that had swallowed other sounds whole.
When he forced his eyes open the sky was not sky anymore but a wound — a raw, bleeding dome of red that stretched from horizon to horizon. A white moon hung in the red like a tooth, too bright and too cold, throwing a pallid glare through the smoke. It made the rain look obscene, each drop a silver needle that should have doused what burned but did not. The flames around him moved like dancers caught in a dream, graceful and malignant; they licked at shutters and columns and then slid away as if water had never been meant to touch them.
He blinked, and for a few lung-burning seconds he had nothing to hold to. No name rose. No memory. It was as if someone had opened a closet, pulled out the parts that made him himself, and left him standing in the empty room. Panic came as a tight, sharp thing behind his ribs; then confusion softened it into a dull ache. He tried his tongue, his mind — searching for an anchor: a face, a place, a word. Nothing. He sat up and the city opened around him like a set of broken teeth.
Street stones under his palms were cold despite the fires; coal dust ground into his skin. He pushed himself to his feet, nakedness of identity making him clumsy and raw. His hair — white as old salt — stuck to his forehead with rain. He looked for other bodies, for motion. The city offered only ruin and silence.
He moved, each step measured against a soundtrack that made no sense: thunder that rolled without threat, rain that should have smothered embers, and the wind that smelled of old smoke and rotted paper. The pavement was a litter of history — a fallen chariot half-buried in ash, its wheel sheared clean; a market stall collapsed like a cough, goods spilling into the gutter, jars of preserved fruit split and blackened; a cart with its horse still harnessed, ribs shadowed by scorch marks, the animal long gone. He knelt over a toy soldier fused to the cobbles, paint bubbled into an unreadable map, and for a moment a childish, meaningless grief hit him so sharply he was light-headed.
He called out then, not as an act of hope but because the lungs insisted on speech. "Hello." His voice sounded foreign to his own ears, rough as a stone dragged across glass. The buildings swallowed it. The only reply was the rain and that soundless fire.
The farther he walked the more the city revealed itself in fragments, like a person remembering by touch. An alley where the murals had been scorched into depressions, the figures' faces erased into smudges of trauma. A temple door that lay open, its threshold crazed with heat, and inside a sea of overturned benches — hymnals scattered and damp, their pages clinging to one another like the hands of the dead. He ran his hand over the cracked marble of a fountain; the water in it boiled without steam, bubbling black, refusing to pour, as if the city's blood had turned traitor.
Lightning forked across the red sky and the sound it made was less crash than the groan of something enormous settling into place. For every flash he felt an answering pressure behind his eyes, as if the world were trying to remember him and failing. Identity, he realized slowly and with a kind of horror, was more than a name. It was the weave of small things: the way his hands curled, the scars he could not see, the jokes whose punch lines had become knots in his mind. All of that had gone quiet. He was a person in the body of a person, raw and unfinished.
His legs took him without a plan, carrying him along a lane choked with the remains of a festival: torches guttered, streamers fused to railings, a food cart overturned and spattered with black. Here and there bodies lay, not in the neatness of death but in stumbles of life interrupted — an arm thrown over a threshold, a face pressed into coal, a shoe lost and peeking like a small, accusing thing. He skirted them, nauseous, not because he feared contagion but because each corpse was a mirror of possibility. If they had been living moments before, where had the living gone? If they had not, how had the city been emptied?
He remembered the hollow moon and the way its white light made the burned plaster look almost washed in milk. He lifted his face and saw, far off, a shape rising above the ruined skyline: an enormous silhouette like a dark promise. He could not tell what it was — a tower, an enormous tower-tree — only that everything else seemed organized around it, as if the city had grown to accommodate its shadow. For the first time since he'd woken, something that could be named pulsed.
He walked toward that silhouette because walking was the only thing that stopped him from collapsing inward. Each block gave new scraps of the city's story: a council hall with charred throne, banners hanging like the tongues of wounded beasts; a narrow bridge collapsed into the river, the water below a sheet of oily night; an inn whose sign still swung in the rain, the painted figure indistinct, its smile melted into a rictus. He threaded his way carefully, dodging curls of flame that reached out like lit fingers and then retracted. The fires were capricious and patient, an offended god's toys.
When at last he paused before the silhouette he did not yet know whether relief or dread would claim him. The space between him and that distant shape had been a walk of revelations and denials, of intimacy with absence. The city, in its ruined detail, had made a private language with him — a language built of small losses. He realized, with a sudden, stupid clarity, how much had made him who he used to be, and how cataclysmic the absence of those things could feel.
He lifted his hand to his face and felt rain-slick skin and a taste like iron. Name or no name, memory or no memory, he had a body that could hurt and hope and trip; that was something to hold on to. He pushed forward, toward the silhouette, and the rain kept coming down, as if it had a reason he could not yet see.....