The air inside the walls was different. It was not merely dead; it was meticulously preserved. A museum of the world's last breath, held in a lung of stone. He stepped onto a grand causeway paved with black marble that reflected the bruised sky like a still, dark water. On either side, the citizens of this nameless place stood as eternal monuments to their final moment. A merchant, hand outstretched with a petrified coin. A mother, her arms reaching for a child who was now a stone effigy of laughter. Their eyes were wide with a terror or a joy he could not name, their mouths open in silent screams or songs. The dust here was not dust; it was a fine powder of time itself, the ground-down moments of a thousand years of stillness.
As he took a second step, a voice, slick with the cold sweat of reason, whispered in the confines of his skull. With a last question in mind, do you truly wish to enter? The land itself gave you its omen. Are you mad? It was the part of him that still clung to the warmth of life, the part that remembered sunlight and feared the dark. It was a faint, trembling thing.
Another voice answered it, sharp and cruel as a shard of ice. However bad this kingdom, why do you fear? The words were laced with an arrogant contempt. You, the student of an untempted monster. You, who have knelt in a shadow that would make this entire kingdom its plaything. Go ahead. This rot is nothing.
But a third voice, older and heavier than the other two, sighed from the depths of his soul. It was a voice of pure weariness. Why should this place belong to me, or I to it? An orphan belongs to nowhere, so what is one more wasteland?
A dry, mirthless laugh echoed in his mind, the sound of the arrogant one mocking the weary one.
An orphan?
"I am not an orphan bastard," he whispered, the words a raw tear in the sacred silence of the city. The sound was swallowed instantly by the oppressive quiet.
The mocking voice returned, its tone dripping with a feigned, saccharine pity. Oh, really, weeping kiddo? Then tell me who your father is. Tell me, oh unfortunate child of destiny.
The question struck him like a physical blow. For a moment, the world of petrified souls and silent screams vanished, replaced by an inner darkness far more terrifying. He clenched his fists, the leather of his gloves groaning in protest. He banished the voices, crushing them under the heel of a will forged in fires they could only dimly remember. The pain, the questions, the past, none of it mattered here. All that mattered was the path. He lifted his head, the shadows of his hood shifting, and walked deeper into the city of the dead.
He had silenced the voices in his head, but the world itself now found its own. As he walked deeper down the grand causeway, the sky began to weep. It was not rain, not the clean water of a living world. It was a thick, cold drizzle, black and oily, that coated the marble in a treacherous sheen and clung to his hood like a second, colder skin. Where it touched the stone citizens, it did not wash them clean but seemed to freeze their silent agony in place, giving their eternal horror a fresh, glistening horror.
The ground mourned his presence. The fine dust of ages, now wet with the sky's sorrow, became a grasping mud that sucked at the soles of his boots. With every step, he felt a pull, a desperate, weak suction as if the very stone beneath him was trying to gain the liberty to seize his ankles and drag him back, to throw the profanity of his living warmth out of the gates. The walls themselves seemed to groan, a low, resonant hum of a thousand trapped prayers begging him to go back.
Then came the sounds. The silence that had been the kingdom's most sacred law was broken. A lone wolf's howl echoed from the petrified rooftops, a sound empty of lungs yet full of loss. The dry croak of a raven answered, impossibly, from the open mouth of a stone merchant. Soon, an uncanny chittering rose all around him, the noise of a million insects that were no longer there, their spectral sounds crawling over his skin. It was a chorus of the dead, an orchestra of accusation. Every sound was a question and a condemnation: How dare you? How dare an outsider bring the disease of a heartbeat into our perfect, final peace?
Amidst the sorrow of the ground and the anger of the ghosts, only one thing seemed pleased by his arrival. The air itself. It coiled around him, thick with the sky's weeping, and it seemed to rejoice. It swirled into his lungs not with the promise of life, but with a cold, predatory hunger, eager for the new scent he would bring. It was the only thing happy here, for it knew this man would soon be a new, rare addition to the smell of rotting corpses.
He pushed deeper, leaving the grand causeway for the labyrinth of residential streets. The half-broken houses leaned against each other like weary mourners, their empty windows staring. As he passed, they seemed to speak, uttering divine, uncanny, and monstrous tales in a language no human was meant to understand. It was the sound of geometry shifting, of colors bleeding into the air, of silent stories pressing against his mind.
Above, the sun was a white scar in the sky, a noon that felt colder than midnight. Its light seemed to beg forgiveness for trespassing here, falling in thin, gray shafts that carried no warmth, only a profound and illuminating misery. He felt the cold seep past his robes, into his very marrow. A tremor ran through him, a fear so primal his skin felt tight, gasping against his bones. He pulled his hood lower, a constant, nervous tic, a futile attempt to hide from a cold that came from within as much as from without.
It was then that he heard a sound that did not belong, even in the rising chorus of the dead: the pure, human agony of a sob. He turned into a small, cobbled square and saw them. A man lay on his back, his face peaceful, his chest bare. Kneeling over him was a naked woman, her long black hair veiling her face as she wept, her tears tracing clean paths through the grime on the dead man's skin. Her shoulders shook with grief. "Why did you die?" she choked out, her voice a melody of heartbreak. "Why did you leave me?"
The stranger stopped. In this gallery of frozen horror, here was a tableau of genuine, bleeding emotion. He saw them not as creatures of this place, but as lovers torn apart by its cruelty, and a pang of condolence, a ghost of his own humanity, stirred within him. For a moment, he felt an anchor in this mad world.
But the woman's sobbing began to change. It hitched, then broke into a low chuckle. The chuckle grew, swelling into a loud, ringing laugh that was more terrible than any scream. Her head snapped up, and through the curtain of her hair, he saw her eyes were not filled with tears, but with a wild, ecstatic joy. Her hands, which had been caressing the man's chest in sorrow, suddenly plunged into his flesh. There was no blood, only a dry, tearing sound like old parchment ripping.
She pulled her hand back, and in her fist, she held the man's heart. It was a blackened, solid thing, like a piece of polished jet. She held it up to the cold light, admiring it as her laughter echoed off the stones. Then, with a final, gleeful shriek, she closed her fist. The heart shattered with a sharp crack, crumbling into a fine black dust that sifted through her fingers. Her laughter died, and in the sudden silence, her head slowly turned, and her joyful, terrible eyes settled upon him.
Her eyes, wild with ecstatic joy, fixed upon him. The dust of the shattered heart sifted through her fingers and settled at her feet. Then, she began to move. It was a dance, but a dance choreographed by a broken god for a world of broken things. Her naked limbs moved in a rhythm of death, disjointed and impossibly fluid, a marionette pulled by unseen, insane hands. The dance brought her across the cobbled square, a slow, mesmerizing horror, a predator disguised as a falling angel.
She was upon him before he could truly comprehend it, her body a whisper-thin shield against his. A wicked, guttural laugh erupted from her chest, and she began to strike him. They were not the blows of a trained fighter, but the frantic, desperate punches of a cornered animal, landing on his chest and shoulders with surprising force. It was so sudden, so utterly mad, that he flinched, taking a step back from the sheer onslaught of her lunacy.
He weathered the first few blows, then his hand shot out, faster than her frenzy. He caught her not by the wrist or the throat, but by the thick black hair at the crown of her head, pulling her up short, her face inches from his hood. Her laughter faltered into a snarl. And then he spoke.
"Oh, lady," he said, and the sound that left him was not the voice of a hardened traveler, but a thing of impossible beauty. It was a voice so soothing, so resonant and charming, it seemed to melt the very darkness around them. It was the sound of a forgotten song, a low music that Apollo himself might weep to hear. "Be quiet. Relax." His grip was iron, but his voice was a velvet caress. "Are you a monster, or a nightmare? What exactly are you?"
The effect was instantaneous. The snarl on her lips dissolved. The fire in her eyes flickered, drowned by a sudden, bewildering wave of sorrow. Her frantic energy drained away, leaving her limp in his grasp. He released her hair, and she staggered back, her arms wrapping around her own chest as if to hold herself together. A sob broke from her lips, then another. She began to weep.
"A monster?" she whispered to herself, the words muffled by her own embrace. She looked at her hands, the dust of the heart still clinging to them. "Basically, yes. I am a monster. See how I crippled that bastard's heart? I definitely am a monster." She spat the words with a venomous self-loathing. She looked up at the weeping sky, a bitter, broken smile on her face. "For God's sake…" she said, the name of God a curse on her tongue. "They don't exist. Or if they do, they must be enjoying this show, hiding behind the thrones they claim to acquire.
He took a step closer, the music of his voice about to form a new question. "Stop," he began, intending to ask what had happened to the man, who she truly wa—
"He was my man," she interrupted, her voice raw and broken, cutting through his own like shattered glass. "The man whose heart I crippled. He was mine." She looked at the black dust on her hands, and the story spilled from her like blood from a fresh wound. "He wasn't dead. Not truly. He was… decomposing, but alive. Trapped in the rot, his soul screaming from a body that was turning to sludge. I wept. For ten days, I wept on his chest, and I prayed. I prayed to every god I knew, and to the ones I didn't. I offered them my life, my soul, anything. But nothing happened."
Her voice cracked, a bitter fury rising beneath the grief. "I was mocked. The silence was my answer. The cold was my answer." Her gaze drifted to the dust on the ground. "So I did it myself. I gave him the peace the gods denied." As the last word left her lips, her strength gave out, and she collapsed to her knees, her body wracked with sobs that had no tears left to give.
The traveler did not stand over her. He knelt in the grime and the dust, bringing himself to her level. The shadows in his hood shifted, concealing him, yet the gesture was one of profound empathy. "Oh, beautiful," he said, his voice a balm against her raw sorrow. "Don't cry. I will take revenge for you. For those who did this to your husband, who let this happen to your world. Just tell me what is happening here. Why is there only sorrow?"
The woman's head snapped up, her eyes blazing with a new, terrified energy. "NO!" she shouted, the sound echoing unnaturally in the dead square. "Oh, young man, never ask about this place! You ask, and you are damned to the deepest of hells!" She scrambled back from him, shaking her head. "And don't give me fake promises. I know that poison. It is the hope you give a dying soul just to watch it flicker out. You cannot mend what is shattered. Light is not coming back. Don't talk about revenge, traveler. No one can ever solely take it."
Her fury subsided as quickly as it came, replaced by a fragile, desperate tenderness. She reached out and touched his arm, her fingers tracing the fabric over his bicep. "Oh, the man with such soft arms… such a comfortable chest." Her gaze was fixed on his shrouded face. "I cannot see you, but I can feel it. You are the epitome of beauty, aren't you? A thing of warmth and life." She gripped his arm tighter, her voice dropping to a desperate plea. "This kingdom… it destroys beauty. That is all it does. I beg you, don't go inside any further. Turn back."
She looked into the blackness of his hood, her eyes pleading for a final act of grace. "And please," she whispered, her voice breaking completely. "Kill me, oh the merciful."
His voice, a strange melody of compassion in a world without it, answered her plea. "Don't talk of death," he said softly, still kneeling before her. "I am not a god to grant such a gift. Though I know," he conceded, a profound sadness in his tone, "it is the best thing I could give you here." He leaned closer, the darkness of his hood a private confession between them. "But do you think your man would want you dead? Would he want you to follow him into this silence?" He pressed on, his voice a gentle probe into her fortress of sorrow. "Lady, tell me about this place. Please."
Her head snapped up, the fragile tenderness in her eyes gone, replaced by a wall of pure, unbreachable despair. "I would rather pull my tongue out than speak of it!" She drew her fist back and struck her own chest with a sickening thud, a blow of self-hatred. "Go away!" she shrieked, clutching the dust of her lover's heart. "Let me rot with what is left of mine! Go and die yourself, you charming son of a bastard!"
The final word struck a nerve deep within him, a place of cold, controlled fury. In a movement too fast to be human, he was on his feet, his hand locked around her neck, lifting her slightly from the ground. "Don't," he hissed, and for the first time, the music was gone from his voice, replaced by something ancient and terrible. "Call my father anything, you—"
He stopped. The fury vanished as quickly as it came, a storm contained. He released her, and she crumpled to the ground, gasping. He looked at his own hand as if it were a traitor. "We often say the wrong things," he said, his voice returning to its calm cadence, though a tremor of what lay beneath remained. "When we lose our minds." He took a step back, a gesture of finality. "You are right, lady. Do what you want. I will find out for myself." He gave a slight, formal bow. "Farewell."
He turned to leave. As the woman curled up, resting her head on the cold arm of her dead lover, the man paused and whispered a final prayer to the weeping sky. "God, have mercy on her." He glanced back one last time. "Believe," he told her, a final, futile offering. "You are going to survive for him."
A dry, bitter laugh was her only reply. "Right," she mocked the heavens. "The god who punishes."
The traveler turned his back for good and took three steps. He heard no thunder, felt no charge in the air. Only a sudden, impossible silence. A brilliant, clean white light flashed behind him, searing an afterimage of the square into his vision. He spun around.
Where the woman and her dead lover had been, there was nothing. Only a perfect, circular scorch mark on the black marble, glowing with a faint, holy heat. The air smelled of ozone and something else, something terrifyingly pure. There was no ash, no remains. They had been utterly and completely unmade.
He just stood there, the traveler, the man with a hundred voices in his head, and for the first time, he was rendered truly, utterly silent. He just couldn't believe it.
He stood alone again, surrounded by a silence so pure it felt earned.
The kingdom had claimed two more souls. It was patient. It would claim him too.