Enough in Truth

An empty temple rests on the mountain’s crown,

stone and wood bathed in the last breath of sun.

No footsteps echo,

no prayers rise—

only the slow bow of evening.

The sun slips behind the roofline,

light thinning into silence.

Shadows gather without question,

content to arrive, content to leave.

The temple asks nothing of the sky,

explains nothing to the world.

It stands complete in its standing,

whole in its quiet being.

Here, truth needs no words,

no witness, no belief.

The mountain knows,

the temple knows—

and that is enough.

 

The Gentle Release

Rain softens the empty town at dusk,

each drop returning stone to silence.

A lone geisha walks the narrow street,

her steps unhurried,

her reflection dissolving in puddles.

She does not walk to arrive.

She does not walk to be seen.

Umbrella, rain, cobblestone—

no edge between them.

Lantern light flickers,

then fades into the wet air.

The town holds no audience,

and she holds no role.

In this quiet crossing,

there is no “I” and no “world,”

only movement moving,

rain raining,

being being itself.

True freedom passes here—

not as choice or escape,

but as the gentle release

of becoming anything else.

 

Then and Now

Edna was a young girl again, running through a field made not of grass but of dreams. The air was warm, sweet with clover and sun, and her legs were strong beneath her, carrying her forward without effort. She laughed as she ran, the sound light and surprised, as if she had forgotten she still knew how to do that.

The field rolled on forever, soft and green, stitched together with wildflowers. Somewhere ahead, she saw herself.

Not a reflection—a vision.

An older woman, pale and still, framed by rain and glass.

Edna slowed. The girl-version of her felt a tug in her chest, a strange knowing she couldn’t name. She stepped closer, pushing through the tall grass, reaching out.

Through the rain, she could see it clearly now:
a window.
a room.
a wheelchair.

And in it—her.

Old. Folded inward. Hands resting uselessly in her lap. Eyes open but unfocused, staring through the glass as rain slid down like tears she could no longer feel.

“I’m here,” the girl tried to say.

She ran toward the image, heart pounding—not with fear, but urgency. If she could just reach that woman, touch her, wake her up, maybe she could pull her back into the field. Back into movement. Back into now.

But suddenly, her legs would not move.

The ground beneath her hardened, turning slick and cold. The green dissolved into gray. The warmth vanished.

Metal pressed against her thighs.

Edna gasped.

She was no longer running. She was seated. Heavy. Anchored. Her body refused her commands, stiff and foreign. She pushed forward anyway, mind screaming go, but the wheelchair did not move.

The window loomed inches away.

Rain hammered against it, louder now, relentless. The girl in the field pressed her palms against the other side of the glass, eyes wide with panic and recognition. The old woman did the same—but her hands lifted only slightly, trembling, stopping short.

They stared at each other.

Two versions of the same soul, separated by rain and time and failing memory.

The girl’s mouth moved.
The old woman could not hear the words.

Then the field began to fade.

The colors washed out first. The flowers lost their shape. The girl’s outline blurred, smearing into light and motion, until she was nothing more than a suggestion—a feeling of once.

“No,” Edna whispered, though she wasn’t sure who said it.

The window remained.
The wheelchair remained.
The rain remained.

And the field—so close she could almost smell it—slipped away.

Edna sagged forward slightly, her chin dipping toward her chest. Whatever bridge had formed between then and now collapsed quietly, without ceremony. The vision retreated, leaving only the ache of having almost touched something whole.

She was lost once again.

Outside, the rain kept falling.

Inside, Edna sat still, staring through the glass, haunted by the echo of running feet she could no longer feel.

 

Release

In the monastery, before the meal,

we pause and let go.

We release hunger and expectation,

the weight of yesterday,

the grasping for tomorrow.

This food arrives freely—

from earth, rain, sun,

and countless unseen hands.

We receive it without ownership,

without demand,

knowing it will pass through us

as all things do.

As we eat,

may we loosen our grip

on fear and striving,

on names and burdens

we no longer need to carry.

Let this nourishment teach us freedom—

the freedom of enough,

the freedom of simplicity,

the freedom of a mind unbound.

May each bite be a practice

of release,

each breath an opening,

until nothing is held back

and the soul moves lightly,

fed and free.

 

In Every Breath

In the monastery, before the meal,

we pause in stillness

and acknowledge this food

as a gift of the universe—

born of earth and sky,

sun and rain,

and the quiet, tireless hands of labor.

We recognize the harmony

that brought it to us:

soil in balance with seed,

time in balance with patience,

effort in balance with care.

Nothing here stands alone.

As we receive this nourishment,

may we live in ways

that transform us gently,

that elevate the mind without pride,

and free the soul without escape.

Let this meal remind us

to walk in balance—

between taking and giving,

between silence and action,

between self and all beings.

Grant us understanding

to see clearly,

love to act wisely,

and presence to meditate upon

in every breath,

long after the bowl is empty.

 

Scattered Reflections

The world had fragmented around Edna, breaking apart without sound, without warning. There was no remembering anymore—only the sensation of reaching for something solid and closing her hand around nothing at all. Memories didn’t fade politely; they shattered, sharp and sudden, like glass dropped onto stone.

She felt them underfoot in her mind.

Gone like broken glass—her days lay scattered everywhere, each one catching light at the wrong angle. A childhood morning glinted beside a hospital hallway. A wedding vow reflected against a diner booth that never existed. A rainy dusk shared space with a summer field. None of them fit together. None of them could be reassembled.

Time no longer flowed; it refracted.

Colors bled into one another—reds from passing taillights smeared into the warmth of barn doors, blues from evening rain soaked into the sky of her youth. Each memory bent and split, casting duplicates that confused her. She saw herself as a girl and an old woman at once, running and sitting, living and leaving.

Edna tried to gather the pieces.

She reached for a shard that looked like Henry’s face, but it cut her—sharp with guilt, love, and regret all at once. She dropped it. Another fragment flashed: her mother calling her in to supper. It shimmered beautifully, then slipped through her fingers before she could hold it long enough to believe it.

“I’m still here,” she thought. Or maybe she said it aloud. She wasn’t sure anymore.

Her sense of self had come apart too. The woman who loved, the artist who created, the child who believed the world was endless—each existed in isolation now, unmoored from the others. She could feel herself disassembling, piece by piece, like a machine taken apart without instructions, screws rolling away into dark corners she could no longer reach.

She sat hunched and quiet in the failing light, her body heavy, her mind thin as paper. The storm inside her showed no mercy. Each moment stripped something away—names, faces, meaning—until all that remained was sensation without context.

Sound without source.
Emotion without memory.
Presence without identity.

The world shimmered in fractured color around her, beautiful and cruel in equal measure. And Edna, once whole, once certain, now existed as scattered reflections—alive in pieces, but no longer assembled into one.

 

In the Mist of Faith

A monk sits within the clouds,

robes unmoving in the white vastness.

No ground beneath him,

no sky above—

only breath.

Mist drifts through his folded hands,

forms, dissolves,

forms again.

He does not grasp it.

Faith is not something held—

it is the stillness that remains

when nothing solid can be found.

Suspended between earth and emptiness,

he trusts the sitting itself,

the quiet weight of presence.

The clouds carry him,

or perhaps they do not.

Either way,

he does not fall.

 

Dulled and Distant

Edna was tumbling in turmoil, all of it trapped inside her own mind. There was no single thought anymore—only a collision of them, smashed together without order or mercy. Cobwebs stretched from one moment to the next, thin and trembling, catching fragments of memory the way insects are caught mid-flight.

A child’s laugh.
Rain on glass.
Henry’s hand.
A blank page.
A farm fence warm beneath her palms.

None of them belonged where they landed.

Time no longer moved forward. It folded in on itself, crumpling decades into a single breath. She could not tell if she was young or old, loved or abandoned, awake or dreaming. Even her own body felt unfamiliar—hunched, heavy, barely responding to her will, like something borrowed and poorly fitted.

She tried to stand inside her mind.

Tried to call out.

But the words tangled in the web before they could reach her mouth.

Inside, the storm raged. Thoughts surged and collapsed like waves, each one erasing the last. Faces appeared without names. Names without faces. Places without doors. She felt herself slipping between them, unable to anchor to anything solid.

“I’m here,” she tried to say.

But she wasn’t sure where here was anymore.

The world beyond her skin—chairs, walls, windows, rain—pressed faintly against her senses, dulled and distant. Somewhere a voice called her name, or maybe it was Henry’s, or maybe it was her mother’s voice reaching across decades.

The sound echoed, then fractured.

She folded inward, shoulders rounded, chin tucked close to her chest as if she could protect what little remained. Her hands twitched in her lap, fingers searching for something familiar—a pencil, a glass, a hand to hold—but found only fabric and air.

Memories broke apart as soon as they formed.

A wedding without vows.
A goodbye without a face.
A childhood without edges.

She felt herself thinning, unraveling strand by strand. Not disappearing all at once—but eroding, the way rain wears down stone. Slowly. Relentlessly.

Somewhere deep beneath the confusion, a quiet fear pulsed—not sharp, not loud, just constant. The fear of being lost without knowing how to be found.

She didn’t know the day.
She didn’t know the place.
She barely knew the shape of herself.

Edna remained hunched and nearly still, weathering the storm as best she could, though each gust tore something loose. Thoughts slipped away before she could hold them. Pieces of herself drifted off into the fog, unclaimed.

And still the storm pressed on.

And still, Edna was losing herself.

 

Untethered

Below ground, Silen sat unmoving on the cold stone floor, his back against a pillar that had once supported something important—no one remembered what. His eyes were open, but unfocused. To anyone passing by, he would have looked awake. Alert, even.

But inside, everything was slipping.

The cavern around him flickered.

Not darkness to light, but version to version.

For a breath, the tunnel walls were raw stone, damp and ancient.
Then they snapped into clean concrete, freshly poured, humming faintly with power.
Then they dissolved into lines—wireframes, grids, placeholders waiting to be filled.

Silen felt himself drifting, untethered from gravity, from time.

Worlds bled into one another.

He stood in a Los Angeles that had never fallen—glass towers gleaming, streets alive with traffic and voices. Then the image fractured, replaced by a wasteland of ash and twisted steel. Then another: a city bathed in blue light, serene and artificial, too perfect to be trusted.

Each vision carried the same sensation—familiarity without memory.

He saw himself in fragments:

• Standing beside Maren over maps by candlelight.

• Running through tunnels he didn’t remember entering.

• Watching the obelisk fall again and again from different angles, like a replay loop refusing to resolve.

A pressure built behind his eyes.

The hum returned—stronger now, layered with a faint clicking rhythm, like distant servers cycling through tasks. With it came whispers, overlapping, incomplete:

Instance unstable…
Memory bleed detected…
Subject exhibits awareness…

Silen clenched his jaw.

“No,” he muttered—though he wasn’t sure if his mouth moved or if the word existed only as intention. “I’m not just… running.”

The visions accelerated. Scenes flashed faster now, almost aggressive, as if something were trying to overwhelm him before he could grasp the pattern.

Then—clarity.

For a single, sharp moment, everything aligned.

He saw the tunnels as they were.
He felt the weight of his body against the stone.
He heard his own breathing, ragged but real.

And beneath it all, he understood.

The simulation—if that’s what this was—didn’t trap him by force.

It persisted by assumption.

By people never questioning the seams.

Silen drew a slow breath and did the only thing that felt instinctively right: he focused. Not on the visions. Not on the fear. But on something concrete—something chosen.

Maren’s name.

The hum stuttered.

The cavern snapped back into sharp focus. The flickering ceased. Dust settled. The air felt heavy again, stubbornly physical.

Silen blinked, then shook his head hard, like a man surfacing from deep water.

“I’m here,” he said aloud, testing the sound. It echoed back, imperfect and reassuring.

His hands were steady now.

Whatever this world was—real, simulated, or something in between—it had rules. And he had just brushed against one of its limits.

Somewhere nearby, the hum continued, but it no longer felt all-powerful. It felt… cautious.

Silen rose to his feet.

If the system was watching, then it could be challenged.
If the world could refresh, then it could also break pattern.

And if he was becoming aware…

He wasn’t the only one who would.

Above him, below him, across realities he could barely comprehend, something had changed—not loudly, not catastrophically, but decisively.

The simulation hadn’t ended.

But for the first time, it had been noticed.

 

Drifting Moment

Beneath the watchful mountains

an old tall ship moves slowly,

its sails catching a patient wind

that knows no hurry.

The hull creaks in quiet remembrance,

each sound a story released

back into the sea.

Peaks rise like still thoughts,

unchanged by the passing wake,

their reflections folding gently

into the water below.

No destination calls,

no compass insists—

only the steady breath of canvas

and the vast calm of stone and sky.

In this drifting moment,

ship and mountain meet,

and the journey becomes

nothing more

than being carried.

 

Slow Rot

The rot had not come all at once.
It never does.

Los Angeles—and all of California with it—had not fallen to fire or war first, but to applause.

For years, the city had been ruled by smiles and slogans. Press conferences replaced planning. Committees replaced action. Politicians stood at podiums congratulating one another for progress that existed only on screens, while beneath their feet the real city quietly unraveled.

They praised themselves for compassion while the streets cracked.
They celebrated reform while the power grid failed in rolling waves.
They announced bold visions while water pipes burst, bridges weakened, and emergency systems aged into irrelevance.

Every failure was reframed as success.
Every warning dismissed as fear-mongering.

Money vanished into programs no one could audit. Infrastructure budgets were redirected into endless studies, advisory councils, and public messaging campaigns that promised a better tomorrow—always tomorrow, never now.

And when the lights went out for the first time, people waited.

When the trains stopped running, they adapted.

When food shipments slowed and hospitals overflowed, the city was told it was a temporary inconvenience, a necessary sacrifice for a greater good.

By the time the truth became undeniable, it was already too late.

Those with means fled first.

They packed up quietly, leaving behind empty homes and darkened offices. Private planes lifted off at night. Convoys rolled east. The city barely noticed at first—until entire neighborhoods hollowed out, businesses shuttered, and tax revenue collapsed like a sandcastle at high tide.

The rest were left to fend for themselves.

Scarcity turned neighbor against neighbor.
Fear turned ideology into weaponry.
Every disagreement became existential.

The media—still broadcasting, still smiling—framed the chaos as “growing pains.” But on the ground, it was survival. Lines formed for water. Gangs claimed territory. People barricaded themselves inside apartments that slowly became tombs.

Police response slowed. Then stopped.

When protests erupted, they weren’t about solutions anymore—only rage. Rage at institutions that had failed. Rage at anyone who looked different, thought differently, believed differently. The social fabric, stretched thin for decades, finally tore.

The politicians kept talking.

They patted themselves on the back for resilience, for unity, for leadership—long after their motorcades had stopped driving through the neighborhoods they governed. Long after the city began to burn in earnest.

Los Angeles didn’t collapse in a single night.

It turned inward, devouring itself.

By the time the underground became the only refuge, the city above was no longer a place—it was a warning. A monument not to disaster, but to arrogance. A reminder that civilizations don’t fall because of enemies at the gates, but because of decay at the core.

And now, as hooded figures moved through the tunnels beneath the ruins, as Maren watched from shadows and Silen felt the hum of something older than the city itself, the truth lingered like smoke:

The world hadn’t ended when the infrastructure failed.
It had ended when trust did.

Above ground, Los Angeles smoldered—an empty shell full of echoes.

Below ground, what remained of humanity decided whether it would repeat the cycle…
or finally break it.

 

Masters of the Moment

In the quiet clearing

a tiger sits, breath deep as mountains,

stripes resting in stillness.

Beside him, three cats gather—

tails curled like question marks,

eyes half-closed,

masters of the moment.

Above them coils a dragon,

ancient and weightless,

scales shimmering between clouds

and thought.

No one teaches.

No one learns.

The forest listens.

Purr, breath, and flame

fall into the same rhythm,

and for a while

even power forgets itself.

 

Emptiness Holds Everything

The temple on the mountain stands empty,

doors open to wind and sky.

No incense burns,

no bell is struck.

Yet the floor is swept clean

by silence itself.

Thoughts rise, then pass,

like clouds forgetting their shapes.

Nothing clings to the walls,

nothing asks to remain.

The emptiness holds everything

without effort.

In this stillness,

the mind becomes like the temple—

open, unguarded, complete.

No need to enter.

No need to leave.

The mountain knows,

and the heart remembers.

 

Marveling at Life

Another rainy day found Edna at the window again, dusk settling softly over the city. Below her, cars moved slowly along the slick streets, their headlights smearing into pale ribbons on the wet pavement. The rain fell steadily, patient and quiet.

But Edna wasn’t here.

Her body sat unmoving in the wheelchair, hands folded, eyes fixed on the glass—but her mind had slipped its tether.

She was on a farm.

A small girl again, standing in grass still damp with morning dew, the air crisp and bright with spring. The sky was impossibly blue. She could smell hay and earth and something warm and alive she didn’t yet have words for. A red barn loomed nearby, enormous and comforting, its doors thrown open to the day.

A cow turned its great head toward her, chewing slowly, unbothered by the world. Chickens scratched at the dirt, clucking and fussing, their feathers glossy in the sun. A pig snorted from somewhere behind the fence, making her laugh out loud—pure, unguarded laughter.

She held the fence rail with both hands, marveling at it all.

Life everywhere.
Breathing.
Moving.
Simple and endless.

Her father’s boots crunched behind her. Her mother’s voice floated nearby, light and easy. No urgency. No fear. No awareness of time as something that could run out.

In this place, death had no shape.
No name.
No weight.

It existed only as a distant idea, pushed far beyond the horizon of her small, certain world.

She reached out to touch the coarse hair of a calf, feeling its warmth, its solid presence. The moment felt eternal—unbreakable.

And for just a brief while, the thoughts that haunted her other days—the fading, the losing, the long goodbyes—had no power here. There were no urns. No hospitals. No rain-streaked windows. No Henry slipping away into mist.

Only sunlight.
Only breath.
Only now.

Back in the nursing home room, rain tapped gently at the glass. A car horn sounded faintly below, then disappeared.

Edna’s eyes remained fixed on the window, but her face softened—just slightly—as if some inner warmth had reached her from across the decades.

The farm began to blur. The animals stilled. The blue sky thinned.

But for that brief moment—so small and so merciful—Edna was not dying.

She was simply a little girl again, standing in springtime, marveling at life.

 

The Descent

The uniforms were gone.

By the time the troops reached the mouth of the underground passage, they had shed their armor and helmets, stowing them in sealed cases marked with old insignia no one used anymore. In their place, they pulled hooded robes over their bodies—dark, ash-colored cloth designed to absorb light and distort silhouettes. Down here, authority didn’t march in formation. It blended.

The transition was ritualistic. Efficient. Practiced.

They moved single file into the darkness, boots replaced with soft-soled wraps, rifles broken down and concealed beneath the folds of their robes. Only the faint red glow of ocular implants betrayed them, flickering briefly before dimming to near invisibility.

The tracks were still fresh.

Barely visible scuffs in the dust. A displaced pebble. The subtle drag of someone favoring one leg. The lead tracker—once a soldier, now something closer to a warden—knelt and traced the marks with two fingers.

“She passed through here,” he whispered. “Recently.”

The tunnel swallowed sound. Their voices barely carried beyond a few feet, as if the earth itself were listening.

They descended deeper.

The walls shifted from cracked concrete to raw stone, damp and veined with rusted cables that hummed faintly with residual power. Symbols had been etched into the rock over decades—some crude, some deliberate. Warnings. Coordinates. Names scratched by people who thought they might be the last to ever pass through.

The hooded figures ignored them all.

They followed the trail with quiet certainty, their movements no longer military but monastic, as though this hunt had become something sacred. Down here, the mission wasn’t capture—it was containment.

One of them paused, tilting his head.

“Do you feel that?” he murmured.

The hum was stronger now. Not loud—but pervasive. A vibration that slipped into the chest and lingered there, syncing with breath, with pulse. The same signal the rebels feared. The same one Maren had followed.

The lead figure raised a hand. The group stopped instantly.

Ahead, the tunnel widened into a cavern where the air shimmered faintly blue. Old conduits pulsed weakly along the ceiling like veins carrying a dying current. In the center of the chamber, footprints converged, overlapped—hesitation marks. Someone had stopped here.

“Subjects are close,” the leader said softly. “The anomaly is active.”

Another hooded figure shifted uneasily. “What if they cross again?”

The leader didn’t answer immediately.

When he did, his voice was colder.

“Then we make sure they don’t come back.”

They moved forward, robes whispering against stone, fading into the deeper dark where tunnels forked and the past lay buried beneath layers of forgotten infrastructure.

Far ahead, unseen by them, the hum spiked—just slightly.

As if something had noticed their approach.

And was deciding…
whether to let them continue.

 

Slipping Away

Another day slipped quietly into evening, the sky folding itself into bruised shades of purple and gray. A hush—no, a husk—fell over the city as if dusk had stripped it of something essential. Buildings stood like hollowed silhouettes against the darkening sky, their windows flickering with tired light. The drizzle had stopped, but everything still glistened, damp and reflective, like the world had been dipped in memory.

Edna sat in her wheelchair exactly where the staff had left her, angled toward the window. She didn’t blink much anymore. Her eyes were wide, glossy, fixed on the city below as if she were watching a silent film projected across the glass.

She wasn’t present in this room.
She wasn’t even present in this year.

Her mind had spun itself into a fragile web—threads tugged from seven decades of living, stretched thin, some broken entirely. Shattered memories hung in the strands like shards of colored glass, each catching light for a moment before slipping back into shadow.

She saw her father’s hat tipping in the wind.
Her mother’s hands kneading dough at the kitchen counter.
A dog she once loved—what was its name? Something with a B? Or an M?
Henry’s laugh echoing in the driveway, or maybe in the diner, or maybe… somewhere else.

The scenes flickered in and out, never staying long enough to anchor themselves. They overlapped, bled together, rearranged themselves into moments that never happened but felt real enough to touch.

Outside, a streetlamp sputtered on, its orange glow reflecting on the window. Edna’s gaze drifted toward it, but her thoughts drifted elsewhere—to a summer long gone, or perhaps one she dreamed. She heard the creak of a porch swing. The chirp of crickets. The whisper of someone calling her name.

Edna…

But whose voice was that?

She reached for the sound—mentally, instinctively—but her hand didn’t move. Her body and mind no longer communicated in reliable ways. So she remained perfectly still, like a sculpture placed before the dusk.

A nurse passed by the door and paused, watching her with gentle concern.

“Edna? You doing alright tonight?”

No response.

Just the faint fog of Edna’s breath against the cold window.

Just her reflection—an old woman with silver hair and hollow eyes—staring back, though Edna didn’t seem to recognize her.

The city lights appeared one by one, blinking into existence like stars trapped between buildings.

Edna’s mind tried to grasp them, to make patterns, to remember which lights belonged to which streets, which memories belonged to which decade. But everything slipped, everything scattered.

She was a child.
She was a wife.
She was an artist.
She was no one.

Just drifting, suspended in the fragile web of a life unraveling thread by thread.

Outside, dusk settled fully.

Inside, Edna remained frozen at the window—alone with a universe of memories broken into pieces too small to ever fit back together.

 

Down the Empty Path

At dusk she walks the cobblestones,

a geisha wrapped in soft twilight,

steps barely touching

the quiet street.

Cherry blossoms drift above her,

petals falling like slow thoughts

forgotten before they land.

No voices call,

lanterns don't flicker—

ahead only the hush of evening

and the faint rustle of silk.

Her shadow stretches long,

then dissolves into the fading light,

as if even the world

dares not disturb her passing.

Down the empty path she moves,

not seeking,

not fleeing—

just part of the moment

where blossom and breath

become the same.

 

The Mountain Exhales

High in the mountains,

where the air thins into silence,

a lone monk walks the stone path

toward the waiting temple.

The sun sinks low,

a final ember sliding behind the peaks,

its fading warmth

brushing the edges of his robe.

He enters the wooden hall

with a bow to the empty space,

his footsteps soft

as falling dusk.

No audience,

no ritual more grand

than the closing of a door,

the settling of breath.

He lights a single lantern.

Its glow gathers the shadows,

cradles them gently,

and the day ends

without a sound.

In that quiet,

the mountain exhales—

and the monk,

simply being,

becomes part of the night.

 

Reclaiming the World

Deep underground, in the chamber carved from ancient concrete and reinforced with scavenged steel, the empty room held its breath.

A single lantern flickered on the central table, its wavering light casting long, nervous shadows that stretched across the rough walls. Four candles, burned low and warped by heat, formed a small circle around a hand-drawn map—its edges curled, its surface stained by soot, sweat, and the trembling fingerprints of those who dared to dream of rebuilding.

The map was a patchwork of the world above: crumbling roads, poisoned rivers, collapsed districts, and the ruins of Los Angeles marked in jagged charcoal. Someone had added small symbols—triangles for safe tunnels, circles for supply caches, X’s where others had been lost. It was a record of danger and hope, equally fragile.

The air trembled faintly. Distant booms drifted through the bedrock like the heartbeat of a dying colossus. The storms above were tearing across the wasteland again—howling winds filled with sand, ash, and the remnants of a city that once glittered with lights and ambition. Now the storms carried only ruin.

The survivors who used this room—the ones who whispered strategy, argued over risks, and dared to believe freedom wasn’t extinct—they were out there somewhere, navigating tunnels and scouting for allies. Each absence stretched longer than the last.

Dust fell from the ceiling with every distant rumble. The lantern flame fluttered violently, as though sensing the tension that clung to the cavern.

Footsteps would return here soon. They had to.

This small room was their command center, their sanctuary, the birthplace of rebellion in a world that had forgotten what resistance looked like. Every scratch on the table, every wax drip on the stone, every penciled line on the map was a testament to the living—however few they were—refusing to give in.

And so the room waited, holding its silence, holding its breath, waiting for the moment those weary, determined hands would reach for the lantern again and plan the next step toward reclaiming the dead world above.

 

Shifting Mosaic

The rain thickened as dusk deepened, turning the city into a shifting mosaic of reflections—wet asphalt glimmering like a dark mirror, puddles trembling with each passing car. Edna’s gaze locked onto the red taillights sliding by below her window, each pair smearing into long streaks across the glass. They pulsed softly, like distant heartbeats.

The glow tugged at something deep inside her.

Red.
The color of brake lights.
The color of her mother's scarf whipping in the wind as they drove with the windows down.
The color of the suitcase her father packed for weekend trips.

But none of the images aligned neatly. They leaned into one another, merging into a hazy patchwork that made no sense and yet felt familiar. One moment she was a little girl with hair in ribbons, pressed against the backseat window, watching cornfields blur by. The next she was a teenager, tapping her foot impatiently as her parents argued softly in the front seat about which turn to take.

Then they were all there at once—a braided loop of time she couldn’t straighten.

She blinked, trying to bring clarity to the haze, but everything slipped like water through her fingers.

A pair of taillights glowed redder than the rest, cutting through the mist. For a second, she felt the jolt of the car hitting a pothole, her father’s voice apologizing over his shoulder, her mother laughing, her younger self clutching a stuffed rabbit. She felt the warmth of the car heater on her shins. She heard the faint hum of her parents’ favorite radio station.

Then—gone.

The memory dissolved into static.

The real world settled back around her with its soft hums and distant footsteps. She didn’t move. Her face remained blank, but inside, a soft ache rippled through her, gentle but persistent.

Another set of taillights drifted past—slow, steady, blooming red against the slick pavement. Edna followed them with her eyes, but not with her mind. Her thoughts floated somewhere unreachable, like balloons caught in branches high above her.

She couldn’t piece together the moments. Couldn’t decide whether she’d been eight, sixteen, or somewhere in between. The years folded over each other until nothing had edges anymore.

She exhaled, a small, weary breath.

Outside, the cars kept passing.
Inside, the memories kept blurring.

And Edna sat there, dazed but calm, her mind drifting in the soft glow of red lights and rain, lost somewhere between then and now, between who she had been and who she was fading into.

 

Reclamation

After the fall, Los Angeles did not simply die—it dissolved, unraveling into a wasteland where nature and toxins fought for dominance.

The city lay in fragments, sinking into its own ashes.
Concrete buckled.
Steel curled like scorched paper.
Neighborhoods once pulsing with life were now skeletal outlines buried beneath dunes of gray dust that drifted like snow through the empty streets.

Nature Returned, but Twisted

Vegetation pushed through the ruins, but it wasn’t the hopeful green of renewal.
It was feral.
Overgrown.
Poisoned by centuries of chemical runoff and nuclear residue.

Vines the color of bruises crawled up the sides of crumbling towers, their tendrils weaving through shattered windows like fingers searching for purchase. Trees erupted through cracked sidewalks, their bark warped and split, leaves slick with oily sheens that shimmered under the dim, storm-blurred sun.

This was not rebirth—it was reclamation by something wild, desperate, and half-mad.

The Storms Never Stopped

Above it all, the sky churned with perpetual violence.
The storms rolled in daily, black and churning, carrying with them winds sharp enough to strip the paint from rusted vehicles and sandblast exposed bone.
Lightning forked across the horizon in toxic greens and sulfur yellow, illuminating the ruins like an autopsy flash.

Rain fell in acidic sheets, carving channels into the dust hills, turning whole blocks into rivers of muddy poison. Thunder shook the earth, echoing through collapsed subway tunnels where survivors hid.

Survivors Became Phantoms

They no longer walked the streets openly.
They slithered through shadows, crawled through drainpipes, traveled beneath debris where the storms could not reach them.
Their shelters—dugout warrens stitched together with scavenged metal—were hidden behind rockfalls or beneath piles of toppled freeway slabs.

Every movement was measured. Every breath cautious.
The storms hunted them as ruthlessly as the old forces once had.

Those who lived learned to read the weather like scripture:
the shift of the wind,
the taste of the air,
the way dust rose in spirals before a downpour.

Silence was their ally, secrecy their shield.

They whispered to one another in low voices, recalling what the city had once been—not to mourn it, but to remember why they must endure. Because survival was no longer just about living day to day. It was about outlasting the corruption that had brought the world to its knees.

Hidden in their burrows, listening to the storms tear apart what little remained above, they clung to a single truth:

The world had fallen, but they had not.

 

The Final Stage

Before the final collapse, before the cities burned and the sky turned the color of old wounds, the forces that hunted survivors had moved like shadows—silent, organized, and merciless. They had not appeared overnight. They had been built brick by brick, law by law, justification by justification, until the machinery of suppression was so vast and entrenched that no one could pinpoint when freedom had actually died.

They were not soldiers—not in the old sense. They were an amalgamation of outsourced power:
corporate enforcers, private mercenary outfits, cartel-funded militias, and state-controlled security drones. Each faction served the same unspoken master—control at any cost.

Before the Collapse, the Hunt Was Systematic

The Drones Came First

Silent tri-rotor units drifted through the streets like metallic vultures, their sensors tuned to detect gatherings of more than three people. They scanned faces, logged heat signatures, listened for forbidden words. A single anomaly triggered a cascade of escalation.
First a warning blared from the drone’s speaker.
Then a flash of light.
Then someone vanished, carried away in a stun-web, the drone lifting them like prey.

People learned not to look up. Not to speak loudly. Not to hope.

Then Came the Black Vans

No markings, no plates.
They prowled the neighborhoods at night, taking those who asked too many questions, those who refused to comply, those who still believed in the naïve notion of rights.

Residents heard the same sequence in their nightmares:
Tires on wet asphalt.
Doors sliding open.
Boots hitting concrete.
A muffled cry.
Then silence.

The vans drove off into the darkness, leaving behind homes full of trembling families who pretended not to have seen a thing.

Cartel Militias Filled the Void

When the government traded its integrity for alliances with drug syndicates, the militias became enforcers.
Heavily armed.
Unrestrained.
Deadly.

Entire blocks were sealed off as “stability zones,” where residents were forced to submit to inspections, interrogations, loyalty tests. Those who refused were marked—sprayed with invisible ink read only by drone scanners. Once marked, escape was impossible. Every corner, every checkpoint became a trap.

Propaganda Finished What Force Alone Couldn’t

Legacy media—the same institutions that once claimed to guard the truth—became the mouthpieces of the regime.
Every broadcast insisted that dissenters were:

• extremists

• threats to national safety

• enemies of democracy

Neighbors turned on neighbors. Families reported their own.
Fear did the hunting even when the hunters slept.

The Final Stage: Purges Before the Fall

As the nation finally buckled, the forces escalated.
Curfews tightened.
Entire districts vanished behind barricades.
Search teams swept through burned-out suburbs with heat sensors and sonic disrupters, flushing out the last pockets of resistance like animals.

Anyone who survived had done so through sheer luck—or because they had already descended into the underground network forming beneath collapsing cities: the seed of a future resistance.

And Even Now, Long After the Collapse

Those forces, or twisted remnants of them, still roam the wasteland.
Some as broken machines, following protocols no human remembers.
Some as rogue militias, surviving off the bones of the fallen world.
And some—still organized—because the hunger to silence hope never truly died.

 

The Gentle Drift

In the stillness of night

an ancient tree drifts on calm water,

its roots loose from earth,

its branches brushing the stars.

Candles float beside it,

each flame a tiny heartbeat

in the vast, dark hush.

Their light dances on the surface—

wavering gold,

soft ripples folding into themselves,

reflections merging

with shadow and moon.

The tree glides without intent,

carried only by the quiet.

No beginning,

no destination—

just the gentle drift

of being.

Here,

between flame and reflection,

between water and sky,

all things pause

and become simple again—

a single moment,

unbroken.

 

Moving In

The troops moved like a slow, mechanical tide—methodical, relentless, sweeping through the ruins with the certainty of men who believed they owned the ground they walked on. Their visor lights glowed red through the ash-filled air, giving them the look of predators whose eyes had adapted perfectly to darkness.

But they weren’t alone in the ruins.

High above them—perched at the broken edge of a collapsed freeway ramp—Maren watched.

She had extinguished her lantern.
Her breath was slow, controlled.
Only the faintest outline of her silhouette broke against the storm-lit sky.

Below, the squad advanced in perfect formation, unaware they were being observed.

From her vantage point, she could see everything:

The scanning beams sweeping back and forth like hungry tongues.
The drone searchlights stabbing through cracks in buildings.
The subtle tension in the air—the kind soldiers carried when they sensed they were close to something important, something dangerous.

But it was what she felt that chilled her.

Silen was near.

She didn’t know how she knew—whether it was instinct, memory, or something deeper threading through whatever strange dreamlike shifts reality had recently taken—but she could sense him like a dim pulse beneath her feet.

The troops were closing in on him… and on her.

A gust of wind tore down the freeway, scattering ash and tattered paper from a fallen billboard. A piece fluttered by her boot—an old government poster from the early days of the collapse:

“STAY SAFE. OBEY DIRECTIVES. PROTECT THE COLLECTIVE.”

The smiling faces on it were faded, sun-bleached into cruel mockery.

Maren’s fist tightened.

Below, the squad halted.

One soldier raised a hand.
He had seen something.

Maren froze.

Through a jagged break in the rubble, she saw what had caught his attention: a footprint, half-smudged but unmistakably fresh. It led downward—toward a gap between two collapsed buildings that formed a narrow stone chute.

Toward Silen.

The officer knelt beside it, touching the edge with two fingers.

“She’s close,” he said. “And he’s not far ahead.”

Maren’s heart hammered once—hard.

They knew.

The squad fanned out, rifles raised, each man scanning angles and shadows. The officer pointed toward the chute.

“Two teams. One follows the tracks. One circles to cut them off.”

Maren’s decision had to be immediate.

She crouched lower behind the cracked concrete barrier and watched as the soldiers began their descent. The formation split, half slipping into the ravine-like chute, the others moving along an upper ridge.

She knew that path.
It led directly into one of the underpasses—one of the corridors Silen used.

If they found him first—

Lightning split the sky, briefly illuminating the city in a blinding white flash.

The troops became silhouettes.

For an instant, Maren saw her reflection in their visors from afar—small, hidden, but vulnerable.

She whispered into the storm:

“Silen… you have to move.”

And then she slipped backward into the shadows of the freeway skeleton, preparing to descend, to try and reach him before the troops did—but knowing she was impossibly outnumbered, outgunned, and watched by eyes trained to see everything.

Behind her, the storm throbbed with electricity.
Ahead, the soldiers moved like wolves.

And from deep below the ruins…
Silen felt a sudden jolt of awareness—like a memory breaking through, like someone calling his name through water.

They were converging.

All of them.

The hunter, the hunted, and the one who refused to let the story end here.