Man from the Dark

They called him Solace — a name soaked in irony.

There was no comfort in him. No warmth. Just the icy precision of a man who had watched the world die and refused to die with it.

He once had a real name, a life, maybe even a family — all swallowed by the flames when the cities burned and the mobs danced around the fires like children playing with matches. He had fought for the country, bled for it overseas, only to return to a homeland poisoned from within by utopian lies and self-righteous destruction.

When the institutions fell — courts, police, power grids — it was the fanatics who rose. Not with compassion or truth, but with vengeance disguised as virtue. They promised equity but delivered obedience. Promised freedom but gave chains.

Solace had seen enough.

He vanished into the tunnels beneath the ruined cities — deep into the bowels of the failed experiment that had once been America. Down there, among the steam pipes and broken rails, he found others like him: men and women who had not surrendered their minds, who still knew right from wrong, truth from manipulation. Veterans. Outcasts. Disillusioned cops. Tech saboteurs. Young fighters born into the ruins, raised on stories of what once was.

Solace became their leader not by vote, but by sheer presence. His command was calm, quiet, lethal. He spoke little. But when he did, people listened — because he meant every word.

“They broke the surface,” he once growled, running a gloved hand across a decayed subway map.
“Now we take it back.”

In the tunnels, he built an army. Not vast — but disciplined, sharp, unshakable. They trained by firelight, repurposed ancient tech, crafted crude weapons from forgotten machinery. He drilled them in silence, ambush tactics, and sabotage. He didn’t preach politics — he taught survival, taught purpose.

He reminded them that the enemy wasn’t just the tyrants above — but the apathy that allowed them to rise. The people who cheered as the Constitution burned. The mobs who called it progress when statues fell and law vanished.

And when the day came to move — when the first assault teams breached a comms tower above — it wasn’t vengeance that Solace sought.

It was restoration.

Not of the old world exactly… but of something earned. Something honest. Something that remembered that freedom isn’t given, it’s protected. And sometimes... retaken by force.