Eden Burning

For a long moment, the survivors said nothing. Their faces flickered in the glow of Aurelian’s lantern, shadows twisting across hollow cheeks, lips pressed tight against words they did not dare to speak. The silence felt heavier than the ash that hung in the air.

Finally, a gaunt man with sunken eyes broke it.
“Fairy tales,” he muttered, voice hoarse. “Dreams for fools. The world’s burned. Nothing grows. Nothing lives but rats and liars.”

Another survivor—an older woman wrapped in a threadbare coat—shook her head. “We’ve seen what happens to those who talk of rebuilding. The drones come. The hunters find them. And then we bury what’s left—if there’s even enough to bury.”

A younger man stepped forward, face twisted by something harsher than fear. “You’d damn us all with false hope. Better to survive in truth than die in a dream.”

They began to turn away, muttering among themselves. One by one, they withdrew into the broken tunnels, their figures fading into the gloom. Even the child who had stared at the glowing shard was pulled away by a trembling hand. The last thing Aurelian saw was her wide eyes peeking over a shoulder before vanishing into the dark.

Aurelian did not follow. He let them go. He had seen this before—the reflex to recoil from hope, because hope was dangerous in a world where despair had become a shield. To hope was to risk loss, and they had already lost everything.

But he also knew something else. Their words had carried fear, but their eyes… their eyes had carried hunger. Hunger for more than scraps and silence. Hunger for something beyond survival.

Deep within, he felt the ember settle. They had rejected him with their voices, but not with their hearts. Not yet.

As he remained standing in the shadows, he heard the survivors’ footsteps fade upward, toward the surface. Toward the glow of the flames still licking the sky. Los Angeles burned as it had for a century, towers collapsed into grotesque heaps, the skyline a jagged silhouette of ruin. The survivors walked toward it anyway—not out of love, but because the fire was all they knew.

They thought the burning city was their anchor, the last remnant of a world they barely remembered. They clung to its skeletons because they could not yet imagine anything else.

Aurelian watched them vanish into the black, their voices carried upward, trembling and angry, but restless too. He did not call after them. He only whispered into the silence:

“You will find me again. Not because you want to. Because you must.”

The smoke from the city rolled into the tunnels like a tide, staining the air with the acrid perfume of death. And still, in the darkness, Aurelian Tharos stood unshaken—his relics glowing faintly in his hands, the ember of Eden burning quietly within him.