Memory of Noise

The road narrowed as Silen descended from the scrub hills toward the basin where Los Angeles once glittered. Twilight bled across the horizon, the last sunlight striking the jagged teeth of broken towers. Smoke drifted in slow ribbons, carrying the ghost-scent of ash and old iron.

He paused where the dirt track met what had once been a freeway. Chunks of asphalt lay like black river stones, and a skeletal sign—half the word Sunset still clinging to twisted metal—pointed nowhere. His lantern swung in the cooling wind, casting amber rings across graffiti-stained concrete.

Every step forward felt like walking into a memory of noise. He could almost hear the hum of traffic, the shouted greetings of street vendors, the thrum of life that had filled these avenues long before the sickness, the wars, and the long unraveling. Now the only sound was the scrape of grit beneath his boots and the faint hiss of fires far off in the ruins.

Silen slowed near a toppled overpass. Vines had claimed its sides, blooming in improbable green. Among the rubble a pair of eyes flashed—feral, reflecting his lantern light—then vanished. Survivors, perhaps, or wild scavengers. He did not give chase. The city would reveal its people in time.

He stopped to steady the lantern against a gust of wind and looked out over the dark basin.
Somewhere amid those shattered streets were pockets of life—families hidden in basements, small enclaves trading whispers of a better dawn. They were wary, fractured, but not gone.

And somewhere, if the dreams were true, walked Aurelian Tharos, the figure of prophecy whose path Silen had followed across deserts and wastelands.

The monk tightened the strap of his pack and stepped onto the broken freeway. Each echoing footfall carried a quiet promise: to keep the flame alive, to listen before speaking, and to remind a city that even in its deepest night, a single steady light could begin the work of morning.