Pyre of Greed and Folly

Long before he was Aurelian Tharos, he had another name—forgotten now, scattered like ash into the wind. He had once been just another soul in the great collapse, a man watching the world die in fire and deceit. He remembered the day the skies turned red and the city burned, when the crowds cheered as though destruction were a cure. He had stood among them, horrified, as they mistook ruin for liberation. Where they saw fire as cleansing, he saw the death of memory.

It was then that something within him shifted. Some said it was madness. Others believed it divine.

In the chaos, he walked alone into the ruins of a cathedral as flames licked at its spires. There, he found the relics he still carried: the stained glass shard, the chalice, the leaf. He claimed them not for power but because they spoke to him—symbols of beauty, faith, and life in a world that sought only death. Emerging from the fire with them in hand, he was changed. Those who saw him walk unscathed from the inferno whispered that the flames had not burned him because he had already been remade within.

From that day forward, he became less man and more myth.

As the decades rolled into centuries, the burning city remained as it always had—its towers crumbling, its streets choking on smoke and silence. But Aurelian endured. His body aged, yet slowly, as though time itself hesitated to take him. His face bore lines, yes, but his eyes carried the gleam of stars too old for mortal men. No one could explain it.

Some whispered he had drunk from poisoned rivers and not perished. Others swore he had wandered through the irradiated deserts beyond and returned, his skin unscarred, his spirit intact. They claimed he was the last remnant of the old world’s soul—walking proof that humanity’s light had not been entirely extinguished.

But Aurelian never claimed divinity.

Standing on the edge of the wasteland, staring out at Los Angeles still aflame a century later, he saw not prophecy fulfilled but tragedy unending. Where others saw ruins, he saw warnings. Where others saw hell, he sought Eden.

To those who found him in the wasteland, he did not command. He did not demand. He simply spoke, and his words carried the weight of mountains:

"The fire was never salvation. The fire was never freedom. The fire was only the forgetting. If we are to rise, it will be not through ashes, but through seed."

And thus his myth grew in contrast to the burning city before him: Los Angeles, eternal pyre of greed and folly, and Aurelian Tharos, eternal wanderer, carrying the fragile ember of a dream that refused to die.