Watchmen of the Underworld

For more than a century, Los Angeles had burned.

Not always in flame, but in memory—the land itself smoldered with the weight of destruction. Nuclear fire had stripped the city bare, and what stood now was not architecture but abominations: jagged blackened towers of fused glass and steel, twisted into grotesque monuments of human pride and failure. They loomed like watchmen of the underworld, silhouettes against a sky the color of rust and ash.

What few survivors remained had long abandoned the idea of “city.” They burrowed into these malformed husks of buildings, carving out hollows in collapsed freeways or skeletal skyscrapers warped by fire. These were not homes but tombs of survival, cavernous halls of shadows where every echo carried the weight of despair. They looked like buildings one might expect in hell itself—crooked, blackened, dripping with the memory of fire.

Yet deep within one such ruin, beneath fractured beams and scorched stone, a single figure still dreamed. The hero—name half-forgotten, yet whispered by the few who dared to hope—sat by the dim light of a salvaged lantern, staring at a scrap of green pressed between glass. A leaf. A relic of Eden.

It was not truly Eden, of course, but it was enough to stir the memory of a world before ruin—before pandemics divided neighbor from neighbor, before politicians traded freedom for control, before war reduced paradise to ash. The leaf was a symbol, fragile yet enduring, and he carried it like scripture.

Night after night he pondered: How could the world be remade? Not the old world of greed and decay, but something purer, a return to the garden humanity had abandoned. He envisioned fields of green rising again where now only blackened rubble lay, rivers flowing clear where once blood had stained the streets.

The hero’s dream was not madness. Beneath the poisoned soil, seeds still slept. If given time, if given care, life could take root again. But to reach Eden, he would need more than soil and rain—he would need people. A people not yet broken by fire and lies, who could believe in more than survival.

And so, in the shadows of a city that looked like hell, a lone figure plotted a way back to heaven.