Tribal and Alaya advanced slowly, hands intertwined—not out of romance, but as a shared testimony. They were the only unmoving things in a world that still trembled. The rain of fire and sulfur had ceased, but the air continued to burn in their lungs, impregnated with sulfur, salt, and scorched flesh. It was not the silence of a tomb—it was the moan of a wounded earth.
The city they had seen born and grow was not in ruins. Ruins still preserve form. There, there were no forms—only marks. The melted sand had transformed into irregular plates of black glass, which crackled beneath their feet. The stones of the ancient foundations had turned into white dust, fine as bone meal. Here and there, shapeless figures emerged from the vitrified crust: the curve of an anvil, the opaque relief of a millstone, the crooked shadow of a cart. Everything fused, condemned to the same identityless mass.
The Salt Sea, once distant, now advanced with a vengeful laziness over lands it had never touched. Its waters were thick and hot, exhaling sulfuric vapors that stung the eyes. The coast was a strip of yellowish foam and coarse salt, accumulated like a frost of judgment.
Tribal stopped where a square should have been. He saw it—the oldest memory he had—the market, the spices, the laughter. And before him, there was only a smoking crater. In the center, an irregular column of salt, grotesquely human, rose like a monument without mercy. He said nothing; there was nothing to say. Alaya squeezed his hand. Her fingers were tense like roots beneath a storm.
In the sky, there was no smoke. Only a low, heavy cloud, tinged with a sickly yellow. A twilight that did not end. The wind brought no relief—only the voices of the ashes. A dry whisper, as if carrying echoes of screams that no longer belonged to time. Beneath the surface, small flames still broke through the ground, reluctant to die, as if the earth were left with one last grumble of wrath. They did not mention lust, greed, dishonor, or forgetfulness. The words of beings seemed too small. What they saw was not punishment—it was the antithesis of creation. Where there was life, sterility remained. Where there was complexity, brutal simplification remained.
Everything was reduced to the elements: salt, fire, ash, silence.
Alaya lifted her face. Her eyes, which had seen the Great Silence and the rise of Sanghanirmāna, were moist—not with sadness, but with a weary recognition. An ancient knowledge that only immortals carry.
They did not come to judge. They came to remember. To be the living memory of what fire erases. To carry, in their immortality, the double weight of glory and ruin. To be a witness, in that moment, was both a blessing and a curse.
Behind them, the field of destruction had only a few vertical landmarks—the pillars of salt. They were not graves. They were transformations. They moved forward, carrying the scent of sulfur in their robes and the echo of a silence that only exists when one observes too deeply.
Tribal stopped suddenly. The desire—so human—to return to the instant before the explosion burned in his heart. He could. He only had to think it. He only had to want it. But he knew Alaya. She would never allow it. The course of things had to follow like a river. And this scar… was exactly where it was meant to be.
Alaya, sensitive as the very principle of things, felt his distress and did not let go of his hand. It was she who noticed first: shadows were watching the city. Not with horror. But with… satisfaction. Silent joy. As if they were celebrating the destruction.
She feared Tribal's reaction. And she feared with reason. The emotion that came from him was not fear—it was the roar of something ancient, deep, irrevocable. He looked toward the shadows and, in a single thought, he was there. Pure, sudden rage. The kind of impulse that time itself avoids crossing.
Alaya followed him. There was no time to lose.
Among the shadows, several figures exhaled a glow of contentment—as if the devastation were an awaited spectacle. But two of them stood out. Anxious eyes, countenances heavy not with joy, but with guilt.
Tribal stepped forward, his presence illuminating the soot.
— "Avaran and Saryan… what have you done?"