It was late afternoon, and the light of the sun shone immaculately over the ruins. Misshapen walls and rubble covered with vines and bushes were all that could be seen for miles on end.
Yet the scene had a strange calm to it. There were no people screaming in desperation, no sounds of buildings crashing onto the ground, or of trees burning.
It was a broken paradise.
Atop a hill at the edge of the destroyed city were the ruins of a large building that stood in place, unaffected by the horrors that had occurred below.
But even then nature had claimed it. Spider webs hung in the corners, and nests rested atop the broken walls.
At what would have been the center of the building, there was a patch of different flowers. In the center of the patch was a scene that seemed frozen in time.
The skeletal remains of two individuals sat among the flowers, one sitting over the other with a black double-edged sword with purple edges lodged firmly into their chest.
For the most part they remained as such, with only a few insects crawling into and out of their corpses from time to time.
The cloud that was casting a shadow over the hill drifted away, and the light of the sun hit the corpse of the one sitting upright, casting a shadow over the one below.
As time went by, the shadow stretched on in silence, and nothing protested.
Then there was a sudden shift in the wind, and the shadow lengthened itself even further.
The silence was broken by a single hand stretching out from inside it.
Then came the other.
They were wrinkled and withered, but they still forced their way up.
Soon it was more than just the arms, but the head, neck, and then the entire body.
The long hair running all the way down to his knees covered his face as his head lay downcast.
He wore clothes in shades of black and purple with a symbol of a purple crystal along with two purple crescent moons along its lower sides. They were small on him but still loose due to how slim he was.
For a moment he sat there staring down at his own feet.
Then he raised his head, his face barely visible through the long strands of hair that covered it.
His cheekbones were visible across his malnourished face, and his lips were full of cracks.
It was his eyes that stood out the most.
They were a shade of deep purple, with two black streaks in the shape of sectors spreading out horizontally from his black pupils to the edge of his irises.
They were practically sticking out from his skull from how they bulged within their visible sockets.
Once he raised his head, he took a deep breath accompanied by an unintentional sigh.
He looked at the emaciated palms of his hands in disbelief.
"Are these my hands?" he thought.
He closed his fingers into a fist and opened them again.
Their movements were dull and weak, but they were real.
"There's no way," he said aloud in a weak voice as a smile broke across his face.
Then he stopped again before saying,
"Is that my voice?"
When no one replied, he said,
"It is!"
"I can't believe it," he said, his hands shaking. "Am I really free?"
He looked around at the sunlit green fields around him and chuckled before breaking into complete laughter.
He was laughing, but tears were streaming down his cheeks as he cried,
"I'm free!"
He passed his hands over the flowers by his legs and smiled.
His long hair started covering his face again, so he raised his head.
He looked up at the clouds drifting lazily through the sky and took another deep breath, this time exhaling more ferociously.
But then he stopped and just stared.
"Was my sight always this clear?" he said.
Looking down at his shadow, it seemed darker than usual.
He stared at it for a moment before turning away.
That was when he tried to stand.
He used all the strength in his arms to try and raise himself up, but he fell onto his back.
He didn't try to get up again and instead just lay there admiring the sky above him.
That was when something caught his eye.
He rolled over onto his stomach and forced himself to sit up.
When he did, that faint smile of his was immediately washed away, replaced with a blank expression as he stared at the two skeletal corpses that had been sitting behind him the whole time.
"That sword," he thought, "is that Axon?"
He crawled closer.
"It is," he said out loud.
He then turned his eyes to the purple armour the corpse wore, along with that eerily familiar black shirt beneath it.
Then he looked up at the skull.
It was drooping slightly downward, with a caterpillar crawling out of its right eye socket. The bones of its fingers still held tightly onto the hilt of the sword.
"Is that you, Father?" he asked in a low tone that hummed in the wind.
There was no answer.
Soon he reached out his left hand and tried touching the end of the hilt, but the crystal engraved at its end pricked his finger and he started bleeding from the cut.
His arm recoiled so quickly that he was shocked.
He stared down at the blood coming out of his finger before looking back at the hilt of the sword.
This time he carefully wrapped his fingers around the bones holding it with his left hand.
Then he reached out with his right hand and did the same.
"I finally made it out," he said through tears as he looked at the skull. "I'm alive, Father."
As he looked at it, the image of his father's face before he cast him into the shadows played through his mind, and his simple tears turned into sobs.
"I'm lost," he said amidst his cries. "I don't know what to make of myself anymore."
"Where do I go from here? What do I become?"
He squeezed the bones of the fingers tighter.
"Please," he begged, "tell me who you want me to be."
He squeezed tighter, but instead of an answer, they broke, and the corpse slumped over, its head breaking off and rolling onto the bed of flowers.
Now all he had were a few finger bones along with the sword that fell down toward him.
He turned his head to the skull anxiously, as if he were waiting for something to happen, but all that did happen was a ladybug landing on it.
With nothing else to hold onto, he gripped the sword tighter and removed it from the chest of the other corpse.
Then, after stabbing it into the ground, he used it to help himself stand up.
When he did, he could feel the strands of his hair reaching his feet behind him.
He lifted the sword up and looked at it for a moment before saying,
"Is this all that is left for me?"
He turned back to the skull and said,
"If this is all that I have to help me find it, then I won't look away—"
"—until I can find it."
He lowered the sword, and just as he did, the cloud that was drifting over them passed by and the light of the sun hit his face.
He closed his eyes as a faint smile appeared on his face.
"It's warm—"
"—but a bit too bright for me."