The world was no longer the one I had left behind.
The trees had changed.
Their bark was thicker, their branches twisted like ancient arms reaching for a sky too young to know sorrow.
The rivers, too, had changed course, carving new scars into the land.
The light itself seemed different —
filtered through fresh skies that had never known the weight of history.
Men once again populated the earth.
No longer scattered tribes clinging to stone and fire.
Now they raised villages.
Hamlets.
Small hearths carved against the indifference of the wild.
They spoke a language foreign to my ears —
rough and broken, shaped by a world that had forgotten the past.
They carried weapons of crude bronze,
shields splintered and dulled by time.
They built walls,
fragile fortresses against a world they still did not understand.
I passed among them like a shadow.
They saw me.
They turned away.
Sometimes, they knelt.
Without knowing why.
Without understanding.
Instinct stronger than memory.
I walked.
Always.
Without purpose.
Without anger.
Without hope.
I was the echo of something they had never truly known.
Days blurred into seasons.
Seasons faded into a timeless mist.
And still I moved forward,
a figure too old for the new dawn that rose around me.
One day, along the broken remnants of an ancient road swallowed by vines,
I found him.
A man.
Alone.
Breathless.
A vagabond wrapped in rags,
his back bent with exhaustion,
his feet bare and bleeding.
In his arms he cradled a cracked jar,
and in his other hand,
a handful of polished stones —
scraps of hope salvaged from a world that had left him behind.
I watched him from the shade of a fallen wall.
He did not see me.
He stumbled forward,
dragging himself to a mound of stones piled without order or design —
a shrine,
or perhaps a forgotten grave.
At its peak stood a figure.
A statue, barely more than a shadow.
Worn and battered by centuries of rain and wind.
Its features were almost gone.
A face eroded by time.
A spear pointed skyward.
Long strands of hair frozen in the stone.
A posture unbroken,
closed to the world.
Something about it stirred the air,
a whisper of something not quite dead.
The vagabond knelt before it.
He laid his stones at its feet.
He placed the broken jar alongside them —
his last treasures,
his last offering.
And he prayed.
Not with words.
Not with songs.
With his breath.
With his tears.
A silent plea,
shaped from fear and desperation,
to something he could not name.
Not a god.
Not a man.
Only a presence,
heavy and vast as the silence itself.
I stood there.
Unseen.
Listening.
Watching.
Feeling nothing.
Not pride.
Not pity.
Not anger.
Only an exhaustion deeper than the bones of the earth.
He poured his broken hopes into the dust.
Into the silence.
Into the breath of the forgotten.
And I remained unmoved.
When the vagabond finally rose,
his body trembling,
his soul worn thin,
I had already turned away.
I faded into the dust,
into the breath of the past.
Like the wind.