Ashes and Devastation



The sky wept acid.
Each drop sizzled against her weathered leather suit, steam curling from the worn fabric like smoke from a dying fire. The city around her was a skeleton — towers gutted, windows shattered, streets cracked open like old bones. Humanity’s last breath had long since dissolved into the poisoned wind.
But she walked on.
Riven, once a soldier, now something else — a ghost of war draped in black armor, red hair streaked with ash and memory. Her eyes, an unnatural green, glowed faintly through the grime. The rain didn’t slow her; it never did. Not anymore.
A scavenger drone buzzed somewhere above, watching. She glanced up but didn't stop. Let them watch. Let them see what they made her.
The acid had taken everything: her unit, her city, her name. But it couldn’t take her mission — the final beacon still flickered in the heart of the ruins, its pulse barely clinging to life. If she reached it, there might still be a chance — not to save the world, but to remember it. To remind whatever came next that they were here, once.
Lightning carved the sky open as she stepped over the remnants of an old playground, boots crunching bones and rust. And then, without a word, she vanished into the storm.
Because in a world that had already died, she was the last thing that refused to.