[Sarah54321]

Small books have been released, less than ten pages in length. Hand written, each book has a story in it, It's obvious a bit of care has been put into each and every book found. Some could be bought, some would simply be discovered in random places. How strange.

The writer's name? 'To Heal'.

---

“There’s this legend I wanted you to know about.”

The land had always been a bit barren to you. Full of sand, full of dirt. There was a plant here, some vegetation there. Not enough to keep society living. Perhaps that was their comeuppance. Society as a whole became far too strong and prideful in their hubris, so the gods abandoned the world.

Then, they took the world with them.

Ever since then, the world fell to more chaos than was original. The Empire fell to its own citizens. Oniga finally shriveled and lost its remaining land to Gold’s desert. Alstalsia’s land became little more than hot slag and lava, what liveable places left inhabited by horrid monsters. Kysei was covered in flames, from where Helondis was birthed and left just as swiftly. Lordwain was finally frozen into a cold, lethal wasteland. Egwyn possibly had it the worst. Hyatt’s remains burst from the fissure, covering the entire continent in ash, uninhabitable and deadly to any that remained.

You were one of the survivors. Left to the machinations of an uncaring land, you stayed on Sigrogana’s land. Though it was mostly destroyed, there were places where life was at least permitted to remain. Only by the power of druids and Doriads was the place at all inhabitable. Even despite that, you had to work a lot. Very hard, in fact.

You were only human, hardly anything in the grand scheme of things. No matter what you thought, all you had to do was keep living. That was the code of conduct for anyone in the camp, however. Friendship and heroism was a thing of the past. If you weren’t selfish, you wouldn’t gain anything.

Man eat man world, perhaps, but it was life. Your existence was enough for you, and so it went on for years. You only wondered when things would finally fall apart entirely. With the Gods having taken back all of their blessings, ripped what the world had in the first place away…

You wonder when it became so bleak. It wasn’t like you were born before the cataclysm. The time where life was easy for most- kindness existed, heroes were a thing of the present, and people cared for one another like family.

It always sounded nice, but maybe you weren’t meant for that sort of life, afterall. You never realized how much you cared about it. How you missed something that you never had. It was a sudden bit of melancholy that washed over you.

You’d never get to feel the happiness of a carefree life. Your mother and father cared in some way, you supposed. They took care of you, they made sure you lived, but then, they disappeared. Par for the course, it was only normal. Soon, you would disappear too. Scavenging had a high mortality rate.

It was strange that you didn’t mourn. Perhaps it was a conditioning that you didn’t realize was being done to you. To accept death like so, it was amazing that even your birth parents gave very little of a reason to feel ‘sad’.

Pursing your lips, you stared down from the high cliff-side where you resided. This place where you found yourself was hardly anything special. Dirt, rock, and a bit of sand. You were supposed to be scavenging, yet…

Staring at the ruined land below, at the few camps that existed, the ones that still fought with each other even over the smallest scraps of food. How long did you want to remain in this area? In this world, even? The wind felt nice as you stood up from your perch.

Perhaps it was conditioning that you didn’t realize was being done to you. Perhaps it was the atmosphere, the world that you were born in, that told you that this wasn’t worth it.

The air felt nice. You felt a strange sting in your eyes as you passed through the sky, staring upwards at the clouds that you would never be able to reach.

Closing your eyes, you simply accepted it.

You cried, for the first and last time.

"They say there's a God that cried..."