Ion's heavy boots kicked away the debris covering the entrance to the rubble which once scraped the sky. The whole structure was liable to collapse on his head, but Ion was tired—and almost as hungry—and a building crushing his bones would be preferable to the fate he would suffer should he see the sun rise.
He swung his great pack from off his shoulders and dropped his thick cloak onto the floor. He let out a sigh—the sigh of one who wished his troubles could be cast down so easily as his effects.
From his pack he pulled a hunk of grey meat loosely wrapped in rags, taken from the élaf he chanced upon last twilight. Ion knew well that a fire would be a mistake, and so the viscid meat slid down his gullet one ravenous bite at a time.
Satisfied as he would be, Ion slumped onto his cloak and forced himself into a dreamless rest that would grant him strength enough for the morrow. What occupied his long hours of the scorching day could hardly be called sleep. Ion felt every moment pass by slowly—an eternity, almost, alone inside his own head. He would open his eyes as soon as his limbs were strong enough to carry him again, and the looming sunlight draping the earth was wont to recede.
In his mimicry of sleep, Ion's mind wandered aimlessly. It wove through past and present—though a future he did or could not imagine. Places and faces past all pushed their way to the front of his thoughts before fading again.
He thought, for a moment, of the building wherein he lodged. A colorless heap ruined atop the horizon, scarred by whipping storms of dust, bent and broken by long, long years of neglect. A place of no import. Indeed, it never was. Whatever purpose it had served long ago held no weight in the hearts of whatever long-dead hands once built the place. The walls of this dreary monolith were home to neither man, woman, nor fond memory. Such was the case for most of what remained from before. Towering shrines, but to what? A thousand shattered windows, steel beams that reached into the sky, a hundred flights of stairs that led to nothing and never did. Nowhere in this lonely plain that was the world was there a home to be found. No love graced a single square meter of its shattered and forgotten form.
The state of man was much the same. Left behind to rot and wander and wander and rot, to breathe and walk and hide from the sun and its perils. To look and behold ghosts of the past with no wonder nor reverie, for there was nothing to be found which inspired warmth in his heart, only still pangs of something that was meant to be there but wasn't.
It was trouble enough to breathe. It was trouble enough to wander. Too much for most, who had long since stepped into the sun's piercing light and faced whatever comes after. On unending days of unrest such as this, Ion, too, felt the urge. To step out. To feel, for the first time, sunlight on his skin. And then to fade forever. One day his shadow would join the rest in haunting this barren hell. Ion did not find comfort in the thought, but neither was comfort to be found in the shelters of rust and stone wherein he laid each day, nor the icy winds of dark in which he wandered every night.
Ion felt tattered and frayed. Though young, he felt old. Hope was a distant word which held no meaning on an earth that was damned. Even still, Ion put one foot in front of the other. He swallowed whatever meat he found. He drank whatever dew the air formed. He was alive, though no voice answered him when he asked what purpose these performances held.
When the millennium of day was passed and the sun had crossed the breadth of the sky till all was cast in twilight's amethyst hews, Ion opened his eyes and sat up, taking a moment to wet his parched lips and clear his sapless throat. His back ached, and he was loathe to set his pack upon it. So, too, was he mired by the thought of setting himself upon his bruised feet. But his thirst bade him up.
Silhouettes of ancient civilization blackened the skyline against the firmament.
Ion trudged through the desert floor, a trail of upset dust following as he went. The ruined streets he trod twisted and turned, a concrete maze. Ion watched the dark ground beneath him for jutting steel and jagged rocks primed to impale.
And then, out of night's shroud, a glint caught his eye. A hundred meters hence, straight ahead—just what he was looking for. Ion clambered over the debris collapsed in the way and approached the slimy grey substance which coated a particularly sharp remnant of an edifice; the creature must have cut itself while passing by. A thinly dispersed trail of whatever shining plasma it bled would lead him to it.
Ion scoured the ground looking for the stuff when he suddenly captured a glimpse of his next meal limping around a corner not far off. Ion quietly pursued the course the animal took and rounded the same corner to see the élaf walking lamely down the street, unaware of or unbothered by his presence.
Just as Ion supposed, the stag's left hind leg was deeply gashed, pouring out that colorless fluid which twinkled in the twilight in the most peculiar way. Élafim themselves cast a deep white glow upon the world, shimmering in the moonlight as they strode the air—their hooves never quite touching the ground, as if their otherworldly amble was out of habit, a memory of another life, or perhaps mimicry of the extinct corporeal beast in whose similitude it was.
The antlers on this élaf were particularly impressive; gnarled, twisted, and branching bone reaching to the sky as if to grasp it.
Ion walked beside the ethereal buck. He set a hand on its hide, feeling its translucent fur between his fingers. It paid no attention to him. They never did. Ion felt a sort of kinship to the creatures. Their sole purpose, it seemed, was to aimlessly wander the evening hours—never stopping—till the sun was fully set and none of its light remained. Then the élaf would vanish, as if it were never there.
That time was fast approaching, and so Ion pulled his trusty iron shard fashioned into a knife and thrust it into the side of the beast, carving out a sticky hunk of that scentless, flavorless meat Ion so despised. As he separated the flesh from the animal, it lost its faint glow and became a pale grey. The élaf showed no signs of pain nor panic, except to hunch itself as it walked, as if it knew that such an injury would affect its gait, though the animal itself had no familiarity with the sensations of pain or distress. It simply continued to walk, walk towards the destination it would never reach before the sun's afterglow faded. It never looked at Ion, it never knew he was there. There was something tragic in its eyes, a longing for something it could not have.
Ion, still strolling beside the stag, wrapped the meat and put it in his pack, and then eyed the élaf's beautiful antlers glimmering in the dark. He reached up and grasped them with one hand while he sawed them off with the other. The right, then the left. They, too, lost their glow as they were separated from the head. They were incredibly light. Ion didn't know why, but he liked the idea of fashioning them to his pack as a menacing trophy. Now he himself was an élaf, wandering the night with empty yearning in his heart, a sight for all to see.
But there was no one who would see.
The last tones of mauve faded from the sky which turned black; the élaf faded with it, and Ion was alone.
Ion's throat was deathly dry, as was his leather waterskin. He knew a place, not far from there, where it could be filled. Ion lived in the dark, and so his eyes were more than capable of showing him the way so long as the moon cast the world in faint azure and the stars still stood as guiding sentinels. Still, it was a few hours' hike.
Ion grasped his pack's straps and marched northward to the oasis. Over rugged crags, under broken highways, around mountains of debris, Ion walked miles with nothing but the wind and his own rough breathing to listen to.
The shadow of an enormous building emerged from the night's fog, bent at what seemed to be an impossible angle, yet there it stood, mostly intact. The pool of clear water Ion so desired was close at hand. His eyes solely focused on that umbral tower, Ion did not see what his foot then snagged.
Ion stretched forth his boot—intending for it to land upon the ground, as is customary while walking—and was panicked when it went down, down, landing upon nothing at all. Ion's whole leg disappeared into the earth, and the rest of him soon followed as the ground gave way to some thinly canopied cavity beneath.
Ion grasped the air for support in vain before he hit the floor with a sickening crack as his shoulder dislocated from its socket. The wind was knocked out of him as his diaphragm spasmed, muscles contracting, shocked by the impact.
Ion was sprawled across the floor, gasping for what felt like minutes, his right arm lit aflame with pain. He sought to fill his lungs, deepen his breaths, but the floor on which he laid was coated in inches of dust that caused him to hack and cough as soon as he inhaled. For a moment, Ion was sure that he would suffocate.
He tried in vain to move, to get up off that floor, but something was pinning his right arm, something he couldn't see in the dark. He squirmed and fought till he was able to lift his face in such a way that he could breathe again.
After some time of slowing his gasping to a panting instead, Ion steadied his mind enough to consider the predicament he was in. Bent at an angle that was altogether wrong, he was unable to pull his arm with the rest of his body, something prevented it. He used his left hand to feel what it might be, and winced when he found the cause. His hand was impaled by a rebar pole jutting from the concrete flooring, about a foot long. As his entire arm was impotent, he'd either have to shove his shoulder back into its socket to be able to slide it off the rusted rod, or lift his right hand off the pole with the left.
The pain was so blaring he couldn't think. He had to fight to stay conscious and flex his abdomen to not vomit, the nausea was so great. Forcing one hand up with the other wouldn't work, as he could hardly reach his impaled arm. He thrust his torso against his arm to force it back to its socket, but he could faintly feel the flesh of his hand tearing when he tried.
The pain was too much, Ion began to gasp again, and then hyperventilate, inhaling more dust which caused him to cough and wheeze. Not nearly enough air was reaching his lungs.
He couldn't let out the frustrated howl he so longed to. Tears welled up in his eyes. Hot blood poured out of the wound. Was this the end? One wrong step, and that was it?
His eyes fluttered. He was about to pass out. And then, in the oh-so faint moonlight streaking into the cavernous space, he saw a pair of dusted feet in front of him, naked from the calf down. That was all he could see of whoever leered over him. The sight was such a surprise he jerked himself up, which pulled at his impaled hand, the pain of which caused him to slump back to the floor again. He tried to speak, but a dry grunt was all he could manage, vain babbling in the dark.
The person just stood there, watching for far too long. "Please!" he tried to say, but all that came out was a malformed whine. The feet were still. No helping hand was offered. "Please..." an even weaker attempt, no better than the last at making that word he so desperately sought to form. From his view the feet faded, as did his consciousness—Ion's head fell, and he was out cold.