[open] oh, fire away, any

[Selaphiel]

these days i don’t pray when i close my eyes—

How strange to have lived through the change and have absolutely nothing to show for it. 
(He had hid, as so many others had, as was—and had always been—his nature.)

There is nothing familiar about this new world. Even the faces have changed. He had not been greeted by Mazikeen in the ruins, but her daughter. His niece. A newer generation.

And what did that make him?
Irrelevant.
(Though this is nothing new, there has never been anything significant about him at all.)

The whole world reeks of death. It makes his head swim and that heart (amplified by some strange magic in the bleakest days of all that darkness) beats hard, persistent, twinging with the weight of it. He draws breath, though it pains him to do so. 

(Some months ago, he had wandered to the edge of some great cliff and looked over the side. And how terribly it had hurt to wonder how far down it was. To wonder what it might be like to simply step off into that great oblivion. Would it hurt less than it hurt to live? This is perhaps the thing that he wonders the most. If his own death would hurt as terribly as theirs.)

There is nothing familiar about the Gates. Nothing at all that indicates that he should be here. But the stench is lesser here, lesser than the rest of Beqanna, and he finds that breath comes a little easier. Cleaner. And he settles, turning those glacial blue eyes to the horizon as the sun sinks and he thinks maybe he’ll just rest here a bit.

—I just bite my tongue a bit harder