Chapter 0 - Again

Ash fell like snow.

Not hurried, not angry—but inescapable.

The planet was quiet—without wanting, but out of need.

Buildings stood in ruins, glass shattered like ice, steel twisted into knots by power drained long. Vehicles sat melted into the pavement. Wires dangled helplessly, their ends swaying like vines on a breeze that had withered long before.

Above, the sky was not dark—there was no sun. Only a grey, pale sheet stretched thin over the horizon. A ceiling, not a sky.

He walked in no hurry.

As if time had let him go.

Dust dropped onto the creases of his coat, folding in like memories folding into the past. His boots pushed the garbage aside, the soft crunch of each step gravel and silence and bone. He moved on, through the destruction, with something in his arms.

Someone who had meant something, held carefully—like glass, like meaning—in his arms.

Her cheek rested on his shoulder, hair scattered with ash, mouth very slightly open in a stillness greater than sleep. Heat from her body had been absent for some time now. Now, there was only heaviness.

He looked down at her face.

No tears.

No anger.

No cry into the sky.

Only a gentle exhale—the kind a man releases when air is more of a weight than silence. An exhale, not of pain, but of something dulled. Something muffled by routine.

Then, the whisper.

Not spoken to her.

Not spoken to anyone.

Not even to himself.

"Again."

He knelt deliberately, one knee gliding over the ground with respect. His hand swept aside broken glass and burned stone, revealing a level section of earth beneath the wreckage. He laid her down gently—folded her hands on her chest, smoothed locks of hair from her face.

Not an offering.

Not a goodbye.

Just the same action, performed so many times that even grief had become still.

He stood and pulled the book from his side. Leather-bound, stitched at the spine. Worn-off corners, frayed edges. It looked normal—something abandoned in a vacant library or tucked away in the shelf of an ancient chapel.

But it felt heavier than the world.

Its presence distorted the air around it, ever so slightly bending the silence.

He opened to the next blank page.

A few lines above were already marked:

World #154

World #155

World #156

World #157

He looked at them.

A quick, but real, silence.

As though declaring what had broken made it final.

As though his own hand rebelled against the fact that it had all gone wrong. Again.

Then he wrote

The pen came slowly, grudgingly—as though the page itself did not want the concept behind it. When the line was complete, he closed the book. No ceremony. No closing benediction.

No audience.

No wind.

No voice from above.

Only the gentle creak of the leather hinge, and the sound of his footsteps walking away.

He did not look back.

Ruins stretched out before him for miles. Cities devoured by time and fire. Forests that had withered to skeletal remains. Rivers choked with ash. But he walked on.

Somewhere deep in his mind, something remained intact.

A memory. A constant.

A truth that had not withered like the others.

But he would not speak.

Not yet.

Not here.

There remained another world to try.

And so he moved—forward, alone—into the next beginning.