She stood in the middle of the ruined city, her gaze wandering to the plenty of signs leaning everywhere across the rubble-clogged streets. Each had messages scrawled across them in an assortment of venom and desperation: some cursing God with virulent venom, others lamenting their lots, and still others, eerily calm-the bitterness palpable in its silence.
Her eyes scanned across the jagged lettering, coming to rest on one phrase that caught her attention.
The simplicity of such a question hung heavy in the air, its weight leaning against the fragmented remains of what was once a grand civilization. She let out a soft breath, tinged with exhaustion, and deliberately turned her back to the sign, refusing to entertain the thought any longer.
Her footsteps took her to the place where there had been a strong point en barricado and through which death had stormed its way in. Soldiers lay sprattled in stark rigidity, guns fallen from lifeless hands to lie within smears and slicks of drying blood. She sank to her heels beside one, an open hand touching a leather-bound log clutched hard in the fist. In bold, defianceful writing on the top it was labelled.
she opened the book. Inside, the pages were lined with raw words dancing with the weight of their authors' convictions:
Her face didn't show anything, though the fingers around the journal firmed a bit more. Turning the page revealed a most unusual mark carved into the paper.
she closed the journal and tucked it into her bag.
It was destruction marked on the road ahead, and the echoes of war still seemed to hang in the air like remnants of some melancholy tune. Pieces of military fortifications crumbled on one side while their battered parts were strewn in every direction on the other, with the ruins carrying imprints of those few who had dared the divinity itself, Anti-God Movement.
With every step further, more chaos unfolded with more signs, desperate cries etched on stone and metal of this battlefield
These messages, impregnated with anger and sorrow, told the story of a rebellion, the refusal to bend to the will of a god. Alongside these, though, lay another truth.
One clung to unshakeable faith in a God they believed would bring salvation.
The other, defiant, wished to sever the bonds binding humanity to the will of a god.
This ideological split gave birth to a war so strong and overwhelming that peace was a dream far, far away. The blood spilled here stained both sides, binding them in mutual loss.
She continued forward, her boots crunching against the ground sprinkled with debris. Her gaze, once detached, had acquired the faint shadow of something deeper inside-weariness, perhaps, or the beginnings of a realization.
The street became narrower with every step she took, as though history's weight leaned heavily against her shoulders. There was blood splattered on cold walls, joined by remnants of desperate graffiti; weapons were everywhere, broken and abandoned-like sentinels fallen amidst carnage.
Yet above them all, she was composed, her will as tough as steel, whetted to an edge in the forge of a world that long since had lost its sense of pity.
She was back to the site of unfinished work and the lingering shadows-the building site. Her footsteps were heavier this time, and her purpose sharper, as if her way through the city wasn't just the following, but a track through echoes of a civilization torn to pieces by its beliefs.