text: A man stands in the desert, and he is alone. The ground, cracked, brittle and dry, crumbles beneath his thick boots, releasing smoke-like wisps of dust carried slowly away by a lethargic wind, rustling the folds of his trenchcoat as it limps across the barren plain. Directly above him lies the sun, a sickly dirty-yellow jewel set deep within a tan sky, casting a toxic glow that made the wasteland seem all the more lifeless. He stands completely still, seemingly gazing off into the distance, towards the one thing that broke up the flat skyline - a great mass of concrete and steel and shards of glass, what was once surely a great city. Now though, its skyscrapers are nothing more than gravestones, monuments to the fallen, twisted spires jutting up like the fingers of some vast leviathan failing to claw its way back from death. Though he seems to be looking at that ghost of a city - after all, there is little else to look at - his face is obscured by a green rubber gas mask, his eyes by glossy circles of black glass rimmed with steel, making it near impossible to discern exactly where he is looking. In fact, no part of him is visible, his hands shrouded by thick gloves and his long army-green coat extending from his mask to his boots. Slowly, as though he carries the weight of that corrupted sky upon his back, the man begins to make his way towards the carcass of the metropolis. Slow and heavy footsteps, muffled by the brittle crumbling dirt, carry the man past the charred mountains of rubble, the only sounds the gentle crunch of the ground and the rustle of his trenchcoat. He seems to walk without thinking, absorbed in the sight of the burnt-out citadel, following a path of muscle memory alone. Every so often, he turns, stopping in his march to gaze up at one of the remnants of buildings, seemingly near-identical to the rest but with some clear significance to him alone. In these moments, true silence settles over the city, for seconds or minutes at a time - and yet always, he returns to his path, his final goal clearly still ahead. City becomes suburb - skyscrapers becoming apartments, apartments becoming houses, and finally it seems his march is at an end. A single house, indistinguishable from those around it, any unique identifiers burned out long ago or covered in dust since - and yet, this house in particular at last brings him off the road. He steps over a half-buried gate, one hinge blown apart, the other barely hanging on and half-submerged in dust, and passes through the half-open door, not running, yet moving markedly quicker than before, and getting faster. Passing through the house in a near jog, he reaches a cabinet, miraculously still standing. On top of it lies a photo, the frame scorched, the glass shattered, the image weathered, clearly damaged by decades of sun and dust - yet still, it had survived. Two children, playing on lush green grass, a woman sunbathing in the background. He pulls it gingerly from its frame and holds it in his gloved hands, looking down at the faded image. The dark glossy eyes betray no emotion, and no sobs can be heard from behind the mask, and yet pure silence settles over the city, and the hours flicker by, until the sun hangs low in the sky and the shadows are long and faded. As the sun touches the horizon, he carefully folds up the picture, puts it in his pocket, and walks out of the house, the weight of the now purple sky on his shoulders seemingly doubled. He makes it a hundred metres or so out of the house before stopping, and looking back at the city he once called home. He turns to those skyscrapers, many with the skeleton frame still intact, and for a fraction of a second feels a decades-old anger return. The arrogance, the blindness of humanity - a species of beings who acted like children and yet thought themselves kings, thought themselves gods, a species smart enough to have built weapons so powerful and cruel they could only be justifiably used against their makers, and a species foolish enough to have given anyone control of them. A species that deserved the price they paid. But then it fades, as it had all those years ago, leaving nothing but shame and regret, and the knowledge that however arrogant and impulsive the rest of humanity used to be, he is far, far worse. A man who, for a brief moment, though it had been long enough to push a button, thought himself god of gods looks upon a city he burned to nothing, on a sky he corrupted and poisoned, on a world he ground into dust, and he knows nothing but remorse. A man who thought himself king of kings looks upon his works, and he despairs. A man, and nothing more, stands in the desert, and he is so alone.