The night sky was a fractured mirror.
Gibreel stood on the rooftop, peering into the ink-black void. A thousand stars had vanished. Not in the way stars disappear when they burn out or die; no, this was something more sinister — they were swallowed whole, drawn into a cosmic maelstrom, a force that gnawed at the edges of the universe. His eyes tried to follow, but the emptiness swallowed the heavens faster than he could comprehend.
He could feel it in his bones now, this cosmic hunger.
It was pulling him deeper, like a whirlpool formed at the center of every dying dream.
The flames had died down in the city streets, but the damage had been done. The people of the city had become hollow, not in a physical sense, but spiritually. It wasn't the fires that scared them anymore; it was the silence that followed. They began to feel the absence — an absence of meaning, of purpose, of connection. No one knew who they were anymore.
No one knew why they were still alive.
It was only in the quietest of moments that the realization hit: the city was falling apart from the inside out.
Gibreel ran his fingers through his hair, feeling the strands stick to his wet forehead.
The air was thick with ash, a residue from the burning streets below. He could still taste the smoke in his mouth, the fire that once roared and danced now dampened into nothing but memory.
What is this? he asked himself.
What am I?
He had once been an angel — or at least, that's what they had told him. But now, there was nothing angelic about him. He was a man, lost between realms, torn between desires, caught in a tangled web of impossible choices.
He looked down at his hands. They were scarred, but it was the scars of time, not violence. These were the marks of age, of forgotten promises. He had lived too long in the wrong skin. He was wearing someone else's identity, and the costume was beginning to tear at the seams.
He had to leave.
It was as simple as that.
But even as he thought it, a wave of doubt washed over him. Where would he go? How could he escape the past he had built, the city that had broken him?
The city — this forgotten urban labyrinth — had its own pulse now.
It breathed, it lived, it consumed.
And Gibreel had become part of its toxic rhythm.
---
Saladin had been following Gibreel's descent into madness, but he too was falling — though his descent was quieter, less spectacular. He had long stopped recognizing his own reflection in the mirror, and his heart, though still beating, had started to slow its pace. Time itself seemed to pass in strange, disjointed jumps — a lifetime in a second, a second in a lifetime.
His body was still a battlefield of conflicting memories. At times, he would think of the life he had before, a life full of promise and ordinary things. But then there were moments — fleeting and maddening — when he could feel the weight of something else pressing against him, trying to force him back into the skin of a man he had no recollection of becoming.
He remembered the fire, but only just.
The edges of the memory were blurred, like watercolors bleeding into each other. He had been someone else before — hadn't he? Before the incident, before the long stretch of hospital beds and medication-laden nights. Was he someone entirely new now?
The woman in white had told him to remember, to reclaim himself, but who was he reclaiming?
It was all so fragmented, like pieces of a broken puzzle.
And worse, some pieces didn't even fit anymore.
---
The city moved on.
Or, at least, that's what it appeared to be doing. Life continued in the superficial ways it always had. People walked the streets, head down, averted glances as they hurried from one task to the next, without any real sense of purpose or drive. They had forgotten the purpose of living altogether. The thought of surviving had eclipsed the thought of thriving.
And all the while, Gibreel watched.
He had taken to roaming the streets at night, invisible to all except those who had stopped living, those who had lost their ability to see. These people walked through life like shadows, caught in a never-ending loop of disillusionment.
In those nights, when the city was quiet and the winds had stilled, Gibreel would meet with those who had nothing left to lose. He was no longer a savior. No longer an angel. He was just another soul searching for meaning. The city had stripped them all of their humanity, and they were now like ghosts, wandering between worlds, searching for anything to give them hope.
---
It was in this strange, liminal space that Gibreel finally found what he had been looking for.
He wasn't sure when it happened, but it did. Somewhere between the empty alleyways and the abandoned churches, he found the answer he had been seeking: forgiveness.
It wasn't from the people.
It wasn't from the gods.
It wasn't even from himself.
It was from something deeper, something within the earth itself. A forgotten pulse in the planet's veins, an echo of the world's lost innocence.
But how could he forgive when he had no idea what he had done to deserve it?
---
Meanwhile, Saladin's slow descent had taken another turn.
He had been talking to someone — or maybe it was only a dream — a woman with black eyes who seemed to know everything about him. Her voice was distant, but when she spoke, it was like she was speaking to him from a great distance, but also directly into his soul. It was a whisper only he could hear.
"Do you understand yet?" she asked.
"You are both alive and dead."
And then, in that moment of strange clarity, Saladin understood that the world, the city, and everything in it — was a dream.
Not a dream of sleep, but a dream of creation. A dream that had no end.
But a dream that could, at any moment, shatter into a thousand pieces.
He had been searching for something outside himself. But the truth was far simpler than that. The truth was inside him, inside every choice he had made. The truth was in the quiet moments, the unspoken words, the moments when he let go.
---
And Gibreel?
He stood in the middle of the city that had once been alive with dreams, now a hollow shell. He raised his hands to the sky, his voice trembling as he spoke to the void above.
"I am ready," he said.
But the sky was silent.
---