The quality of the paper became better with time, as did Valentine's handwriting:

I can see children playing in the market—they aren't there. Wives gossiping in tea houses—when have I last drank properly brewed tea?

I had intended to spend the rest of my days in penance, as long as the headaches lasted. By some mercy, they eased after nearly two decades. I intend to walk this world and see what man's hubris has wrought. Perhaps mankind still lives out there, somewhere. I suspect, with the size of the desolation in my own home, that it's a misplaced hope.

There was never another person, just the two dogs that refused to shift to women any time he was near. Not that he could do a thing with them or like he cared, but it was something they didn't want, so he never complained.

What was the point of complaining to ghosts?

And so those years passed as the rupture in their world healed but never brought things back to life. What was the point of going on when nothing changed?

Even so, a bored and lonely man must pass the time. He took to reading some of the older texts that had been sealed away. He found a sense of longing in revisiting what his people thought of Arden and their world. What he once thought, himself.

None of it spoke to him. He didn't expect it to.

Until one day, it did:

But you, Oh Man,
Who are you to die?
Alone at the end of the age,
A hand on the head of Sorrow
Another on Suffering,
Refusing to seek the world's end
Where no one stands alone.
Come, lead your people.
Bring them home
To wage war anew.

The first time Valentine read it, his hands shook. He remembered reciting it as a small child. It was a song his people sang before demonic death came for mankind.

It should have been popular while they fought the monsters, if the people had been strong enough. A rallying cry taunting the dying while everyone still struggled to meet each battle head-on? No one could stomach that text. It was deemed heretical and sealed away, never recited over the dead as it once was. The knight was there the day it was entombed.

And it had been there, waiting for Valentine to find it and remember it. It was for him. It wasn't the whole of Arden's faithful, but him that was being derided. It demanded he stand up and fight, to take control of his very existence, and to do something about all the losses.

For the lost.

He would have brought everyone back if he could. He hated that the rapture looked like human souls being plucked like chickens before being made into a stew.

For a whole year, he despised the Goddess, for allowing this ancient text to taunt him. He wasn't the one who stole every bit of life from the land. That was all on her, not him.

Valentine tried to pull this depths from his mind, like extracting a tooth. It continued to gnaw at him until the first cyclone in years built off the coast of the city. It felt like his Goddess was waiting to see if he would answer her. The urge to visit the cliffside as the storm raged was the first truly desperate thought he had held in all his years of survival.

So he went and stood on the highest peak, past where the wall of water would break during such fierce storms. Everything to the east would flood under this monstrous assault.

The whole unsettling sensation forced him to his knees, long before the winds drove the storm inland. He cried out in rage at the Goddess who wouldn't let him leave this world.

Not that the words tumbled past his mouth. He had been silent for too long. The wind was too loud to carry one man's voice, anyway.

Anger fueled what would have been worship in any other context: bowing down to the dust, wind tearing at his hair and clothes. His frustration ate at him, mimicking the storm that boiled over the ocean and land, riding waves to meet and break on the shores of King's Port.

A small portion of city wall fell to the west, shaking the ground beneath him, when the first wave hit.

The old knight slowly stood against the winds on that rocky cliff, contemplating jumping to the rapidly submerging outcroppings of rocks before firmly dismissing it as a waste. The wind would slam him into the cliffside, not the beach. Instead, he stared out to sea and watched a storm boil out of the ocean until it moved inland enough to show him the baleful eye. It exhilarated and soothed him, breaking off his rage. He was finally in a mood to hear Arden and see if she had anything to say.

It was silence.

He stumbled back inside the barracks to drink himself senseless on a full belly during the second half of the storm. Both he and the world were at peace before he went to read it again.

Valentine stared at the scroll for 3 days before the realization struck him. This old text was saying that this wasn't the first ending in mankind's life. But he knew of no other rapture. Rolling his shoulders, he thought long and hard about what he was having his nose shoved in, like he was a dog that shit on the floorboards.

Merely thinking about them caused Whisper and Vesper to look back at him, from their normal sleeping spots by the fire. Sorrow...Suffering...

Of all things to make a connection over: dogs.

There had been an ending.

It had been the end of mankind being an animal to be punished for not knowing what to do with its excrement. When mankind learned how to be civil. No, he needed to go back to where Arden gave humanity the mind to rise up and build a life that was worth fighting for.

Perhaps there were animals out there, still, and humans would come from bears or donkeys this time.

More importantly, perhaps Arden knew how to bring back everyone she had taken. He was less sure of those who had died without her.

It's the sheet of his finest-made paper that he tacked to the door after this epiphany. Heavily coated in wax and repeated in a clay tablet by the hearth, the words he etched therein spoke more life than these dead memories and time tables on scraps.

To anyone who finds this letter—if there are minds to read it—the city was once called King's Port. I am Valentine Auger, a knight and former lay priest of Arden. I head east, towards the face of destruction. Head north if you want to live.

...

Valentine, now approaching 60, packed only what he could carry. He didn't fear meeting monsters. It took 2 decades of his life for the demons to push them to Armageddon. He spent even more time watching the invasive bastards die off. He didn't expect to fend off a fight like his last desperate battle. So it was a spare set of clothes, simple bedding, waxed kindling, a pot, basic dry goods and the latest bit of good writing paper he managed to keep from the bugs.

The world had finally reached the first demonic species his people had ever fought. Those crowned locusts that were as long as a man's forearm dropped like a plague all last summer, yet none of their eggs hatched this year. Not that he expected them to hatch. After all, this world was as deadly to them as they were to it.

But it did mean that there were no fresh grains in the wild fields. Half the new growth was worried to a nub before spring hit.

Perhaps the portals that brought them here had finally sealed themselves shut. It was hard to imagine this world at peace, and no man could appreciate it but himself, but that was his lot in life.

Still, his pack was small for a man setting off to see the world.

No horse had survived, and his two hounds couldn't carry a thing even if they chose to go with him. That is, if they could. Ghosts were often attached to places. If they came along, it would ease his heart, for the world was lonely. If not? Sir Auger had an obligation to the living. Whether now or in the future.

Instead of plate mail, he chose chain-mail and leather like an archer, something he had to reshape for his massive build. But it wasn't by much. Archers had to be strong. That and Valentine was old.

Leaders on the field were often indomitable. While not the Grand Cross of their holy order, he had once been a Commander 1st Class. He could remember setting the speed at which they ran towards their enemies. With this power came a strength that couldn't be tamed or bound.

Until Loric discovered the Holy Order's wings in battle.

Valentine found his wings and could dive from the sky. More often, he flitted through space, phasing through enemies to slash them from behind. That ability outlasted the wings, as he fought alone. Well, the rare time he fought. He no longer believed in saving the world.

But even that was too taxing in a fight. Less flourishes, more swift kills the rare time he still fought demons. It was safer to make a life of hiding from everything.

And here he was, giving up on hiding. Valentine hoped it was the right choice. How was he supposed to lead the next ending? The Goddess was silent.

The trek across the city was mournful, a dragging of steps with the tinkling of woven chains. He was loathe to leave his home. The soft click of his boots would wear out with time. This pair was still fresh against the dusty cobbles. The dogs made no sound in their death-fueled prance in front of him. They eagerly sniffed around, like there was something new to be seen.

But even the echoes faded as they moved into what was once a clearing with a cobbled road. 20 years—only 20 years—and small trees were forcing their way under the paving stones of the great highway. This area of the nation had been too forested to prevent the loss of the road. Hopefully, it would get better once they made it through to the plains. Forests hugged the coast, not the interior of Asheradama.

The edge of the north, here, was small shrubs and gnarled things. It was not full of vigor before man fell, but shattered, like they, too, had been through the war. It made the former knight pick up his pace and stride through the uneven landscape. Anything to get away from fresh reminders of death. The older ones, he was cauterized to.

A few miles on, past the old farmsteads that fed this great city, the start of more recent growth began to pick up. These were straighter trees and shrubs, with a few intermediates that dwarfed their brethren. Fruit trees from old orchards were swallowed in these wilds. The knight picked his fill of apples and pears as he made his way deeper, placing them in his hip's sack.

The dogs silently barked at him, further up and further in. This didn't need a sound to be understood. Indeed, the tall pines of the Blackwood forest sprang up around them in time to kill any sprouted saplings that would easily tear up the road.

Valentine wound up strolling in peace in the midday heat. He munched on fruit in the ever-dimming gloom of a silent forest. Not even the death of all things made the trees any whit cooler than necessary.

He hadn't tasted a shake pear in a while. The tang of blood from biting through thick skin cut his gums. The faint hint of his own mouth wasn't enough to stop him from enjoying the sweetness of one of his childhood pleasures.

Back then, the birds sang, and lovers could be found in haystacks. That gave him an education that no child needed but couldn't escape. He didn't like the base nature of lovers at the age of 10. When his father had offered to have him turned over to the monastery for an extra portion of food, the boy had quit his meandering ways. Valentine gladly went to gain an education that scarred his mind and body far more than bodies entwined.

After all, they became entwined and entombed on one battlefield, without lust. There were no more lovers. The stain of abstinence showed him how lonely the world could be.

He should have told that boy to love someone. No, not at 10, but he wasn't a child by the time death greeted him. He'd have something to grieve beyond emptiness if he had a wife and children. His father was long dead by the time of the battle, and his mother? Who knew her face?

Who knew his face?

He didn't remember the woods being this dark before. He gave up a silent prayer as he chanted the words to light the darkness.

The wings were long gone, leaving him with little to see with. He couldn't call on the power he wielded to survive the lonely years to be a light in the dark. Flitting through space would just place him inside a tree.

A small spark answered his call. It was a fluttering of flames like a butterfly that illuminated his path, sputtering on a cold night. This prayer had once been a pillar of light, but why would a defeated Godess have that anymore?

Or was this a successful Goddess?

The fact that it worked at all came from his erratic faith.

Honestly? That faith was only rekindled by the fact that the dogs still walked as his companions.