How many years had passed? If someone asked him, Voltaire couldn’t give them an answer. The collapse had been brick by brick, one cough or choked breath at a time, for far longer than he should have been alive. Far longer than anyone should be alive, at least aside from one he hoped might still be. Maybe if one of those pokes and prods at how stiff he was had come through, even just a crackle, any single sign that she was still out there. But the signal had been cut off, exactly when he couldn’t tell.

It had been after the haze started to become visible, no longer the thinnest and nearly invisible haze that only made the sick sicker. It came after the trials became more of a show than a sign of order, after the illusion of still being a power was beginning to fray at the edges. When his impartiality had left him turning away from the rest of them as they began to point fingers and blame those who weren’t dragged down into this hell yet.

It had pooled low to the ground by then, starting to thicken enough as it reached knee height for most. Yet nobody noticed, not when generations had passed in what felt like a blink of his eye. Somehow, they still spoke of him, even as he pulled himself further and further away from the farce of justice and poked at the edges of the world, trying to find a way through. If he could just find somewhere to wait it out, it would have to pass. If it was a calamity like other worlds had experienced, there wouldn’t have been generations of people living in this. Though with each generation, the population grew weaker and more susceptible to the haze. He long stopped focusing on what felt like the beat of a butterfly’s wings in comparison to his own existence.

When it became too much for him, when each death seemed inevitable and final just as his judgments had been, he found a way into the tunnels. They’d long been forgotten about, out of use since those who had traversed them had been gone for…. Centuries? It was fuzzy still, but as he broke through one of the rusted iron doors and made his way deep below the earth, he could breathe without that feeling of tightness in his lungs. The air was stale and musty, but it was free of that haze. With a depressing thought, he wondered if there had been anyone who remembered what it was like before the haze had come.

The cold bricks that surrounded him in the tunnel left him numb to the feelings of his body, all muted from where the warmth had been continuously sapped away, yet he remained here and was still breathing against all odds. Playing memories of conversations in his mind, trying to hold onto them and the legal codes, as everything else muddled together with the unsteady flow of time. The details on things weren’t as clear, sharp corners were rounded, or solid shapes became soft. Colors muted even as he tried to grasp them while fighting against the relentless flow of time.

The vague memory of him telling her of the first meteor shower, how even if he knew it was the result of something having gone wrong on a nearby planet or asteroid, he knew the beauty of it might be appreciated to someone who was alone. How her voice had sounded, even now, was a hazy memory to him. Curling his arms tightly around him as he shivered in the damp tunnel, his good eye caught what looked like the thinnest wisp of that haze finally breaking through. Even now, he could barely remember what it was like to be warm, to not have that permanent feeling of existing in a damp space. What the sun looked and felt like, what the wind sounded like as it blew leaves from trees that long have gone extinct. If he stayed, how long would he remain in this haze? Could he wait it out even if it hurt?

He had to move, had to withdraw more, because it was so thick now that it left him struggling to breathe if he let it breach his hideaway. Even if he wasn’t sure his betrothed was out there, he didn’t want to meet his own end before finding a way to get off world just long enough to confirm things. Whatever had kept him alive had given him more years than any other had lived before, which meant he could be patient and wait it out. But did that mean all this time before now had been a mercy, and the rest of the wait would have him choking through time until something inevitably changed?

Then the earshattering sound of stone on stone and the crumbling of earth. His whole world shifted as bricks poured down with that haze. With it came something old and familiar, a crackle of something in the air he could only remember within dreams. The haze didn’t encroach any further, only small tendrils reaching out to touch him but never making contact. It withdrew back up where the debris had come from. Such a change had him looking forward and pulling his sash to wrap over his nose and mouth as a barrier against it.

It wasn’t easy; all the years without having the space to stand or move hadn’t helped. He’d been alive but not living, and as he breached the surface, he saw something in the haze. That feeling of static in the air, like a storm might approach had his hair starting to stand on end. He felt it on his fingertips, running down his spine as he stood fully upright for the first time in so long he couldn’t even fathom putting a number on the amount of time. It felt like he was on the edge of something, like the moment before lightning might strike. A breath caught in his throat as he waited for what might happen, what would shift, and what new inevitably would occur.

A figure seemed to stand before him, something taking shape in the haze, and then as it reached for him to caress his face, he was gone.


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