The world had been silent for years. Once teeming with life, it now lay in ruins—cities reduced to skeletal remains, roads cracked and overgrown, and the air thick with the eerie hush of a planet abandoned. Zach had long since given up on the idea of finding another survivor. He wandered the empty streets, his only company the wind whistling through shattered buildings and the distant calls of creatures reclaiming what humanity had lost. It was a fate he had come to accept—until he saw her. A small figure darting between the rubble, too quick to be a scavenging animal, too deliberate to be a hallucination.
Zach approached cautiously, his heart pounding. A child. An actual, living child. She couldn't have been older than eight, her hair wild and tangled, her clothes patched together from whatever she had scavenged. She stood her ground, eyes wary but filled with something he hadn't seen in years—defiance. He raised his hands to show he meant no harm. "You're real," he muttered, more to himself than to her. The girl—Anne, as she later revealed—stared at him like he was the ghost in this forsaken world, and perhaps, in some ways, he was.
The weight of his purpose crashed down on him. He had been given a mission, one whispered by the dying remnants of civilization before they had vanished: rebuild. But how? The world was not fit for children, let alone for one man to guide an entire species back from the brink. And yet, against all odds, Anne had survived. The question was—had she survived alone? Were there more like her out there? Or was she truly the last, leaving him with an impossible responsibility?
As the sun dipped below the ruins, casting long shadows across their broken world, Zach made a choice. He wouldn't let her face this alone. Whatever came next, they would face it together. Humanity had one last flicker of hope, and he would do everything in his power to keep that flame from dying.
Recommended Comments
There are no comments to display.
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a Dreamer in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now