The Armor in the Void
The stars were not the same anymore.
They glimmered coldly above the still figure, a silhouette of metal and silence adrift at the edge of time. Armor dulled by centuries clung to a body that no longer breathed, no longer bled — if it ever did. Its surface was etched with forgotten constellations, patterns carved by dust, memory, and regret.
No voice stirred in this place. No wind carried whispers.
Only silence, ancient and vast, pressing in from all sides.
The figure stood unmoving, gazing upward through a visor pitted with age. Beneath the helmet, there might have been a face once, but the stars had stolen it. Beneath the armor, there might have been a name, but the silence had swallowed it.
There had once been meaning — a reason for the vigil.
But reason fades.
And the stars… the stars did not care.
Fragments of a Lost World
There were memories.
Not whole, not sharp — just drifting shapes behind closed eyes, barely clinging to the edges of thought. A warm wind through tall grass. The scent of earth after rain. The hush of a candlelit hall. Footsteps on worn stone. Something like a voice, soft and distant, saying come home.
But there was no home now.
The place these memories belonged to was gone. Not destroyed — not in the way things break. It had unraveled. As if time itself had grown tired of remembering it. Forests turned to ash without fire. Towers fell without sound. Names crumbled, even in thought.
And still, the figure had remained.
There had been others once — not many, but enough. Some stood beside, others behind. They had watched together, sworn to something greater than crowns or conquest. And one by one, they had vanished. Some in light. Others in shadow. None returned.
Now, only this one endured.
Not out of strength. Not out of hope.
But because the stars had not told them to stop.
The Oath That Remains
It had been a vow.
Spoken once beneath stars that no longer burned, in a tongue the void had since forgotten. Not to a king, not to a god — but to something older. A promise carved into the marrow, heavier than any blade, stronger than any wall.
To watch.
To stand until the end.
The end had come. The world had fallen. The silence had stretched beyond time. And still, the vow held. Not through will, not anymore — will had withered ages ago. Only the words remained, echoing faintly in whatever echo of a soul still lingered beneath the steel.
There were no more threats to guard against.
No gates to hold.
No lives to protect.
But the oath did not care.
And so the figure stayed — not alive, not truly — a sentinel of ruins that had long since turned to dust, beneath stars that offered no witness.
Perhaps that was the cruelest part: not the solitude, but the faith that nothing would come to end it.
The Sky of Graves
The stars watched, but they did not see.
Each one shimmered like a distant memory, a grave marker in the black. Some flickered, others pulsed, as though straining to speak through the silence. But none of them had a voice. Not anymore.
They had once meant something — those lights.
Guides. Omens. Warnings. Prayers.
Now, they were remnants. Cold fires left burning in a sky no one looked up to. The figure gazed at them not with wonder, but with recognition. As if each light was a name lost. A place buried. A face faded from thought.
And in some forgotten corner of whatever remained inside the armor, grief stirred — faint and slow, like frost creeping over stone.
Not for the self.
But for all that had been.
All that would never return.
The stars had once been a promise.
Now they were only the proof that everything ends.
Letting Go
There came no sound.
No signal. No voice through the dark. Only a stillness deeper than silence, a kind of final breath that did not pass through lungs, but through time itself.
And something shifted.
Not in the stars — they remained as cold and distant as ever — but within. A loosening. A weight, not lifted, but released. The threads of the vow, long frayed and brittle, came undone one by one. No thunder. No collapse. Only absence, settling like dust in a forgotten room.
The figure did not fall.
It simply stopped.
The gaze, once fixed to the stars, lowered.
The armor, once rigid with purpose, softened — not from movement, but from stillness unburdened.
There had never been a breaking point. Only this moment, quiet and slow, where the will to remain simply dissolved.
And so it ended, not with defiance, not with sorrow, but with surrender.
Not to the void.
Not to time.
But to forgetting.
