Note: The inspiration poem at the beginning is in the public domain, and thus not against ff.n's rules to post.

After the battle, many new ghosts cry, The solitary old man murmurs in his grief. Ragged low cloud thins the light of dusk, Thick snow dances back and forth in the wind. The wine ladle's cast aside, the cup not green, The stove still looks as if a fiery red. To many places, communications are broken, I sit, but cannot read my books for grief. -Du Fu

The world was broken.

There was no other word for it. All the battles that the Empire had fought, all the work he had done, every enemy they'd turned against had been wrong. The real threat had been nearby the entire time.

Not only was it broken, but it was dying. Plants withered, streams ran poisonous water, regular animals were devoured by monsters if they'd otherwise managed to survive, and all the humans on the small island he lived on now were slowly dying one by one. Soon, he and Celes would be the only ones left. Perhaps in the entire world; there was no way for them to send or receive messages from the island and thus no way of being sure that anyone survived outside of it.

Aside from Kefka, of course. No one could doubt that he still lived.

Somedays he thought he would join them, but he knew he couldn't. As long as Celes slept with no one else to watch over her, he had to live. He couldn't leave her to slowly starve to death, or, possibly worse, wake up all alone on the small, barren, island.

Night was falling, so started a fire in the stove and sat down beside it with a tattered book he'd pulled from the rubble that had been on the island when he'd woken up there. He told himself that it was something to do other than stare at her, as if that would hurry her awakening, but he never seemed to get very far in it. Even now he was distracted from it yet again by the sound of someone screaming somewhere out of the night, screams that he was sure were caused by the death or the dying of yet another of the few people left on the island.

He bowed his head over the book, staring at the pages but no longer making out the words, listened to the faint sound of Celes' breathing, and prayed in the hopes that some deity still existed who had not been turned against humanity that he would never have cause to be the one crying out to the night.