She can see it from the rise, a ruin on a crumbling riverbank. Volk was born here, back when it was lush and busy. She barely remembers those days, snippets of its glory only in dreams and fuzzy memories.

The city is a husk now, a few towers still standing proud against the sky and the gleam of the university across the Elbe all that remains intact. The castles and state buildings and churches gloriously shining in old pictures barely remain. It has taken twenty years, but she is here. Here, where the nightmares originate and penetrate her headspace.

Dresden.

The name is a curse, those in Berlin and Leipzig and the countryside are afraid to even think about it, much less utter its name. They're probably afraid that acknowledging it in any way will give it power, like an old angry god. Looking at it after hearing the sirens wail for herself a few days prior from Leipzig, the last spit of civilization in the area, she can understand the fear and paranoia that permeate the minds of mortals.

She has listened to the stories and read the reports of events that transpired here, kept meticulously by those in Berlin. No one lives here, not anymore. The crater created by the rogue warhead that decimated the entire population is visible from her position, the devastation from it fanning in all directions and telling the story better than any oral or written history. She balances out her arsenal across her body, changes the filter on her mask, and begins her way into the valley.

The trek from her vantage toward the mass tomb below is slow and calculated. Her guides have long since split ways from her, afraid of how the city will react to their presence. The crumbling walls of what used to be suburbs have scribbled and painted warnings in a multitude of colors and mediums about what to expect.

Warnings about the voices, the visions.
Warnings that don't make sense now, but she is sure will make sense later.

They end not too far into the city, denoting an invisible barrier where the world outside of it simply ceases to exist. A bubble where no sound penetrates, startling when she realizes she can't hear the dosimeter at her waist clicking incessantly as it has since she entered the outskirts. The silence is oppressive, a pressure on her inner ears that incites tinnitus and roots a familiar paranoia in her head. It pushes in on her and she can almost see the ribbed walls of the tunnels she grew up knowing. Feels the familiar anxiety of being enclosed, trapped.

Given all she has heard and read of Dresden and its condition, is it playing off her fears? Something to subdue her, maybe, make her weak or more susceptible.

Susceptible to what…

She uses that hyper-vigilance of hers, acquired over her long stint in the Russian State Library, to concentrate on something other than the claustrophobic weight starting to push in from the unnatural stillness. Though she holds her faithful Tikhar at the ready and scans every avenue and every side street and every alleyway, she notes with further apprehension that there is nothing. Not even vermin mutants scurrying for cover from an intruder in their territory. That is worrisome, the thought that not even something as common as Lurkers and rats have taken residence here causing her lips to draw thin.

She looks down the crumbling road she has been following, unable to see any other living thing. The only thing left among the unsettling waves of decaying asphalt are the bodies of unfortunate Stalkers who have come before her. It seems Dresden has not yet had her fill of blood.

The toe of one of her boots nudges an arm and she kneels beside the body it's attached to, inspecting it for a cause of death. From one angle, it looks like this one simply keeled over in the middle of the street, their equipment rusting and neglected. Certainly not killed by another opportunistic human being and without any sign of animal attack she can see.

She pulls the body toward her, repositioning it to find the cause of death, and falters as soon as the front comes into view. The clothing and protective suit have been burned and melted in patterns vaguely resembling human hands, the skin beneath charred to the point it smears blackened grease over her gloved fingers.

She leaves it and rises again quickly, looking around slowly once more and straining every sense she can into trying to read the city. Once more, all she is met with is uneasy silence. Her metaphoric hackles raise as she steps over the dead Stalker and continues on, her hands gripping the pneumatic rifle a little bit tighter to calm her creeping nerves.

She is careful to check her entire field of vision, certain that something must live here. Something humanoid, something that apparently likes fire. She walks a little bit faster down the road, aiming for what constitutes as downtown. Usually the heart of any city, she is almost sure that she will find something there, waiting for her.

After all, though Volk remembers little of it, Dresden flows in her veins like her lifeblood. It has been calling to her and others like her, she is sure of that now.

Nothing manifests, save for an eerie feeling of eyes watching. Not from one location, but from everywhere. She looks all around her to prove that there is no one and nothing there. At least not in a tangible form. It's likely the city itself is watching her progress, and the thought unsettles her a little more.

A flash stops her as she comes to a broken intersection, poles knocked askew adding to the surreality of the scene that comes and goes. So brief, and yet so provocative. She can still see the image burned quickly into her eyes, hear the murmur of the sudden onslaught of sound, smell the tang of life on the air. It's gone the next instant. Though she was sure it was there a second ago, she is also aware that it wasn't there at all.

A memory, maybe. A replay of something that might have been there once, but isn't anymore.

The history that lies buried in the city is revived by the prospect of one of its own among it. A facade flickering into life, perhaps as a welcome. Maybe a threat. So early in the journey makes it hard to say just yet.

She walks passed the intersection, slowly making her way deeper into the city. A change makes her pause, scuffling to a stop in the middle of the street. It's subtle, and it takes a moment for her to pinpoint what it is. There is a faint breeze swirling over the ground, centered on her lower legs and tugging the looser portions of her pant legs.

It isn't so much that the wind is blowing that makes her increasingly unsettled. Wind is nothing new, even to an irradiated world. There is an ebb and pull to this one, however, not unlike something is breathing. She ignores the fight-or-flight that ignites in her chest, causing her own breath to flutter behind the respirator. It's a learned reflex to ignore such an instinct, probably a stupid one. But every instance she has ignored it saved her rather than been her end, so a small measure of stupidity is a good thing, she reasons.

The world shifts again. The vision is a little longer than the first flash, enough she can read the small rectangular plates on the cars zooming passed her, ignoring the bumps and dips in asphalt that has been liquefied and hardened in waves. They stay long enough for the feeling of their wakes to overtake her body, a shiver of pressure changes; to hear the rumble of their engines and the creak of their shocks; to smell the acrid exhaust pouring from them. The buildings around them shimmer, an illusion of towering structures in their glory days, ghostly silhouettes of people walking the sidewalks as though nothing changed.

But things have changed, and the memory is incomplete.

The glass in the car and building windows is a bit too dark, hiding figures and shapes from view. The features on faces and bodies of citizens going about their days are blurred and indistinct. There is something there, something that might have given the figures identity long ago, but it is muddled and destroyed now. These people are all Dresden, she knows. These are no longer real, they are only recollections to be learned from.

It drifts away again, rolling from behind her and leaving only ruin. A reminder that the city had life once, or maybe a warning that it still does on some level of existence. The latter is more frightening to her. A dead city, she can handle, but one that refuses as a whole to stay dead is a terrifying prospect. It makes it unpredictable.

She tries to argue the point that she is used to unpredictability. She conquered the unconquerable in Moscow, the Russian State Library, and more importantly, found a way to predict the supposedly unpredictable inhabitants inside. That is a feat in and of itself and of that accomplishment, she is proud. But an animal or one person is a much different idea of unpredictable than an entire city. One consciousness is not so much a hurdle against the collective of hundreds of thousands of identities all playing at once.

Dresden is just that type of unpredictable that scares her rather than makes her crave the challenge. Even if it seems calm and welcoming now, the underlying predatory nature she keeps seeing poke through its facade tells her that this is a beast with its eyes -hundreds of thousands of pairs of eyes- watching her every move. She is far out of her league here, left hoping that her birthright keeps her safe long enough to see this through.

The embankments built along the riverside are crumbling with age, falling into the dark caustic depths of the Elbe and in some places taking the road with it as well. Entire chunks of land have disappeared into the churning cauldron of the river that slices the city in two, and even through the filter of the mask, she can smell it as she comes to it, avoiding the raw edges of earth as much as possible. With no support, her weight could be enough to send her falling in with chunks of road and wall.

Bending carefully over the edge where the wall is most stable, the water below is thick and foamy. A sludge more than a liquid colored dark green beneath an oily black. It looks almost still at first glances, but if she stares at it long enough, the ribbons of color in it are clearly flowing.

She pointedly ignores the yawning crater across the river from her, the source of death and destruction, though she notices her Geiger clicking again through the muddled haze hanging over the city's interim. A warning there is little safety here. A ripple catches her attention around the center of the Elbe, a raised series of humps rising from the depths to distract her from the abyss on the other side. At least there is something still alive here…

She knows she probably should feel something for the city, she should feel a tug at her heartstrings for seeing her native home like this. But truth be told, she feels nothing.

Was it too long ago that she can't remember it? She was four years young and in Moscow when the world came to its end, ushered into the depths of the metro system there instead of living here to apparently be blown to pieces or melted or to die barely a year later in excruciating pain. She remembers so little of Dresden, save snippets in dreams and in the faces of the night terrors that have gripped her as long as she can remember. She simply can't dredge anything up for the doomed city she is greeted with.

She takes a step back in time to hear a mechanical sound issue from a pole behind her. It stutters at first like someone clearing their throat before whirring to life. An unmistakable cry from the melted metal amplifiers at the top of it, warbled and wobbling but still a sound that will forever haunt her nightmares. The wail of an emergency siren is hard to forget, no matter how long ago you heard it in full practice. Drills can never prepare someone for an actual emergency, and for her, she will always see the flood of panicked people and the tall buildings of Moscow framed by the blinding light of missile trails.

That is all Volk can see now, even though she stands in the dead city of Dresden, with the entire city flickering around her with unspoken histories in time with the network of sirens crying around her. They echo off the crumbled walls and sticky waters of the river, reverberate against the supports of the defunct bridges. Around and around and around the sound goes, around and around and around the memories fly, like someone has turned on a projector and is clicking repeatedly through the slides at a pace too rapid to read what's on each one, a patchwork of everything trying to occupy one space at once, and it drowns out even her rememberings of the end of the world.

Firestorms and mourning and rebuilding and life and firestorms and rebuilding and mourning and life. Over and over again, she has to close her eyes against it, pulling her hands from the Tikhar to rest against her head to block it out. There is a wild cacophony of sight and sound, assailing her so fast that it blocks out and overwhelms the attempts to keep up with any of her other senses.

She hunkers down as though making herself smaller might save her from the onslaught, hearing as the siren begins to wind down. Hearing as the sounds of the city's memories start to discern themselves to fit their places in time better. Hearing as the last replay settles on the firestorm that first leveled the city to the ground, long before she was born.

The shrieking jolts her from her poor attempt to block the world out and the sight that meets her is one she knows she won't forget. The drone of airplane engines, the crack of explosions. Shouting and screaming and crying, the flickering shadows of people running for cover either in buildings still standing or futilely trying to find a shelter.

It lingers longer than the other visions, but it has good reason to. Such an event would leave a scar on a city. Despite her indifference to this place, the experience leaves a sort of ache in her chest.

It takes a moment after the city settles back to normal for her to realize the sobbing still persists. Changing her filter out takes all of a second before she turns around with a shuffle of her boots on the ebbed asphalt, a clack of her equipment punctuating the movement.

Hunkered in the doorway of a building not far from her is a silhouette. Something faint and barely recognizable against the backdrop of the space behind it. Some part of her brain tries to tell her that it's a human shape, grasping for something familiar in an unfamiliar landscape such as this. The rest of it tells her that it's wrong. She's not sure how, simply that it is.

Cautiously, she makes her way toward it, leaving the crumbling bank of the Elbe and paying especial mind to the empty doors and windows of the ruins still standing. If this thing lives here, there could be more of them. She doesn't like surprises much in uneasy territory, especially cities like this, and works to avoid them while still maintaining full visual of the thing in the door ahead. So far, so good…

As soon as she comes close enough to it, it stops crying and looks up at her like a startled child caught doing something wrong. The motion stops her as well, met with an elongated head and stick-like body, a pair of bright white circles where eyes should be taking up most of its face. It's vaguely humanoid, though completely colored an unremarkable charcoal grey, save the eyes. No distinguishable features, just a stick figure like those drawn by children across concrete walls. It doesn't feel inherently malevolent, but she still doesn't know what to make of it and she grips the Tikhar and tenses just in case. She's encountered nothing like this, in Moscow or even in her journey here.

She tries talking to it, but before she can croak out any words, it turns and darts into the yawning abyss of the doorway it sits in. Probably its nest.

Volk doesn't follow it. Following something you don't know is stupid, and there is only a margin of stupidity she allows herself to experience and use to her advantage. Although it feels friendly enough, if scared, she knows nothing about this thing. For all she knows, it could use this tactic to lure prey into a hive of its brethren and any overly-trusting Stalker is torn apart.

However, self-preservation is not the same as curiosity, and she can't help but bend slightly to look into the building. She can barely make out the humanoid bounding up a flight of broken stairs a short ways in. The walls seem unnaturally black, a loud shuffle of movement reaching her ears as pinpricks of white light appear across them facing toward her.

No. Those are not lights, and the realization of it causes her to move away slowly and turn to leave, feeling her hackles raise instinctively toward the presence of possibly hundreds of the creatures all knowing she is there. Though their collective intent is unknown, she doesn't want to stick around to find out.

The impression of being watched grows almost tenfold after she discovers the hive and careful glances into other buildings proves that the one she found is not the only one. Curious white orbs appear from doors and windows, offering vortexes of them into cloudy depths beyond ruined walls. These things are everywhere, she concludes. While they seem to be harmless and more fascinated by her presence now, that wonderment could turn into something more sinister.

A glance over her shoulder as she walks down the center of the riverside roads eases her fear of being followed or hunted by them; despite the eyes peering at her, they seem reticent to leave their hovels and the streets remain clear of them. She doesn't have to fear these things it seems, numerous as they are, but it occurs to her that they might be a prey species. And where there is prey, there are usually predators. What big nasty thing is waiting for her? Her grip tightens on her pneumatic rifle and her awareness sharpens just a bit more. She can only hope she catches it before it catches her.

She passes one bridge, missing its center supports and therefore an entire section of it to the stew-y waters of the river. The base foundations of the missing columns stick out like eerie sentinels, memorials to a monumental effort that stood the test of time for centuries. A second bridge further down the road is in much the same condition as the first, entire sections washed away while other supports poke like spires from the mire, parts of the rugged path on top crumbling away as she walks steadily passed it.

The city has been quiet since the siren, she notes as she approaches a third bridge, scrambling up the embankment to the road leading to it to get a better look at it. This one is mostly intact, enough someone with sure feet could navigate it across the river fairly easily. The wind whistles over the pavement, still ebbing like breath. It seems to tug more fervently at her now, pulling her toward the bridge. Or maybe that's her paranoia talking, it's hard to tell here.

Something feels off about the bridge the more she looks at it and she feeds into the flight of the reaction this time to turn around and move away from it. As soon as she turns her back on it, the city reacts. A whoosh of air is pulled around from behind her and blown back in the direction of the bridge. It's accompanied by the hellish blare of what can only be every functional siren within city limits firing at once, a continuous single note that deafens her and throws her off balance, knocked off her feet by the wind. She rolls awkwardly across the broken road toward the bridge a few times, a tangle of flailing limbs and equipment, her hands trying to find purchase in the cracks beneath her amid the confusion, when it stops abruptly.

Her ears are ringing, an odd sensation in a place where foreign noise is already dampened. Her head is rattled, staying on the ground long enough to regain her bearings before pushing herself to stand. She stumbles once before finally rising upright, looking toward the bridge again. The blast has pushed her closer to it than she thought it did, almost onto it. The toes of her boots barely touch the edge of the threshold. This was a statement, a demand, an order.

Dresden wants her to go to the bridge.

Volk furrows her brow and draws her lips thin behind the respirator as she imagines what is waiting there. Is it on the other side of the river? Will the bridge collapse underfoot halfway across and let her be swallowed by the soupy river below?

"Maybe there's a troll." she mutters to herself, cutting the returned silence like a dull knife.

Her voice sounds different, like she's speaking through a heavy blanket. But the audible joke helps ease some of the tension of the unknown ahead. She takes a deep breath and lets it give her the courage to take a step onto the bridge.

Reality shifts as soon as she puts her foot down, a flickering return to the passive visions that greeted her, a modern world before the warhead hit. Even though she knows it's not real and can't hurt her, she still moves out of the way of a truck barreling down the road toward her. The facade is so solid, she swears she feels the rush of air as it passes her harmlessly and the rumble in the road below, breathing in the caustic exhaust even through the mask.

She reminds herself these are just ghosts, no matter how real they appear to be. Still, she steels herself against the onslaught of oncoming traffic in this dream, feeling something of a shiver she can't quite describe every time one passes through her. If it weren't that she can still feel the unstable true bridge beneath her, she would move to the side or middle to lessen the discomfort of staring fake death in the face.

Placing every foot carefully to test the way the ground shifts is slow, but she is able to avoid pits and soft spots hidden by the memory. This is the longest she has experienced one; even the firestorm didn't last this long. It gives her a chance to stop at one point to look around and admire the city in its glory days.

It does more than just show her what it used to be. It awakens a nostalgia from the glittering towers of the city center to the cold mountain water of the Elbe, dark and cunning in its apparent calmness. There is something here, in this moment, that manages to pull at some long-lost memory of her own, a flash of watching the river zoom away, leaving one bank behind to pull at the opposite.

A child's laughter, echoing as though far away, a woman talking in sweet melodic tones and the smooth deeper ones of a man, both familiar to her. Nothing said is coherent but the skyline and knowing the whole world was out there…

The cold indifference melts slowly away to be replaced with an aching longing trying to bubble from her chest upward. The horror stories of the city swallowing and devouring blood for sport cannot change the feeling that this hellscape of a city is still ingrained in her bones and is in part the reason for her very existence.

It cannot change the fact that standing here, ignoring the replay of traffic and the busyness of people, she is home.
She is meant to be here.

"Ah. You have returned to me."

It takes a moment for her to translate the words spoken to her. She has spent so long with Russians speaking Russian that her native German doesn't immediately click. The voice is also incredibly strange, the sound of many voices overlapping and merging and layered. But it isn't just human voices she is hearing. The syllables and annunciations are made up by all manner of just noise, albeit giving it an overall monotonous buzz. The voices in the layers made up of the memory of sounds of a bustling living city. The cars zooming passed, the low chatter of people on the streets, the lapping waves of the Elbe against the embankment walls and bridge supports below.

She turns slowly to view the newcomer and is greeted with a sight as strange as the voice it uses. Existing at the center of the bridge at halfway across is the shape of a human. Not a solid being, but more like someone cut out the shape of a generic human being from the fabric of space-time itself. In the frame of its silhouette is the world opposite the memory that envelopes this pocket of space Volk stands in, the real world of crumbling structures and clicking dosimeters.

There is something else about a quarter of the way up the bridge from the other side, something clearly quadrupedal, large, and stocky in build. Any distinguishing features are hidden by the writhing curtain of white-hot electricity that covers it head to toe to tail. Its hulking form stomping up the road methodically is menacing at best.

"Do not mind The Collider, Blood of My Blood. It is only here to guide you." the human silhouette tells her, though it doesn't move in any definitive expressions she can read. The voice isn't helping read its mood, either. "Welcome home."


A/N: A thing that's been batting around in my head for a while, a 'What If...' scenario. There's more, but rather than barf a text wall, I'm letting people request it.