reflection gazed despairingly back. He had changed. His blonde hair, grown long, obscuring the angled face and staid expression. His eyes bloodshot due to lack of sleep.
His muscles ached with months of travelling through vast deserts and festering marshes, over enshrouded mountains and crystal oceans. And now he was here, his life shattered around him like the glass of the window.
He watched, and waited. There was no hurry now, the sound of those final words, echoing and falling in his head. He sank to the ground, overcome by painful memories stepping out of the darkness to occupy and shadow his mind. He spun round alerted by an abrupt noise.
Instinctively and with one fluid movement drew his Katana facing the oncoming threat with unwavering focus.
Two black eyes gazed at him from the undergrowth; a head emerged, followed by a sleek body and a short tail. A deer bounded out of its location, eyes wide with fear, rushing towards the mountains that dominated the horizon, their lofty pinnacles piercing the dark mists that circled them.
The land that spread from the base of the mountains was cracked and distorted like all the life had been sucked from every living thing that had once resided there.
The black earth was peppered with rotting carcasses of all sizes; whole herds of animals had perished trying urgently to migrate to the next source of clean water only to unearth the truth that the water had disappeared, trickling into the ground long ago it had left nothing but a crater in the earth which had once been a water supply for both man and beast.
Something flashed just out of visual focus, he turned wearily convinced it was just a trick of the light, but again, a flicker of light danced across an object half buried under a small pile of earth. He picked up what looked like a small star made from unspoiled sapphire, blue as any sea and bright as any fire this was attached to a silver chain. He gasped as he touched the cool metal. He gazed longingly at the cerulean gem bound by its magnificent beauty drawing him in to a world were nothing mattered. He wound the chain around his wrist, a new fire now burned inside his heart.
He took one last look at his home then turned on his heel and disappeared into the dimming forest, growing darker with every hour passing.
