Meaning, clean drinking water is not merely scarce. It is nearly nonexistent.
So I turn west and press onward toward the coast.
As I walk, I try to prepare myself for what I might find, but nothing in my imaginings accounts for what awaits me there—devastation shaped by both nature and the violence of men.
The ocean has claimed what the war did not. It has carved new boundaries into the land, pushing inland in some regions while retreating from others. Where maps once showed thriving cities, I encountered jagged shorelines and broken foundations swallowed by churning blue-green water. Entire neighborhoods tilt at impossible angles, buildings leaning like exhausted giants, and most are half-submerged structures groaning as waves batter their exterior walls. Many streets vanish beneath the tide as if the world still exists somewhere below in its darkest depths.
An Atlantis of sorts—if myths were real and this were not The End of Days.
I remain along the western coast longer than I intend, grounded by something I cannot easily name.
The air is clearer here. The ash that blankets the rest of the world is thinner, carried out across the open sea. The wind carries salt instead of decay, and the warmth of the sun reaches the Earth without resistance. For the first time in many years, I feel something other than the constant weight of ruin pressing against me.
I often find myself watching the horizon where the endless ocean meets the endless sky, fascinated by the steady rise and fall of the sun and the moon. They climb. They descend. Day follows night, and night yields to day, as it always has—indifferent to the devastation wrought on the world. The rhythm comforts me in ways I struggle to explain to myself.
Maybe it’s a reflection of my hope that with time, humanity will mimic this rise and fall. That all is not completely lost. And in that thought, I rediscovered something I had nearly surrendered.
Faith.
So I stay. I make excuses to stretch time.
I train and salvage what I can during the daylight hours, read and study when it turns dark, and contemplate where to go next. My search for the Horsemen continues, but here, survival is less like a struggle and more like waiting for the world to change.
Change in due time reveals itself in the smallest of ways.
One evening, while resting atop a pile of boulders set back from the crashing waves, something I have done countless times after wearing myself out from training to fight my future adversaries, I noticed something unexpected among the rocks and fractured concrete near the shoreline.
I spy it first out of the corner of my eye and almost dismiss it as a figment of my imagination.
A flicker of green.
A single shoot forcing its way through a fracture in the stone.
Small. Fragile. Only a bud of something, yet alive.
I move closer at once and kneel beside it, careful, reverent, uncertain whether to touch it, as though even the brush of my fingers might cause it to vanish. The small leaves tremble in the ocean breeze, stubborn in their existence.
It is the first living thing I have seen grow from the earth in years.
The sight fills me with a quiet wonder I cannot name.
Death surrounds me, yet here, in one tiny bud, life persists.
I return to it daily, watching the fragile shoots grow and strengthen until, at last, it blooms into a single flower, delicate yet defiant, its leaves stirring gently in the wind. Red. Pink. A beautiful blend of the two colors, with small stems of pollen, and it’s more beautiful than I have proper words for.
I give it a name. Odessa. A flower of remembrance. A new life replacing one of the ones lost.
And for the second time since beginning this journey, something else stirs within me.
Not merely hope now. But resolve.
A burning desire to witness the world restored. To see color in varying shades return, ash and grey replaced, little by little, as God’s creations reclaim their place in this world.
Seeking out the Horsemen is no longer my only purpose as I travel east. I become a scavenger, a gatherer of what remains. I collect anything of use—records, electronics, books, weapons, seeds, printed news. Stores of drinkable water above all else. Each item is a piece of a world that once was, and I preserve what I can.
For a long time, I leave the electronic devices where I find them. I distrust them deeply, since my studies revealed that power, machines, and the unchecked ambitions of man played no small part in the world’s downfall. They were instruments of progress once, but also of destruction. I see little reason to place faith in the very things that helped unmake the world.
But necessity has a way of reshaping conviction.
