I own nothing.

Before gods tread the earth and great nations rose from the dust, a boy was born into a ruined world.

It was thirty years after the Great Burning, thirty years after they destroyed the books, the weapons, the technology that had made it so, thirty years after the moon was ripped from the sky, thirty years after the remains of humanity started to be born… different. The days and nights were colder than what had come before, and passed by with greater speed than they had before the world was Burned. The already-poisoned earth was choked with ash that made what few plants had survived wilt, and sickened the people who had survived the Burning. The seas lost their tides and were still. Life withered, and the gray skies showed nothing in the way of hope.

Many of the children born after the Great Burning were possessed of uncanny power, but the boy born thirty years after the world changed forever was especially prodigious. Wherever he went, life seemed to spring up behind him. He brought green to a barren, nearly lifeless world.

The boy became a man in this ruined world, a warrior of great renown, a savior of great love, the one who made the ruined earth bloom again. He, the Sage, gathered many under his name, took a wife, had children. Slowly, ever so slowly, but with the surety that came with eyes that could see the future shining out of something so small as a grain of sand, he did his best to heal the world that had been Burned.

And then, it came.

Sixty years after the Great Burning, a creature born of malice and despair rose from the ashes of that still-ruined world. The seas boiled. The lands burned and were cleft into a thousand pieces. All that the Sage had accomplished, the creature destroyed. The world was again plunged in darkness and fear of a great beast whose monstrous form blotted out the sun itself.

The Sage did battle with the beast for seven days and seven nights. Their battle caused the broken lands to take on new shapes and forms. The people were scattered all about the world, and wherever the beast set its foot, the earth beneath turned to barren waste.

But the beast could not prevail.

The Sage, with his great power, took the life force of the beast and absorbed it into himself. With the vast body of the beast he fashioned a new moon and sent it into the sky to give the night light and the oceans back their tides.

He awoke the next morning to feel the sun on his face.

The world was again Burned.

The world was once more changed forever.

But it was still there.

So Ichiro smiled.