I’ve walked these silent streets for sixteen long years. I’ve watched the green slowly swallow the grey, how vines climbed over crumbling towers, how roots cracked open old roads until they flowed like rivers after the rain. I’m seventeen now, and for as long as I can remember, I believed I was the period at the end of humanity’s sentence.My memories of the Before are blurry fragments, shards of noise and color. I remember the screaming. Then the silence that followed… a silence so heavy it became its own companion.For years, the world was nothing but me and the ruins. I learned to talk to echoes, to track the wind like a friend, to survive. I thought loneliness was the natural state of things.And then, everything changed.I saw them, four silhouettes standing against the dying sun. Anna. Izuku. Aiko. Tenya. Four strangers breathing the same air I had convinced myself was mine alone. They looked at me with the exact shock twisting my chest, like we were ghosts staring at each other.