Eli was alone with the silence, a silence that had pressed in around him like heavy, wet snow.

Six days of silence.

He didn't speak that entire time, didn't cry, didn't scream. He simply walked, and kept walking as he made his way out of Twisted and into the territory abutted by the uncanny Valley and the lost. Clouds rolled overhead, moving in double time across the sky. Time seemed to pass around him, separate and incongruous with the slow plodding of his feet.

Their original journey had taken them on a wide circle: beginning in the South East from affliction, then south down to the tower, then north to Genua and west to kurshing, only to circle north and then east through the stalk. Twisted lay in the north east of the territory just over the Uncanny valley, leaving him only a few days travel south and slightly west through the uncanny and the lost before he was to reach desolation.

He hugged the curve of the uncanny, seeing only the occasional reminder of the area's true nature as a strange scaly butterfly with a black aura filtered out from the forest, and faces appeared in the clouds above looking down on him as he walked. A cold wind blew down from the northeast, likely from the stalk, though he didn't put a jacket on.

He was too numb to feel the cold.

In the first mile or so out from the University he had heard his name being called in the distance, but he had ignored it as he kept walking actively doing his best to avoid pursuit, as much as his numb mind would allow.

For the first time in his life, he was well and truly alone.

He thought he had been before, but this was different.

He didn't have Wink to keep him solitary company.

Didn't even have his fear to keep him warm.

He did his best to shut out the memories, dancing with his mother while rain roared outside, sitting with his father as he learned how to read, learning to survive under wink's instruction.

All memories, blocked as soon as they appeared.

Long grass brushed against his legs as he walked, and walked, and walked. The sky overhead became a field of stars in bitter blackness as his feet continued to move through the grass. He turned his head to look up, and for the first time in a long time he felt the disarming expansion of the Sheer overhead it seemed to be pulling him in stronger than ever. Eli felt a sudden lurch and staggered onto his knees, feeling as if something had tried to tug him off the ground.

He stared down at his hands and the dirt, afraid to look up at the sky.

Eli closed his eyes curling up there on the ground, hands covering his head wishing that the sky would just leave him be. He stayed there until morning, at which time he rose to his feet and continued to walk, following his own exhausted footsteps and the quiet of his own mind. There was nothing to think about, no theories to come up with, no clues to unravel.

They had all been meaningless.

Besides, It was Peter that had found those anyway.

Eli was a pretender.

A fake.

Eli was nothing,

Nothing.

Nothing.

He crossed into the lost the day after that following his own footsteps in a wide churning circle for most of the day. Everything looked the same, everything seemed the same, and it was difficult for him to tell where he was.

He was lost, it frightened him more than he would have liked to admit. He had never actually been lost in the lost, but he found himself wandering too and fro through the tall grass staring at the same line of hills in all directions trying to position the sun behind the thick layer of clouds which rolled overhead. It was no use and so he sat in the grass staring at his hands as the day grew brighter and then darker around him.

When night came and the sky opened up he cautioned a glance around him, finding a familiar white star beckoning him from the darkness. He took to his feet and followed it, following his feet in the direction it felt he had come from, not sure this would lead him out. He walked most of the night and most of the day following that. His feet and back aching, his body throbbing, his mind empty.

He recognized the desolate by its smell, or rather lack of it.

All around him color seemed to drain from the world and the grass gave way to cracked gray earth stretching on for miles and miles in all directions. That same, familiar lonely wind blew across the plane before him kicking up tiny rocks and dragging them across the expanse. He couldn't' have said if there were clouds in the sky as the world around him always seemed gray anyway. The sea was gray, the rocks were gray, his thoughts were gray.

Stepping into the Desolate.

Well for the first time in a week, Eli felt.... something .

It was a sense of relief so profound he could never have explained it in writing. It was simply what it was, and what it was was glorious.

Like chill after heat.

Sun after rain.

Light after dark.

It was soothing and comforting and quiet after clamor.

It felt like home

All of a sudden the silent darkness in his head didn't feel so bad. The Desolate was here, the desolate would help him forget about everything. The desolate would heal his wounds and keep him comfortable and alone.

The desolate would never hurt him.

Because you couldn't be hurt if there weren't people around to disappoint and betray you. Its expanding monochrome landscape lavished him with empathy, seduced him with silence, and caressed his face with promises.

It could take away his fear.

It could take away his sadness.

As long as he was alright with being alone.

That didn't sound so bad at all? He had been alone for a while, and he had felt alone even when he wasn't.

Overhead, clouds rolled across the sky casting shadows against the expansive ground before him.

His footsteps were silent, and the low and continual wind brushed against his body. He swayed softly to its cadence, a noise that he had heard only a few times before. It sounded like singing, and the more he listened the more it seemed as if it was his own mother singing a distant lullaby to him.

A lullaby luring him further into the vast landscape.

It was only the smallest sense of familiarity, and grasp on his own mind that he did not simply turn and walk off in a new direction. Instead he followed his feet on a familiar path across the open landscape before him. Following the call of the beckoning horizon.

He curled up again under the Sheer that night, holding his head tight, his forehead pressed to the dirt as he heard the raging of the universe above him. As it did, the desolate seemed to fade, and he was again left with his fear and pain, and the memories over the past few days like open wounds festering and unable to close.

Every failure.

Every betrayal.

As soon as dawn came, he took to his feet once more, his body covered in silver dust turning him almost as drab as the rocks and landscape around him.

He turned to look back over his shoulder once, though something about the landscape seemed strange.

He stared at it for a long moment, staring as he tried to figure out what he was seeing, only to realize.... The scene was missing something.

There were no footprints

He looked down at his feet and took a step forward, expecting to leave a mark in the dirt where the sole of his shoe had disturbed the dried and cracked earth, but when he lifted his foot there was nothing.

Almost as if he didn't exist.

He stood there for a long moment, unsure of how to proceed before simply turning and continuing on his way.

What could he do?

Why did it matter if he left footprints or not.

It was halfway through that day when he first smelled the brine of the sea as a gust of wind was kicked up into his face. It was sharp and pungent in the way the sea tended to be in the desolate. Over the sound of the moaning wind over stone, he could now hear the crashing waves of the sea.

It wasn't long before the peak of the tower came into view. A black line in the distance which slowly grew as he drew closer.

A memory flashed in his head.

The boy on the beach, playing in the rocks unaware of what was to happen to him.

He took another few steps and a more recent memory assailed him. He remembered running with Peter over those same stones as the sky before them grew dark and things in the sky began to roil and churn.

He tried to shake that off, willing himself to keep walking.

He could see the tower now, and its presence had cleared his head somewhat.

Another memory broke from its forced containment. Sitting on the floor, legs crossed as Wink sat on the table, instructing him on the finer points of cartography.

Eli didn't look back, afraid of what he would see on the dirt behind him.

Would his footprints still be absent?

He kept walking willing his feet to make noise over the stone, and he thought he could hear them, though very distantly as under a layer of water

Before him the tower grew sharper in his vision, and instead of a simple silhouette, he could see the color and texture of stones along its sides.

His footsteps hurried over the ground as the crashing of the sea grew more insistent. He was jogging now, and with every step his feet grew louder over the stones, his breathing heavier. He was kicking up rocks now, pebbles and bits of dirt being kicked before him, a sure sign that he was still alive, that he was still real.

The tower was just a hundred feet away now, rising up into the clouds over his head. He could see the door from here, small in the blacked white stone of the tower, and.... Gaping black.

The door was open?

He sped up his pace until he was running.

Yes the door was open! His breath caught in his throat, clogged in his larynx. No, not just closed, ripped and hanging off its hinges."

He was at a dead sprint now and the door rushed up to meet him.

The door was, indeed, hanging off one hinge, and blackened scorch marks marred the doorframe and the stone around it. Eli tried not to choke on his own horror as he tore past the open door and raced inside.

Ash.

It floated down from above in gentle flakes trailing through a weak ray of wan light.

The tarp that had once covered the skylight flapped and whipped in shreds and tatters as wind rolled in from the broken windows.

The floor at his feet was black with soot. Books lay defaced and burned in heaps at the base of the bookshelves, and the metal spiral staircase had been all but torn from the brackets on the wall dangling creaking in the wind.

Eli took a step into the room, illuminated by a shaft of light as he stared up at the devastation.

Nothing was left.

The books.

The manuscripts.

The journals.

His memories.

All were gone. He tore across the open room throwing open a cupped to find nothing but cinders.

His mother's Paintings!

It was that that broke him, he staggered away from the wall falling to his knees in the ash which drifted around him like snow, falling onto his hair and onto his clothes already stained with ash.

Who had done this?

Did it matter?

Someone would have needed a map to.....

And then his eyes caught something. A single point of color in a field of monochrome gray. Light filtered down from the ruined ceiling, casting a dim pool of light against the object which rested atop the cinders.

Eli reached out a hand brushing grime from the cover in a silver cascade, and as his eyes read the words that burnished the front of the page, his heart cascaded with the ash.

His mother's atlas.

The one he had dropped as they ran from mirror lake.

The atlas that contained maps of their small world, and a guide leading directly to the tower.

This was all his fault.

He had led them here, to all that remained of his childhood, all that remained of his memories.

All that remained of his mother.

It started with the first tear that traced its slow way down his cheek, cutting through the grime there, and falling onto the floor before him, and then came another, and another, until he was curled over double arms around himself.

He clutched at his clothes, fingernails digging into the grimy cloth, then he leaned forward on his hands and knees immersed in cold ash, his fingernails scraping the cold stone floor. His body sagged forward, his hands dragging through the soot until his fingertips touched something. He pulled back after a moment taking the object as he sat back on his heels turning it over to look at it.

With his sleeve he rubbed the black smudges partially from its surface.

What he found was a bowl. A bowl, which for so long, had sat with two others on the table at the center of this very room, waiting until the day his parents would return.

A product of misguided hope.

He was frozen, staring at it for what felt like an eternity, eyes tracing the polished wood, which glittered from under a layer of destruction, somehow having survived when nothing else had.

And then the leaking dam broke.

Eli turned his head up to the sky and screamed. He screamed until it choked into a sob and then he screamed again. He got to his feet and threw the bowl across the room. Weakened by the fire it shattered against the stone exploding into a shower of pieces.

Eli gripped his hair, tears of rage and hate streaming down his face.

His entire body shook.

He turned and kicked at what remained of the shelves.

They snapped, and all that remained of burned books scattered onto the floor. He turned in the other direction, picked up the remnants of a chair and threw it to shatter against the wall. He screamed, and raged and cried, not a single coherent word passing his lips as his nails scraped against stone and ragged wood until blood mixed with ash.

He kicked pieces of his ruined life into the wall, dragged streaks of gray down his face until, finally he collapsed leaning against the corner of a toppled bookshelf watching quietly as the ash continued to fall from above as wind pushed it off the flapping tarp.

He could barely see anything from behind his glasses now streaked with grime.

His eyes looked outward, catching sight of the gray window of light seeping in from the door as the Desolate spilled into the room creeping along the floor and up the walls in a way it never could before trickling upwards slowly, like how water saturates tissue paper. He felt it creep through the open door, growing its presence around the tower pressing tentative fingers into the cracks along the shelves and books , examining its new property, slow and curious.

He felt it when it touched him, washing over him like a gust of warm wind. He closed his eyes, and then stood slowly, walking through the falling ash to the blackened threshold. His hands brushed over the stained stone and he paused there. Behind him the room felt empty and silent. Before him, the open door beckoned.

He remembered a moment like this, standing in the doorway. Staring out into blissful silence.

Wink was not here to save him this time.

Eli took one, last deep breath, and stepped away from the door, his fingers parting from the cold stone. Stepping out into the desolate and finally giving himself into the dread.

Behind him the ash of the tower was undisturbed

He left no footprints.

He left no memories.