The Ruins
By late afternoon, the ancient city was beginning to bleed its people.
Seventeen-year-old Victoria Whitmore noticed the shift of the day first—not by the sky, but by the pull of the crowds toward the gates.
Families drifted past, clutching exhausted children and lukewarm water bottles. Beneath the crumbling stone archways, guides barked out final headcounts before herding their groups back toward the tour buses. Nearby, vendors were already folding heavy canvas awnings, shoving unsold fruit into wooden crates with tired, practiced urgency.
Her father checked his watch. “We should head back.”
Her sister, Mia, looked up from her camera lens, her lower lip pushing out. “We’ve barely seen anything.”
“We’ve been here since morning, Mia.”
“Exactly.”
Their mother laughed softly, adjusting her scarf against the cooling air. “Your father has been waiting for someone else to suggest leaving for the last hour.”
“I have not.”
“You have.”
Victoria smiled quietly, keeping her pace steady alongside them. She liked watching them bicker—it was familiar, grounded, and safe.
Around them, the ruined city stretched out in shades of weathered gold and dust. Broken walls clawed up through fields of dry, yellowed grass, while half-collapsed buildings stood engulfed by enormous, ancient trees whose roots split the earth like buried veins.
Cobblestone roads disappeared around forgotten courtyards, only to reemerge farther down the hillside, leading nowhere.
It had once been a real city. A living one. People had eaten here, fought here, loved here, and complained about their neighbours here.
Now, tourists came in shifts to photograph what was left before retreating to air-conditioned hotels.
Victoria found it strangely beautiful. She had always preferred places that outlived their people.
Except she kept noticing what wasn't there.No sound of birds.Even tourists' voices seemed to travel only a short distance and then simply stop, as if the air itself refused to carry them further.
At the fork by the great tank, she turned left before Mia said which way to go.
"How did you know that led to the watchtower?" Mia asked, catching up.
"I didn't." She had. Her feet had simply gone, the way feet go down a staircase in the dark, sure of a step that isn't visible. She didn't like how sure they'd been.
She didn't look at the watchtower after that. It stood like a tall sentinel among the ruins. She told herself she was simply tired.
“Come on,” Mia said, snatching her wrist with a light tug.
Victoria let herself be pulled deeper into the ruins, the scent of parched earth and dry moss clinging to her clothes.
The sun sank low, painting the broken towers in deep, bruised crimson. A cool breeze stirred through the canopy—and then, without warning, vanished entirely.
Victoria stopped dead in her tracks.
The city hadn’t grown quiet gradually. The silence was instantaneous, heavy, and absolute.
She strained her ears, listening for any sign of life. There was no faint laughter from the main entrance, no distant rumble of tour buses idling near the gates, and no birds rustling in the branches above. Even the insects seemed to have suffocated in the sudden, suffocating stillness.
Mia didn’t notice the atmosphere shift. She was already several steps ahead, standing beneath a towering archway and peering up at the fading sky. “Look.”
Victoria followed her gaze. A pale, oversized moon was rising over the broken stone, casting long, sharp shadows across the dirt.
“It’s beautiful,” Mia whispered.
“We need to leave,” Victoria said, her voice barely louder than a breath, tight with sudden caution.
Mia turned, her eyebrows raised in mild amusement. “You don’t sound convinced.”
“I’m serious, Mia. Look around. We shouldn’t be here after dark.”
Mia laughed, though the sound felt thin and hollow in the heavy silence. “You’re scared.”
“I’m not.”
“You are! It’s an ancient city, Victoria. Being empty is literally the point.”
“Girls!” Their mother’s voice called out from further down the stone path, breaking the quiet. “Keep up!”
“Coming!” Mia called back, stepping out from beneath the arch and looping an arm through Victoria's arm.
They walked back under the moonlight, which caressed the dead city like a hand smoothing a sleeping face.
Victoria lay awake long after the hotel room had gone quiet.
She could hear her mother's breathing settle into its slow rhythm across the room, her father's with its small familiar catch, Mia's gone soft and even, one hand curled under her cheek.
Through the shutters the moonlight lay across the floor in a single pale bar, and somewhere out in the ruins, very faint, wind moved through the ancient buildings with a sound like a long-drawn breath.
She told herself it was only an unfamiliar bed.
In the morning she would laugh at herself for feeling like this, over ruins, in daylight, with her whole family on breakfast table.
Once, far off, something struck stone, iron on iron, a single note, there and gone. She told herself she had imagined it.
The smell reached her before she understood she was no longer in the room.
Smoke. And under it, roses, crushed by the hundred into garlands.
