The wind meets me here.

I stand above a land of rolling green, the breeze carries with it a melody and the sound of howling laughter. The faint smell of a roaring campfire dances past.

I leap, and the air catches me in its embrace. Tugging ever so gently on my glider, the valley below rises to greet me. I follow the melody to an old stable, and wooden planks creak as I make my way past the smiling faces of its many patrons. Just outside a dog barks, and a guitar continues to enchant a gathered crowd.

I’m told I was asleep. One hundred years stretch between my visits to this valley. I watch as sun vines pierce the clouds above, and I wonder how I could have possibly forgotten something so beautiful.

I’m told I failed. Allies perished. “End times.” Calamity hangs aloft these days, you can see it with your own two eyes. They tell me this with heads bowed low.

And yet here I sit, eating a stew comprised of the few edible materials I could scrounge together in my short journey thus far, and I am welcomed by these people with open arms. They surround me with their tales and with their tidings. They offer advice, and they offer supplies. Not a shard of malice rests in the eyes of the stable bearers, nor those stopping for a well-earned rest on journeys of their own. Before the sun has set I am prepared for the road ahead, my bags are filled with many a token of kindness. The last of the day’s light once cast an orange hue upon these strangers, but I now find myself among friends as the moon joins in our festivities.

This does not feel like a world torn asunder.

This does not feel like an apocalypse.

Or perhaps, this is exactly what it should feel like. When all is lost, do those who remain not fortify themselves with the aid of those around them? We look ahead across the fields before us, and we can see it from the ground upon which we sit: The Castle. It splits up through the earth and into the aether like an ever-present colossus, an imposing monolith against the glittering horizon.

And do we not all see a dark shroud moves within its walls? Do we not feel the ways in which it is unnerving, and frightening, and unnatural? Do we not perceive a constant, looming reminder of history’s greatest failure? Of mine?

We do. I do. Yet we laugh. We trade goods, and we drink, and we love.

After a century of torment, somehow, we persevere.

And we do it together.