001 The City That Never Wakes

The wind was thin up here, carrying only silence. No voices, no sirens, no distant hum of life—just the quiet sigh of air moving through empty spaces.

He stood at the edge of the rooftop, looking down at the city wrapped in fog. The buildings stretched endlessly into the haze, their outlines softened, blurred, as if they were dissolving into nothing. No lights flickered behind the windows. No movement broke the stillness of the streets below. It felt like the whole world was holding its breath, caught between night and day, between existence and fading away.

The sky was pale, the color of untouched paper, and the sun—if it could even be called that—was nothing more than a dull smudge behind the clouds. It wasn’t rising. It was just… there. Hanging low, casting no warmth, no real light. Time stretched, thin and weightless, as if it had forgotten how to move forward.

He closed his eyes for a moment, listening to nothing. The city was asleep, but not in a way that promised waking. It had the silence of something abandoned, something long forgotten.

Maybe it had always been like this.

Maybe he had always been here…