He crawled out from under the road and out of the ditch.  Water held his pants against his legs, and his shirt was damp as well with sweat.  The heavy sun cast a warm glow on the stones in the ditch, and on the city trees planted along the brick sidewalks.  The buildings in this housing edition were mostly one story, quaint but finely crafted.  It wasn’t a city of skyscrapers, so now, after the Cataclysm, it wasn’t nearly as full of rubble as Thyrion.

What it did have, however, what all cities shared in common in this newly-ordered world, were broken windows.  Boarded windows to keep thieves away.  Grass that needed to be mowed.  And in the middle of the rampant grass:  plots of recently overturned earth—makeshift graves, decorated with landscaping stones or wooden planks or, in some cases, a teddy bear or a toy truck.

Falcon Point was fortunate in that it benefited from an old aqueduct system that brought water into the city without the use of any magic-powered pumps.  The people had water.  In the two weeks since the Cataclysm, wide-scale starvation had not yet set in, and disease had not yet gained too strong a foothold.  These people’s biggest threat was from each other.  And they knew it.  Some of the buildings had been torn to pieces for salvage, and some of that salvage material was used to build walls around backyard gardens and palisades around their front yards.  A number of front doors had crude drawings of swords carved or burned into them, a sign that the house was protected by the most advanced weapon in the world.

Jaysynn wandered around the town through what remained of the day, seeing the sites.  When he was out of the suburbs and into the industrial quarter, he took to the rooftops.  He wasn’t in his Watchman’s garb—he was wearing cotton work clothes from top to bottom—and he wasn’t doing the Watchman’s work—he had no backpack and no bread or medicine.  Instead he was acting as a spy, watching the city and its people—the people Vac said he wanted to save from Thyrion.

When the first traces of darkness came, more people took to the streets, like rats coming out of hiding.  They scurried about, some of them perhaps going to check on friends or relatives, and some of them going to steal from strangers.

He watched them for a time.  He moved about to see the different types of people coming from different types of homes.  As he traced the city, he spotted another spy, a man crouched behind a garbage can listening in on a conversation.  Jaysynn scurried along the flat roof of a three-story apartment building so he could hear what this darkly dressed man was learning.  Soon he spotted an old but healthy man talking to a boy, twelve or thirteen years old.

“Your father shouldn’t send you off in the night like this,” said the old man.

“He said he had to stay home and keep watch over the place—and keep my sister safe.”

“You ought to just move in with me,” said the man.  “Then we’d all be safer.  But listen now.  You hurry on home.  Keep that loaf of bread safe.  And when you come back for more in a couple days, bring your dad and sister with you, you hear.”

“I’ll tell them,” said the boy.

“Good.  I love you.”

“I love you too, Grandpa.”

The boy looked over his shoulders and then hurried off, half-running down the narrow street.  When he passed the trash can, the other man stood up and chased after him.  The boy saw him and tried to run harder, but it was no use.  The thief was an athletic young man, maybe 18 or 20 years old, and soon he grabbed the boy by the shoulder and dragged him down into the pavement.  As Jaysynn dashed across the rooftops and down to the street, the man pulled at the boy’s shirt to get at the bread that he’d hidden underneath it.

With the bread in hand, the young man took to his feet and started running—but he’d picked a bad direction.  He took a few quick steps in the direction Jaysynn was coming from, but when he saw another young man bolting after him, he turned around and started running the other way.

He was fast, but, having abandoned his escape route, his sense of direction was lost.  He ran without knowing where to go, glancing down alleys as he passed.

As Jaysynn drew nearer, one stride at a time, he started looking for a move to tackle the thief without seriously injuring him—without sending the full speed of his spring downward into the roadbed.

But before it came to blows, the thief held up his hands (a loaf of bread in one of them) and slowed his pace.  “Ok.  Take it,” he said.  “It’s yours”

“I don’t want it for myself,” Jaysynn said.  “You stole that bread.”

“I know,” the young man said.  He dropped down to his knees and was nearly in tears.  “I’m sorry.  I didn’t want to.  I’m a good kid.  I always been good.  But I got to eat and my family got to eat.”

Jaysynn glared down at the youth, “That little boy’s family has to eat, too.”

The young man looked up at Jaysynn.  His eyes were watering and his lips quivered.  He tried to speak, but couldn’t find words.  In his heart, Jaysynn wished he had the resources of a prince or an emperor.  He wished he had bread of his own to give, but he had nothing.  He hadn’t eaten anything himself all day, and he felt the temptation to take the loaf for himself.

“I’m going to take the bread back to the boy,” said Jaysynn.  “But, listen, there’s got to be some way of getting through this.  Not just for you, but for everyone.”

The thief handed over the bread.  “Not everyone’s gonna make it,” he said.

“Look, I had a friend,” Jaysynn said.  “Someone who was getting into a lot of trouble, doing some illegal things, to try to feed her family.  So I found her a job at a bakery.”

“There’s no jobs no more, mister.”

“I know,” said Jaysynn.  “But there’s got to be more for a young man to do than just steal.  Forget about getting a job for right now and think about how you can make work for yourself.  Times have changed, right?  So you adapt.”

“Work’s good for nothing,” said the young man.  “Money ain’t no good.  Some people are buying it up like crazy.  That’s what my old man was doing, and that’s why we got no food.”

“Then forget about money,” Jaysynn said.  “Try to think of a way that you can make something people need for trade, for barter.  Maybe there’s some way you can make food.”

“Out of what?” said the young man, “this?”  He scraped a handful of pulverized rock dust from the road bed and sprinkled it back onto the road, then looked up at Jaysynn with dark eyes.  He went on, “You told me to adapt.  Well I already adapted.  I steal bread from little kids now.  That’s the only honest work there is these days.”

“You’ve got to find a way to do better,” Jaysynn said.  With those stern words, he walked away, hoping he would be able to find the boy again.  If not, he would return the bread to the old man.  But as he walked, he felt a tug on his heart for the young thief.  So, without another word, he turned back around and tore the bread in half, giving the smaller portion to the thief.

The thief also said nothing in return, but bowed humbly, grateful to receive a part of the stolen meal.

Jaysynn realized that this was no solution, and that there was no solution to such a problem in such a world as this.  His heart swelled with sorrow, but when there is someone to blame, sorrow ferments into anger.  Jaysynn could feel the bubbles rising as his blood turned to venom.  He did not know why the world was in ruin, or what conspiracy had driven that young man to steal a loaf of bread.  But he knew the name of one guilty man, and with every clenching of his heart, his body filled with heroic hatred of that name.

He made his way down the street and knocked on a door.  He was greeted suspiciously by the old man and the little boy.

“I was able to recover some of the bread,” he said.  “The thief made off with the rest.”

“That scoundrel!” said the old man.  “What kind of monster would steal from a child?”

Jaysynn shook his head.  “Don’t blame him,” he said.  “The man responsible for this is Xander Dracon.”

“The Thyrian?”

“That’s right,” Jaysynn nodded.  “But try to stay strong.  If I can do anything to set things right, I will.”

“Well, then bless you, sir,” said the old man, shaking his head.  “And who are you, anyway?”

“General Dracon is… one of my unruly subjects.”

A smirk crept across Jaysynn’s face.  He nodded at the man, who was dumbfounded by his response, and walked away.

The old man leaned out the door and asked, “How’s that?”

But Jaysynn walked on and soon bounded up the side of the building, where he disappeared into the night sky.

*     *    *

Jaysynn slept on a flat rooftop, a place where no one in the city could see him, and no one could reach him without a bucket lift or a sixty-foot ladder.  He spent the bulk of the next day sitting on that roof, just him and the sky and the sun, fasting for lack of food, and meditating on the next moves, the next subtle turnings of Lomara.

Last night he had called Dracon one of his unruly subjects.  It felt impossible.  It felt like the words of a child who said he could throw a stone a hundred miles.  But it also felt good.  Though it was a flight of fantasy, Jaysynn also felt it was somehow true.  It was true that the world had been crippled, and that Dracon was a guilty man, and that Jaysynn had inherited the throne of a nation that still lived.

But the old customs of the Kyzer Dynasty were dead.  The structures that ran the empire had crumbled.  The old rules were out, and if Jaysynn had a role to play, he knew that it would be in a different world.

All this talk of Thyr, too—the firstborn of Elthor—that was a broken myth.  All the talk about Elthor, too.  The dream of Elthor was broken with the breaking of the wells.  So Jaysynn told his thoughts to the sun, his only companion.  Not that he believed the sun was a new god.  If there had been a dog on the roof, he might have talked to the dog.  If a child, then he would have talked to the child.

But all he had was the heat that poured down on the asphalt, the vital source of every wood and meadow, the limitless empire of light.

Whatever I do, he said in his heart, I won’t leave Kyrie in the dungeon.  I don’t know what tomorrow holds, what I will do then, or who I will be.  But tonight I will free her.

The sun, perhaps out of respect for Jaysynn’s will and compassion, did not waver, but went on with its everlasting burning.