Pillar of Fire

A lone figure rises from a freshly opened grave, his body a trembling mix of ancient dust and an impossible new awareness. He can hear the wind roar, see the sky blaze with the dying colors of an endless autumn, and feel the heat of forests reduced to ash. Yet he cannot breathe, taste, or smell, and a deep, almost primal hatred drives every strained step he takes across the silent, ruined landscape.

As he surveys the last cemetery on Earth, the man—William Lantry—realizes he may be the only corpse left in a world that has somehow erased death itself. Beyond the hill, a city of bright lights and soaring rockets pulses with life, while the ground beneath his feet still bears the scars of a long‑forgotten catastrophe. He is caught between a past that refuses to let go and a future that refuses to acknowledge his very existence, forcing him to ask what it means to be alive when everyone else has become something else entirely.