Prologue

Dusk was approaching over the ruined landscape of what had once been called the city of sin. Long shadows made their dance across the open expansion of the Nevada desert, caught in the hot-hued colors of the approaching night. The sun began to bed down at the edge of the horizon, igniting the whispers of clouds in the air with fiery, gradient light. These lights reflected in the amber eyes of one man who stood tall upon the husk of what had been a high rising pyramid on the Las Vegas strip. These eyes had held witness to apocalypse and omnicide, redemption and rapture. Placid could not describe the stare they made across the open plains of sand and decayed humanity.

No, not placid, apathetic suited that gaze more appropriately, for in the law of irony he had been charged once to protect against such dissolution. But those days were lifetimes past. Now, now there was no charge or task to be done. This man’s destiny had been played out. Now was a time that the world no longer needed his kind, saviors, for there was no one left to save. Now was a time that the world no longer quivered, for there was no one left to fear his name. Dmitri, Son of the Earth Mother, destroyer of the same.

His lungs filled with the cooling air, giving the delight of such a simple pleasantry. From atop the perch, on a hollowed shell of what had been one of the most distinct hotels of the city, he could see all of the lands that were now called his domain. The ‘black-pyramid,’ seen on Vegas postcards and highlights of the city’s once held splendor, was now the throne to a king of nothing.

Nevertheless, from this former den of gambling, the man ruled over these lands as survivor of the catastrophe that wracked the world and razed civilization. As this self-proclaimed ruler turned from the panorama he carefully laid down his rifle with a mother’s touch. Fingers wrapped in tattered rags ran along the weapons railing as he came to sit against a partially collapsed wall.

The roof of the pyramid had long been flattened and destroyed, with it the brilliant spotlight that used to shine over the night sky of the city was a distant memory. His back against rebar and concrete, the night inching its way across the desert he closed his amber eyes and thought on things long past. Memories that, until now, had made Dmitri who he was.

But, after living decades longer than any one man should, his psyche did not stand up to the tests of time as well as his body had. The memories that reflected before him seemed distant, as though they were someone else’s. Was this a sign of his ebbing humanity? Or were they just false segments of a life he’d never truly lived, and simply conjured from the mind’s coping with mental trauma?

Neither could be said for certain, both conclusions seeming equally plausible. What was known for certain was that these memories, sooth or false, kept insanity at bay in these forlorn days; even if they could not be considered sane events