The Breathing City was barely a living thing.
It grunted and hissed, all shifting earth and growing tremors beneath your feet. But the irony of its name was just as concrete as the absence of its soul.
I stepped into that emptiness, allowed myself to be swallowed by the dark. I searched for the life within the doom, peeking through cracks and ruins, brushing the dust off my sleeves. It felt as though the City was hoping to make you rot along with it.
I found him standing in his usual place; right in the middle of all the wailing, the screeching, the falling of this realm. He painted a beautifully sorrowful picture, so I stood back to admire him for a moment.
His face was a blank canvas of swirling shadow, his umbrella lifted high as it always was. It stood out against the gray sky like a smudge of strikingly black ink that he held in a steady grip, right above a cello case. I'd noticed it never rained in the Breathing City. His persistence to continue using that umbrella both annoyed and intrigued me.
"I've never seen you play," I said, drawing closer and nodding towards the cello case.
"I don't know how to."
Confusion washed over me.
"And yet you cherish it so?"
"Do I have to be the one to claim the gift of its music to know it deserves to be cherished?"
I went quiet, irritated by the embarrassment that followed after most of his defensive responses.
"You're from beyond the darkness," he said, and he probably noticed my perplexity because he added, "explains the glow."
I stared down at my hands and hummed, as if to finally acknowledge the faint, golden light that settled over my skin like a warm blanket made of mist.
"I'm not here to stay."
He shrugged. "You always come back. What good is leaving at this point?"
I was unsure. He made me unsure.
But I couldn't be trapped here. I couldn't be a dying creature's lungs. Those came in pairs. I'd grown comfortable in solitude. It was a state of life I'd learned to accept would last. For always.
As I turned to go, I heard him call out to me.
"You're afraid. Of me. Of the city."
"I am unbound," I retorted. "And my fear is not fit for this place."
I left the city empty handed and in bitter victory. I'd lied to him, much like he'd lied to me. For it was the sound of his music that had led me there. It was the cello that he kept so closely guarded that had sealed the city's horrid fate.
Little by little, melody by cursed melody, he'd been destroying his home, chasing after dreams that he'd now thrown aside with no remorse.