By the time the sky turned gold, she had reached the city.
They called it Shal-Vatra now—“hollow heart” in Old Canine tongue—but long before, it had been a place of the Humans. The name Humans once used still clung to rusted road signs, half-swallowed by ivy and sun-bleached time. No one alive could speak it. Not even the frogs.
She walked with a soft gait, barefoot on crumbled asphalt, her lithe figure casting a thin shadow over the bones of the old world. Her skin, warm and exposed, bore the gentle chill of approaching dusk. Wisps of hair—thin, white, wind-worn—crowned her head and trailed behind like silk caught on a breeze. She wore no clothing; she needed none. The air was her cloak, and the twilight, her jewelry.
Her name was Jinjing-Yu.
Born of the Anthem Pack, she had wandered far from the riverlands. She was not a scout, nor a trader. Just a soul drawn to silence, to memory, to places where stories whispered through walls long forgotten.
Ahead, the city’s towers rose—skeletal monuments of another age. Shattered, leaning, yet stubbornly tall. Like sentinels waiting for orders that would never come.
She approached a wrecked Human bus, half-sunk in soil and wrapped in vine. Moss clung to its wheels. Wildflowers spilled from its windows. She stepped close, tracing a paw along its side. It was still warm from the sun.
This was how she preferred to meet the past: quietly, without ceremony.
Others had stronger opinions. The forest tribes of the Elk-kin saw the Humans as destroyers, architects of their own erasure. The Frogs called them the fire-walkers—bright, short-lived, gone. Even some canines spoke of Humans with awe or resentment.
Jinjing-Yu felt neither. Only a kind of ache.
They had tried. That was what mattered.
When the sickness came, it stole them gently. No flames. No bombs. Just breath… turned wrong. And when they fell, something inside the world awakened.
The mammals changed. Wolves stood upright. Bears spoke. Dogs like her gained memory, history, vision. The Frogs, stranger still, became clever swamp-spirits with long fingers and sharp wit. Mudskippers rose from the shallows, built wooden nests and sang at dawn—but they were rare now. Few left the lakes. Few cared to.
The birds never changed.
Jinjing-Yu looked up. A crow perched on a window frame above, watching her. Its head tilted. No fear. No understanding. Just stillness.
The streets narrowed and deepened as she walked farther into the city’s center. Roots split the pavement. A broken statue—a Human, tall and noble once—lay face-down in a garden of reeds. She passed it with a nod.
Soon she came to the place the elders spoke of: The Opening—two towers, long since separated by age and time, with a vast gap between them. From that gap, the sun poured through.
It bathed the city in fire and gold.
She stepped into the light. Dust floated like embers around her. She could feel the weight of it all—the buildings, the bones, the breath of a species that had wanted more than the world could give.
She sat.
And there, in the silence, she spoke.
“You rose fast. You fell quietly. You left behind more than you knew. We are not you. But we walk the ground you shaped. And we listen.”
She touched her paw to the stone beneath her. Not reverently. Not mournfully. Just honestly.
She would leave in the morning. Perhaps to the Frog-lands, or the grass colonies out west. She might never return to Shal-Vatra.
But tonight, she would sleep here—in the shadow of towers, beneath a watching sky.
And dream not of what was lost, but of what had learned to endure.
