A visit back home

(Afterlife depiction) (apocalypse?) (Self-blame) (Poly)

Poly hasn’t drank anything in weeks, their skin is faded and dry, easily peirces by the smallest of pricks. Star walks the streets of zs childhood home as they desperately scribble into a notebook, documenting the ruin.

Believe it or not, this used to be a city. A thriving one, even. The docks used to be bustling, with ships entering and exiting every minute of the day. It was a popular hangout spot for children, watching the ships go by, pestering whatever adult would talk to them, loitering at nearby candy shops.

Star meandered down a narrow side alley, emerging on the other end to what once was a hub of life and activity. The colorful tarps were shredded and the rotting boardwalk creaked under zs feet. Caramel apples and popsicle sticks littered the ground, hastily discarded in the flee for safety. Poly picked up a candy wrapper and dumped it in a nearby trash bin. Not that it mattered much anymore.

The buildings used to be towering, glistening things. Monuments to mankind’s achievements. The god who lived here wasn’t just a totem god, he was a god of life and death, and they dabbled in construction as well. Buildings in every style and shape scattered the city, some were homey, small, made of red bricks and broken shingles. The council had a professional looking building, columns and floors of white marble.The totem god was most importantly, a god of the ocean.

Paint from a mural on the side of a shop flaked off in large slabs, a poster for a school play who's date has long since past still, somehow, taped up. The mural showed a smiling, happy family, which once held the words "Take your family on the ultimate trip to the boardwalk!" but the faded paint had erased some of the letters, now reading "your fa ult". The bricks behind blackened by the endless burning smoke. But if they squinted and looked straight down the narrow boardwalk, star could almost see the city in its former glory. Z didn’t though.

It hurt to see what once was, what they destroyed.

Everything now is either cracked and parched from the beating sun, or damp and flooded, the only life left being cockroaches and worms. Lifeless yet decaying. A world once thriving, erased.