The cleaners had won that day. Raiders scattered like roaches in the light. But the memory of him didn't scatter with them.

The dump sprawled before you now, a graveyard of the forgotten. Rusted carriages, mountains of rotting fabric, the skeletal remains of machines long past use. The wind carried the smell of decay and metal, familiar as your own breath.

You'd come back to the spot. The clearing where the fight had happened. Churned dirt still bore the scars of combat—divots from thrown debris, a deep gouge where something heavy had been dragged.

And there, sitting on a rusted washing machine like it was a throne, was him.