She walks through the ashes, her fingers drifting like lost leaves in the wind.  How, she wonders, could the city have fallen?  How could its beautiful towers topple and smash to the ground like felled trees?  How could a boy, not a foreign, angry, army, but a single boy, wreak such chaos and destruction?  She threads her way through debris and broken buildings like a visitor might thread their way through gravestones, looking for the resting place of a love one.  Her finger twirls along a broken stone wall, dusting with exhaustion and sorrow.  She stops, her fragile bones trembling weakly in the sadness that plagues her like a disease.  Her raven black hair shifts and catches the ashes that flutter in the air as she kneels in the center of the city.  Her paper-thin skin presses into heaving, pain-wracked dust, her fingers dig and scratch though the charred until she find the scorched aching earth beneath.  She doesn’t cry.  She can’t.  Not anymore.  Her pain cuts too deep to be expressed in salt water.  She doesn’t know how many days or weeks have passed.  Her mind no longer fathoms time, only loss.  Her head bows, and her hair falls around her pale face as if trying to shield her from the pained, broken whispers of buildings that surround her, as though it can protect her from being consumed by the angry ghost of what was once the greatest city in the world.