Once again, I stood on my balcony. There was a part of me that felt amused at the familiarity of the location, the sense of belonging that welled up within me as I stepped onto it, looking into the night as I had done hundreds, maybe even a thousand times before. The odd thing was, everything had changed, the entire world was completely different from what it had been when I stood here the last time, I was fundamentally different, and yet, it felt oh-so-familiar.

Though, the biggest upside was that I could now see all the stars in the sky, countless tiny dots of light scattered between a few hanging clouds. Without electricity, without any light pollution, the stars shone brightly once again and it was a magnificent sight. If only the price hadn’t been so high.

Helping Lia up from the frozen ladder I had conjured to let us climb up, I smashed in the already cracked window, easily stepping into my apartment. Here, the familiarity ended immediately, the place was nothing like I remembered it being. It was in ruins, the walls were blackened from fire and even one of the dividing walls between the living room and the kitchen had come down. Rubble was strewn all around the area, even the floor had partially dissolved or burned or something along those lines, it was an utter mess. Nothing of my belongings looked even remotely intact, everything had been consumed by the flames.

I felt Lia approach and she gently placed a hand on my shoulder, offering silent support. It was weird, I had thought I had already discarded any attachment to the live I had before the change, simply because it was necessary to focus on the present and prepare for the future. Surviving in a breaking world, making sure that I had the supplies needed, those concerns had taken over everything, alongside my personal desire to learn and eventually master magic. The Arcane Path had become my life, only now, I realised that my old life had truly burned away. It was gone and would never return and for some reason, the stark reminder I was looking at hit me hard.

Maybe it was that the apartment had been my home, the place I could always return to, and now I was looking at the irrefutable evidence that it was gone. Maybe a part of my mind had clung to the idea that it was still out there, waiting for me. But it simply was not.

Shaking my head, I carefully moved forward, uncertain if the floor was still able to support the added weight. Cracking sounds accompanied my advance, likely from broken glass and other small parts of my old life that I was now trampling underfoot but the floor didn’t falter, nothing indicated I was in danger. At least not physically.

Moving along the wall, past the burned-out shelves where my novel collection used to be, past my television stand, past the wreckage of my old life, I made my way to the hallway. A brief look into the bathroom showed quite a bit of water damage, alongside more broken glass and destruction, but nothing too extreme. The contents of the room were broken but the room itself was intact.

Sadly, the same didn’t hold true for my office. Even before we reached the room, I could see that things were bad. The hallway had a few chunks of concrete lying around, in addition to a few bits of construction metal, bits that I planned to pick up. The metal might be basic steel but it might be possible to use it, either to advance my magic or to have somebody else craft things with it.

“Shit,” I softy cursed, looking into the room that used to be my office. Or what was left of the room. It was almost amusing, one quarter of the room was remarkably intact. Sadly, that quarter was what held mostly my old University supplies, textbooks and quite a bit of professional literature. They hadn’t burned, they were singed and looked somewhat worse for wear but I was quite sure I would be able to read them if I so desired.

The rest of the room was demolished, not just destroyed. The ceiling above, and not just one floor above, had given way, creating a chimney spanning multiple stories, maybe reaching all the way to the ground floor. I wasn’t about to get too close to the gaping hole in the floor, I had no desire to cause some sort of secondary collapse with my heading down a few stories and landing on broken debris. That sounded like an excellent way to get myself killed.

“What was in there?” Lia quietly asked as I considered how to proceed.

“You’ve heard about Road to Purgatory. To reach Mundus, to connect to our Avatars, what we thought of as game characters, we used a Capsule, think high-tech coffin,” I explained, getting an amused snort, maybe because I had told her that already. But I was rambling, so she couldn’t complain too much.

“The Capsule was an amazing piece of technology, or at least I thought it was just technology. Now, with the change, I’m pretty sure it was some sort of divinely created artefact, though I’m not sure created by which deity. I wanted to study it, maybe get some parts of it, trying to see what I can figure out. I doubt I’d be able to actually understand it, but a few bits and pieces? Maybe;” I admitted, knowing that the idea was pretty arrogant. Mortal Hubris at its finest, but given that I had replaced my Hubris with Titanic Ambition, it was amusingly fitting.

“And that capsule is where?” she asked, looking past me into the wrecked office. In lieu of a reply, I simply pointed towards the gaping hole before me, letting out a mirthless chuckle.

“Oh,” Lia just replied, “Want me to take a look?”

“No, not without taking some precautions, no idea how sturdy everything in here is. No need to get into bigger trouble,” I declined, already deciding on a way forward. Conjuration of Ice was such a wonderful ability. Outside, I had used it to create a simple, relatively sturdy, ladder that allowed us to make our way upwards, avoiding compromised structures in the process. Now, I could, with nothing but the wave of my hand, form a large sheet of Ice, using it to distribute whatever weight we put on the floor across a larger surface area. That way, the entire hallway would have to collapse before we fell into the hole. Not perfect but as safe as I could make it. I briefly considered raising a bannister next to the hole but decided against it, that would have just been silly.

Stepping forward, I leaned over to peer into the hole. All the way down, for it went down to the ground floor, the damage widening and making me worry that the entire structure was compromised. My capsule, in whatever form it still remained, was lost, buried under a massive pile of rubble and debris. Maybe we could head down there and get a look at it from ground level, and possibly find some more salvageable metal, but I didn’t have high hopes for anything magical.

“It’s a bust,” I told Lia, before turning away. Looking around, I started to idly move through my apartment, still going slowly to avoid trouble. Behind me, Lia took a brief glance down the hole before coming after me, silently shadowing me.

Luckily, my bedroom was mostly intact. There was some damage, my bedsheets had somehow managed to catch fire without causing serious damage to anything else, so I could salvage a few items. Old photographs, pictures of my family that I had hung on my wall when moving in and never bothered to replace or move. A memory of my parents, a reminder of their presence. Letting out a sigh, I took them off the wall, planning to take them with me. A reminder of who I used to be before the change had hit.

The devastation was strange, some places seemed to be almost untouched, others completely destroyed. A small part of me was continuously looking for patterns, trying to figure out how things connected. Why did parts of that wall crumble, but others were still there? What reason did that particular material have to burst into flames, while leaving other things intact? Did that shelf burn by itself, or was it set ablaze by something else? There were countless questions that ghosted through my head, as I moved through the ruins of my old life. Looking for answers.

But ultimately, there were none for me to find here. Nothing but old clothes, burned paper and destroyed memories, everything that had truly made this place my home was gone. Had been gone since the change hit, maybe even before then. Maybe my home had been gone, ever since Sigmir died on Mundus and I had never realised.

Maybe home was just something I could dream about until I managed to accomplish what I had set out to do. To get my beloved Sigmir back.