A whistling wind blew through vacant alleys, into vacant roads. The strong gusts of wind blew debris from one side of the road to the other. Litter piled in alcoves, untouched by nature’s harsh touch, by the blowing air that ripped the very soul of the deserted city from the weak wood frames that still held up the abandoned buildings, with an icy twinge of hatred.
A thousand miles away a fire burned, lighting a small field, glowing on three companions, huddling around the single source of warmth. A thousand years ago, women wrapped in tattered clothes bent over cooking fires, stirring the broth and turning the meats, all the while, keeping nude children from burning themselves on the open flames.
But this city was neither a thousand miles away, nor a thousand years ago, rather, it was right where it was, right where it stood. And it was content with that. It didn’t want to be anywhere else, anything else. Nowhere else could you experience the purity of the wind swelling past you, deeper and deeper in the emptiness, the emptiness that closed up around you, hugging you in the forms of strong framed, wooden buildings. Nothing else could be as quiet.
No, there was nothing in the world that could compare to the windswept streets of the forgotten city. The cobblestone lanes that would never again be touched by man, the broad square, the frozen fountain which would never again feel hands dip into its crystal clear waters, drinking of the coldness. There were no longer any cobblestone lanes, nor stone fountains, anywhere but here. Only market squares remained, yet strangely changed, marred, and their beauty stripped.
They bustled with men, with women, and the occasional lost child scampered across its width, but they were not like the squares of old, empty and desolate, as the one ancient square lay. This too, nobody would ever touch. Not for a minute, not for a moment, not at all, forever.
The whistle grew louder, throwing large trash again. The silence after the wind was the song of angels long since gone to hell - unheard, and desperate, yet somehow still soothing, as if the touch of god would be with it forever.
A lone priest preached in the entranceway to the temple. But one holy word was echoed through the still street, into the quiet square. Only one preacher could be heard throughout the whole city, and then the wind moved on, leaving the entrance, to find a new home, roving, searching. The whistle died, and the preacher with it.
Three feet away, just outside the low desert wall, a skull lay, being worn away by the whipped about sands, just as the wall, and the city itself slowly died in the same manner. Three years ago, the same skull lay there, a bit thicker, but still dying the same slow death. The wind god inhaled, and drew the winds crashing back, only to gain more strength in his next blow, sending everything back again, with even more force.
A small pebble blew off the sandstone wall, and fell into the sand, only to be blown straight into the wall with the wind’s sudden return. And there it stayed, a once proud piece of the wall, now just another forgotten part of the desert, wind swept, and slowly dying the same death as everything else, except just a bit lonelier, sadder, forsaken, and unknown. Nobody cared about this pebble, nor the city from which it came. There was no place like this in the whole world, but maybe nobody knew. Maybe they all had forgotten, maybe nobody cared.

The wind blows harder this time, and thoughts drift away to sun-beaten crops; a place where life, though challenged, survives. Here, the stone, the hollow sand, cares little if a man lives or dies. The stone loves no one. This is the land of emptiness, an oasis forbidden to all but the sun.
Amidst the confines of a narrow, cobbled alley one last remnant of inhabitation crumbles and disintegrates under the heat of the endlessly burning eye in the heavens, no longer held back by human constructs. Roofless walls tower up, ending in open arms to the sky, crumbling under the weight imposed by the world. There is nothing left but these very walls, with no sign that any man ever stood within their confines. There is nothing left but stone waste. There is nothing to waste but time. Lifeless cities and baked stone have little to worry about time.
The sun rises to the zenith. The last standing clock casts its empty shadow on numerals long scratched away by the whipping sands. A slight sand dune rests in the shade of the wide pillar as though it, too, could no longer stand the heat. Cold spirits whistle by, and preach of the sun. The sand, beckoned, driven, lifts on the lifeless song of too many sermons, and flings its future to the wind. Cool and untouched by the sun the spirits float above and beyond the shrinking dune, off to betray yet another to the cruelties of the burning orb.
Nowhere in the great city, nor the great expanses beyond its weary gates, is the land untouched by the sun. The sun, and the forsaken sands. What the sand and the sun do not conquer is left to the stones. What the stone cannot rule is left desolate, a single monument in a windswept desert. These the sands often claim, and soon. Yet some will stand. They will stand just to stay a little bit longer, if even just a moment. It is not paradise, but pride is earned here, beneath the sun. And it is in these remote places that the desert does battle. Long has it been since life was lost on such a field, yet the skeletons of inhabitation still battle on. Four walls to a house, four more soldiers, each pillar, a spear, each foundation, ancient armor, guarding what life once lost.
Too many lives ago the city still stood. Too much sweat weakened the once strong stone, now just a shell, a memory of what used to be. Now a despairing scene of natural brutality, once a sanctuary for those under the sun, for those who cared not for wind beaten lungs and sand stung eyes. What life was lost will be forgotten, but the stone still cares.

Four corners to every square. And so the winds blow from four corners, from each depth of the world. But the world is no more square than the sun that lights the sky. That fact each and every living being can see, and it is agreed that the sun burns indiscriminately, a perfect orb of hellish space. So the winds come from four reaches do not exist, or so it seems. Is it so impossible that the wind blows all around he world from but one nexus, spreading as equally as the earth itself.
Imagine a place so alone that even the wind could call that place home. Imagine the unimaginable, a place so ancient that the air we have always breathed can lie down and sleep without a single remembrance. To say that no one place could exist for so long would be to lie to the very senses that feel the cool breeze flowing across your cheek. For there is a city, basking in the cool shade of the sun, in the sweeping plains of rock, that birthed the winds.
Imagine the how insignificant a second, a life must be to the winds, to the stones. Life is such a poor and inconceivable notion to the rocks. Perhaps the tallest of trees cannot even remember and age where the stone was young. But no living speech can tell the story better than the floating spirits that bring the world’s juice to the land. The notions that float high and low above that city, that desert, can tell you how old the stone is.