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window beside him—trees and brick townhomes rushed by in a blurred haze. The man mumbled slightly to himself and tensed, wondering where he was and more importantly who he was. The soft comings and goings of a frightened and yet somehow familiar voice filled his ears, begging the nameless man to remain awake. The nameless man rotated his head slowly to the left, surveying the steel cage that surrounded him as he bounced up and down on a strangely thin bed.
    Not a bed, the nameless man realized. And not a cage.
    The man was in the back of a colorless vehicle, laying on makeshift padding that sat on top of a ribbed metal floor. A gray-haired soldier spoke above him, shouting as the man who couldn’t remember his name began to slip back into the familiar darkness from which he had just departed.
    “Stay with me!” the frantic voice above him yelled. “Stay with me….”
    The man fell back into the vast blackness as the other man’s voice echoed from nowhere and everywhere at once, dying like a whisper in a storm. As quickly as the nameless man’s brief escape from the dream had come, the vivid hallucination returned and he found himself back where he had dwelled moments before.
    The man stood on the edge of oblivion. Hot wind swirled around him as he looked out on the fiery ruins of a fallen nation. He tried again to remember who he was, tried and failed to recall the memory he was on the verge of losing completely. Still, the man pushed that flimsy thought out of his mind, concentrating on the here and now, wherever the here and now actually was.
    Hours before, he had battled against a thing of hatred, though he couldn’t remember who or what it had been. The inner blaze that had been born of his rage had grown tired and cold. The only thing he could remember was that he didn’t want to remember what had happened. There would be pain in those memories; that much he knew. He wanted to be free from life and the agony that awaited him should he live. He wanted to die and join…someone he had loved, though again he couldn’t remember who that had been. But he didn’t fear the pain itself. He was afraid of little in that place of withdrawn apathy. In fact, the only thing he did fear was what might come of him if he yielded to the anger and sorrow that lurked just beyond the void.
    The sound of a swirling wind drew near and the man turned to survey an unknown arrival. A stranger—or more so a brilliant mirage that shifted in whites, silvers, and golds—approached.
    “Where am I?” the nameless man asked of the newcomer, surprised at his own demanding tone.
    A hard question to answer, the stranger replied, though not with audible words. Instead, the nameless man sensed the stranger’s thoughts and emotions. It was almost as though his mind answered the question as it teetered on infinity.
    “Is this a dream?”
    I like to think of it as the in-between, the stranger began, though it is as much of a dream as is the world you will soon rejoin. Perhaps it is more real, in many ways.
    After a moment, the nameless man tore his eyes from the stranger and looked down upon the burning ruins. He felt as though he should remember the blazing kingdom below—felt as though he should be able to name the phantoms that cried out in pain and anguish as the flames consumed them. As though the stranger could read his thoughts, it moved toward the cliff’s edge and spoke.
    Always a new name and a new empire for a new generation. But they are all as one the same.
    “What do you mean?”
    The kingdoms of men are always forged by the hands of men. However righteous those nations may be in the beginning, they are destined to succumb to mankind’s sin and die, just as every man is destined to die.
    “I…I remember….” The man trailed off as a ray of illumination broke through the cracks in a cloudy mind.
    The stranger looked to the man before turning to gaze at the fiery land below. It knelt down and scooped up a handful of dirt,