The city was unlike anything Kyle had ever imagined. The streets were choked with a constant stream of people, their faces gaunt and tired, just like his own. The air was thick with soot and the acrid smell of industrial waste, a far cry from the fresh earth and open fields he had once known. The steam engines rumbled overhead, their ceaseless hissing a constant reminder of the world that had left him behind.

  The buildings loomed high, casting long shadows over the streets, their grey facades as cold and indifferent as the people who hurried past. Kyle’s once-proud frame was now hunched, his eyes empty and weary. He asked for work, for food, but the wealthy merchant lords and factory owners, busy with their own ironclad pursuits, paid him no mind. He was nothing more than a ghost in a world that had no room for him.

  As he walked the narrow alleys and crowded lanes, he saw other souls like him—men and women who had once tilled the land, now reduced to begging for scraps. The city had no place for them, no compassion to offer. The poor were left to huddle in the shadows, their faces turned away from the gleaming windows of the wealthy and the noise of the steam-powered world that had taken everything from them.

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  The cold, biting wind cut through Kyle’s thin clothes, but it was nothing compared to the chill that had settled deep in his heart. The city, with its steam-driven machines and its indifferent masses, had offered him no hope. It had only exposed the bitter reality of his situation: he was a man with nothing, and in a world where progress and industry had triumphed, there was no place left for men like him.

  The sounds of the steam engines echoed in the distance, but Kyle could hear nothing over the growing silence inside himself. The city continued to spin, indifferent to his suffering, as he walked alone through its streets, a man lost in a world that had no place for him.