The Last Man of K--- (Reading)

By Adam Sedia

A young scribe working in a remote village encounters a strange traveler with an even stranger story. The last citizen of a once glorious civilization recounts the story of how his beloved city and people met their final fate.

I will never forget that day – many years ago now – when the stranger came to the village. Not many strangers visited us at all, and almost never from another country. The appearance of this particular foreigner would have been remarkable for his presence alone, but why he came was even more memorable. Thus the village remembers him simply as the stranger. Even now, many years after his likely death, anyone speaking of “the stranger” needs not explain whom they mean. Everyone knows. 

I was only twenty-two then, a precocious scribe assigned to the backwater village on the edge of the desert. I hated it, the dust that would blow into its streets, the bumptious ways of its people, who tilled the fields as far as they could until the land was barely arable anymore. It was no place for an ambitious young man, but I was needed there and promised an appointment at the royal court if I exercised my duties well. I could not have imagined then in my misery that I would receive the last, and perhaps the only, account of the land of K---.