Prologue

The vision, or rather, dream, was quite a violent one, one like no other. His hands are still caked with cuts, debris, and dirt. One of the things he remembered before it ended were soldiers setting the world around him afire, closing into the screams like a cage.

Battle airships and large hovercrafts flying suddenly appeared out of thin air above his town. White uniformed soldiers came flying down on air motorcycles. They acted as one and never had any emotion. It was like they were controlled.

When they came down, he could hear guns firing, glass breaking, and screams, soon muffled by the crumbling of buildings. In his memory, he vaguely sees bullets being fired from the shattered windows, igniting the whole place with sparks. A man (perhaps his father, but he could not recall his appearance) told him to hide in a cold, firm voice. What happened next was blurry in his mind. He only remembers seeing the man fall to the ground, hard and still. His body burned into ashes from the bullets. Red stained the floor and walls.

He knew that he could not have saved the man, at least not when there were walls tumbling down at him. A voice beside him screamed and called out to him desperately; a little girl trapped under a support beam, her eyes filled with tears and horror. He tried to reach for the weak child’s hand, only to see her helplessly being buried in the pile of rubble in mere seconds as the roof plummeted to the floor.

He couldn’t feel anything, except for a ring on his left hand, half bronze half stone, being burned in the fire, melting the inscription on it. He tried to ignore the pain, and tried to climb out of the wreckage on top of him, to find this poor little girl beneath their roof. His hands scorched from the hot, burnt debris, and bled from the broken glass. There was no success in finding her. For he did not even know her, tears suddenly welled up in his eyes.

Another troop came by and released gasses to the nearby wreckage. His body felt tired and completely failed to move at all. He was paralyzed, still aware of everything, until the hands carried him into the darkness.

Then it was pitch black. The humming sound of static crashed in his ears.

In his mind, there was nothing but empty space.