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How It All Began...
By Crimson Mistress
Holy mother of damn. I finished something original. normally I'm, like, pathetic and finishing things. Hell, I've been on the same fanfiction for something like two years. Oh yeah. Me? From Don't look. I suck. But here's a short something I wrote for a competition, in the short story/first chapter of novel category (I suuuuuck at poetry. Don't take my word for it. I'll show you soon enough), and I was wondering if you WONDERFUL readers might give me a quick once over and any pointers on how I may improve? I would really, truly, absolutely love and appreciate it.
Maybe, I might also torment you with snippets of other things I have come up with. O.o If you're really unlucky. Damn my flippertigibbet habits!
XX Crimson Mistress
Some could go so far as to say it was a matter of time.
But when the dust settled, none could say it was for the better.
Not that she had a right to have an opinion, of course. She had not an inkling of any of anything from the past.
It all began when the tenuous good relations dissolved and became animosity and enmity, the greatest powers of the world falling into a blood lusting frenzy of war the likes of which had never previously been seen. Whilst not a world war, it seemed that the forces of these titans clashing with cataclysmic effect echoed around the world in death screams of denial and helplessness.
As typical with all wars, the men in charge gave orders safely at home, from behind their desks, and the soldiers carried the banners of war on their heavy shoulders, sending the messages of hate and vengeance to the enemy on bullets of metal and carved from blood and suffering.
Friends died and friends avenged them. Men screamed and wept. It was an endless cycle of death, carnage and destruction.
For two long years the war between the gods had waged. Between them, yet involving the entire world, which could only watch helplessly as these factions of power tore asunder everything they had worked for. Promises of the past died like the men, in a hail of fire and blood, falling into an abyss of disillusionment and betrayal, words spoken in vows were swept aside by the hail of bullets and missiles, torn asunder like the flesh of the thousands of men that died every day for the greed and pride of a few.
Eventually, the lines became so blurred, that not one could tell who had thrown the first blow, the truth obscured by the carcasses of the fallen and burned by the baptizing unholy inferno that had seized the world in its punishing grasp. Some dared not even venture to guess the truth, for it may have been too terrible to contemplate.
Could they simply have wanted to start a war?
Could one have been fed up with sharing power?
Was all this death merely the satiation of the greed and egotistical pursuits of a few men?
The questions may have varied, but the answer to each was the same.
When the two years had come to a close, and the world found itself left in the wake of war, surrounded by corpses, broken souls and seas of blood, those powers withdrew to lick their wounds and mend their broken prides. There was no winner, all were losers, but each vowed to never be so again. With venomous glares and regretful reminiscence, they plotted their return to power and the elimination of the only threats that remained.
They would never have such a chance.
As with the previous war, the reasons behind it were obscure. Perhaps some wanted revenge. Perhaps some wanted punishment. Perhaps some were simply seizing their chance.
Whatever reasons they had, the countries formerly disregarded by the titans, the mortals in comparison of manpower and munitions, lunged at the scent of blood and weakness, going for the exposed throats and vulnerable sides. With the titans weakened as they were, the odds were evened far more than was comfortable, and it was like mountains clashing.
What had occurred previously was nothing compared to what happened before. Alliances were forged and dissolved, enemies were made and vanquished. There were no sides, bar one’s self, and one’s country, and even then some loyalties were in question. Enemies came from all sides, countries ganged up on others. Some countries simply tore themselves apart.
Dog eat dog.
The world was consumed in the first true world war that had ever occurred.
A world war that completely destroyed everything.
A war that, like the previous titan war, had no winner.
However, there was no simple retreat. The countries did not fall back, did not go to lick their wounds.
In the face of such carnage and destruction, the world did the one thing it could.
It collapsed in on itself, as the earth heaved with convulsions of outrage and disgust at the atrocities man had committed on her soils. Seas rose and fell, consuming and revealing whole land masses. Cities crumbled and great fissures split the crust whilst mountains thrust up into the sky.
Two years the Titan War raged.
Three years the True War waged.
Two months, the world punished mankind.
Forever, was the world changed.
A world that she now belonged to, which had risen from the ashes like some great phoenix, all black flame and toxic vapors.
The population of man had been cut into a twentieth of it’s original size, decreasing rapidly throughout the next few years as straggling groups of people succumbed to starvation, paranoia and the newfound dangers of their war ravaged planet.
Borders faded into the darkness, as did racial disputes and religious dogmas. In the face of such devastation, the world united into one simple cause.
Survival.
A pursuit that was noble, in the beginning, but the ensuing difficulties would transform it into an atrocity far worse than any war…
Survival, it seemed, was hindered by the shadow of the wars that had come, and by the simple lack of resources that prohibited an accelerated population growth. What was needed, what was desired, was the slow growth of a powerful new society of man, rather than the random and uninhibited leaps and bounds in breeding that came in the past. This society had to be united rather than divided, united in their goals, and united in their superiority. The mistakes of the past could not be repeated.
The theory was that only the greatest and the strongest would possibly be able to make such a society, and thus the New Eden project was launched.
Those select few people who were permitted to breed would give their children to community centers where they would be raised together, with a continual rotation of carers so as to create no connections, no emotional ties.
For the first five years of their lives, these children are named, educated and constantly tested in lessons and in basic lifestyle, monitored at all times. Children, who exhibit an unusual amount of intelligence, or discipline, or potential, are removed, and placed in prospective fields as doctors, scientists and other high level educational positions.
Those who don’t…
Those who don’t are taken in their fifth or six year, removed from their respective community homes and, by random number lottery, placed in one of the Walled Cities.
She was one of those children who didn’t pass. One of those children who were slapped with a name that was little more than a random assimilation of letters and dropped into the cities, so the big tops could brush off their hands and leave them to their will. Clean hands, clean conscience.
The children did the rest.
The cities were functional in the regard that they had a supply of water and working electricity, but that was about it. Derelict and abandoned, the cities rot form the inside out, buildings crumbling and the streets filled with garbage and refuse.
The unruly state of the cities, the way the children lived, everything, in fact, all culminated in one distinct reason.
The cities had absolutely no adults.
The Walled Cities were instead monitored by thousands of hidden cameras and microphones, surrounded by a ‘sonic fence’, which consisted of a wall of sound that sat at a high enough frequency to shatter eardrums and, even, kill. That was then surrounded by an insurmountably high wall of five feet of solid concrete and rock, mounted by motion and heat sensing gun turrets that obliterated anything that managed to crawl past the sonic fence.
But this was not to keep order, not at all. The fences were merely to contain, and the cameras were to observe. The children could do as they pleased, running wild, doing as they pleased, destruction and mayhem and all those things children so desired to do in their rebellious stages of life.
For any child, that would be paradise, but for those watching, that was the final test, the longest and most grueling ordeal, and the darkest part of the New Eden project.
Because the test for intelligence had long since passed. Now the children must be tested for strength and ingenuity. Survival skills. In these cities, where all children could do as they wished, the New Eden Project turned deadly.
Without restraint, without reprisals but what the others could come up with, a single nudge in the right direction had every next generation tumbling over the precipice. Whilst they could maintain some order, whilst they could, somehow, exist in some way that would mimic society, their unrestrained lives made the worst come out of them.
Turf wars, gang riots, children’s crimes taken into an adult fashion.
But the worst part was that they killed each other.
Indiscriminately, unabashedly.
Mindless slaughter.
They, the big wigs, had not needed to even introduce violence. Certainly they had introduced the tools, but the rest had come out from the children themselves, a result that served them well. The weak were killed; the useless ones that could have had no place in society, and they had no blood on their hands. The adult society was strengthened before they could even become adults. Innocents could not be blamed, could they?
The Walled Cities were a test; a grueling fifteen-year test of survival and only the strongest would survive. The greatest. The worthy. Only those most deserving of adult hood, only those who were the epitome of what desirable adults should be, would be ingrained in adult society when they were of the right age, to build a better world. Mankind would be perfect, far better than that of the war, a time that was now only called the Time of Purification.
For that was what it was. Purification. The old had been burned away like narcotic flesh to make room for new growth. New life. New society.
But she… she knew nothing of the history. In fact, she didn’t know anything that occurred beyond the great walls that surrounded her city, after the sonic fence that further served to prohibit escape.
Or, maybe she simply did not care.
The city was her world. Her life. She knew nothing outside of it, and it took all of her focus on this small portion of existence to simply survive it, to go from day to day still breathing.
She had scars as a testament to how difficult that battle was.
She had no idea of the world outside. A world that turned their back on the cities and what occurred in them, turning a blind eye to the atrocities that those children suffered, and what they put each other through, in an effort to self-justify the crimes they themselves had committed.
She knew nothing of them.
She knew only this life.
A life that, it seemed, she had taken a moment from, to watch a sunset.
Her hair floated on a gentle breeze, silken strands of auburn stained a brighter gold, forming a solid curtain to one side of her body. Her dark azure eyes were fixed on the city as it descended into the fiery abyss formed by the setting sun, the orange and yellow light leaping high behind the standing edifices of the buildings like some vast funeral pyre.
Some of the buildings stood tall, glass windows reflecting the blazing glory of the dying light. The windows that had no glass seemed to be gaping eye sockets and screaming mouths, vast pits of darkness that leaped out from the burnished gold around them, reflecting the deaths of the buildings that lay at their bases. Some were skeletal remains, charred husks of metal frames reaching like broken fingers towards the sky, for a salvation that would never come. Others were simply piles of rubble, corpses strewn out over the streets, providing both obstruction and cover for those living among them. All were eternal testament to the battles that had felled them and wounded them so terribly, wounds that would never heal.
No one was willing to rebuild buildings that had no use for them.
She was glad she had a place so far removed from the main city.
She fancied, for a moment, that there might be someone else on those buildings, a scout or sniper, perhaps, that had taken a moment to stare at the sunset, with an unobstructed view of the sea beyond, the sonic fencing towers sitting on the extending bits of artificial land preventing the boats used by the group that inhabited the equally artificial island in the middle of the bay, from escaping into the blue.
Not that they wanted to escape. Not them, at least.
She was not entirely sure what had drawn her to the hilltop, what had coaxed her from the safety of her home to this vulnerable and exposed position. A sniper could spot her and put a bullet in her eye, or perhaps send a scouting part into her area for a raid. A single girl? Prime target.
But… for some reason, she simply did not care. Staring at the sunset, surrounded by golden silence, she found a moment of calm and serenity amid a life rife with war and fear and which was a continual struggle for survival.
It was soothing.
Inhaling deeply, she closed her eyes and turned her thoughts inwards, to the chaotic cacophony of noises and images that was her past. Soothing was fine, but she could not let herself slip from the eternal battle readiness that had meant she had survived thus far.
Terror and fear, of others, for others, for herself. Screams and shouts. The scent of death and the taste of blood and the sounds of gunfire. Corpses sliding past as frightened footsteps fled from the firefight as fast as possible. Friends, enemies, the lines became so blurred, sometimes, but all were the same, when dead. Some were buried. Some were left to rot where they fell. It was war, with a backdrop of horror and noise and helicopter rotors.
…Helicopter rotors?
Startled from her reverie, the girl’s eyes opened and turned to the sky, in time to see the helicopter blast overhead. But what was most significant to her was the massive unmarked crate, square, and taller than she was, that was suspended underneath it on a series of cables.
Drop…it’s a drop…The crate, or more likely, what was contained inside, was the most valuable and anticipated thing in any city. So much so, that it eclipsed the fact that it came from a place that few even had an inkling of what it could possibly be.
She watched, standing, as the first helicopter was joined by dozens more, all carrying crates, and all heading for random, separate locations in the city. The locations where never the same. But the other helicopters were unimportant. They would be raided and perhaps booby-trapped before she ever got there. What was most important was to get to the one that was closest to her, as soon as possible.
Those crates held clothes, food, medicine and other numerous items vital for survival, including many bonus items, all random, some useless.
But what was most important, and what most would care about more than even clothes and food, was the fact that these crates would have new weapons and fresh ammunition…
Whatever had brought her to the hilltop, she did not know, but she was thankful for it, as she grabbed her utility belt, bag and jacket, running full pelt down the hill towards the city below, ignoring the path that may have taken her twice as long.
Because she had a head start on the crate that was merely two blocks away.
This was life for her. This was how it was. Living week by week, for each drop, scrambling over the remains, trying to stay alive…
None of them really knew why.
Most of them didn’t care.
That’s just how it was...
Oh god! And I can say this too!!
All ideas and characters in this story are copyright to Crimson Mistress. AKA (Now now. It wouldn't be as fun if you knew my name!) All replication shall be met with LEGAL action and all stealing shall be met with CHAINSAW... I mean... administrative action...
MWAH!