Empyrean

Chapter 22

Chapter 22-Eris

Zenith One

Early Afternoon, 10th of Pachon, Year 612

            For the past day Echo and Fenix have been running around grabbing supplies for what looks like will be a journey to hell. They have gotten everything they could scrounge from the rubble of the house and pulled in favors from all around Zenith One and some of the Red sectors. I, because of my burns, have been sitting here, right where I lay yesterday morning, for more than twenty-four hours. Sleep has not pleasured me with her embrace.

            It has been immensely boring. I have regressed from drawing in the dirt to just counting as high as I could before I got bored of that language and started in another. The only interesting times have been my sparse words with Echo when she comes back carrying some ridiculous piece of shit that won’t possibly help us. I don't know what it is with Fenix, but ever since he killed those Alexandros on the roof he hasn't been acting the same. It has awakened the same type of Fenix that I first me, the Fenix that was on a mission, a bloody one.

            I see Echo across the way and scream out to her. “Echo!” I sound like one of the sex deprived beggars in Zenith and Red who yell out to any woman in earshot, hoping for, really, just a smile. “What have you brought back this time?”

            She smiles at me out of pity or guilt, but no matter, I get some human contact. “I don’t know what this is actually. I was going to ask you that.” She holds out with two hands the scariest thing I have ever seen. It is a gas mask. “Do you know what it is Eris?”

            I take the item into my hand and turn it over a few times with a puzzled look on my face as if I am trying to figure out what Fenix has made her go and fetch. “I’m sorry, but I don't know either.” I say giving back the mask. Just to spite Fenix , I lie further. “But if Fenix made you go get it than it must be something that we will need, and for the greatest of purposes!” I don't think I have lost my faith in my friend, but he will need to earn my trust again.

            Speak of the devil and he shall appear, or so they say. Fenix appears from around the corner and throws two more of the masks in the pile and beckons for Echo to do the same with hers. I know that he has been talking to Echo extensively to say what she needed to pick up, where, and from whom, but now he talks to me, as adults. “Eris, we need to leave the city.” He pulls out the final item from his pocket. It is the oldest map I’ve ever seen. He lays the map down and starts to unfold it.

            I look at what’s familiar first, The City of Light. It shows the city and its borders. It shows the glass like force field walls. It shows the different colors of the rainbow rising up to the palace surrounding by the black ring where we live, but it also shows something else. When I look at the map again I realize that there is something here that isn’t on any other map that could reasonably be found in the city. There are other cities on this map. It shows a whole continent surrounded by water. The City of Light is miniscule and the map is huge. As he continues to unfold it more continents appear across the largest expanse of water relative to the size of the cities imaginable. For our Emperor to be so audacious as to suppose that they were the only city on the continent, in the world, and impose that on others is utterly ridiculous. But that is what they do.

            “This is where we need to go.” He puts his finger on a city south of here in what seems to be a jungle of some sort. “It’s run by some sane people and I have already sent everyone I know from outside the city to meet there.”
            “Wait. You know people from outside the walls?” I am incredulous. “How? How do you keep in contact?” I had spoken with one woman some time ago and that is when I heard that the people from my father’s city are building an army, but he seems to be in habitual contact with them.