Orion's End

Preface

19 years. 19 years since I was birthed by an old beggar woman with no more than three cents to her name. No father, most likely the product of a forced sexual relationship. Of course, I never met my birth mother either. Thankfully, not even a week after my birth, she sold me off to a young couple who owned a farm a couple blocks down from her begging spot. They struggled with infertility, had the money for it at the time and figured it was best to get me out of her hands before she sold me off to someone more dangerous. The likelihood of that happening is incredibly high, considering the city we live in. In fact, it seems that if my adoptive family and I don't figure something out soon, we might need to go out and find a nice slab of concrete to beg on. What goes around comes around I guess, and it looks like i'll end up right back in the same place I was in 19 years ago—the spitting image of my birth mother. The city is beginning to lose its resources and everything is running low, extremely low. As this happens, the city's residents have begun to get desperate and unfortunately, we don't have the luxury of a police force or laws in place that can dictate good from bad. Those were disassembled decades ago when they realized there was no saving this city. As time goes on, we've realized there's no living in Orion either, there's only surviving. So what do we do when we can no longer survive? What opportunities are there for anything better, any life worth living? Are we just stuck in the constant cycle of working until we run dry and have to beg for a crumb of bread? Surely there has to be someplace better. Surely there's a way out of here. I don't want to just survive anymore and I don't see how much worse this place can get.