I Am A Flyer

Epilogue

Smoke rose from the ruins in silent, towering plumes. It fogged the area over, masking the entire city with eerie gray. What remained of Shann Tei was silent, for the most part. An occasional wail would rise up from the rubble, a single, terrible note of agonized grief. Shann Tei was broken.

A single flyer spotted the smokey mass from above, and didn't hesitate. He dropped down through the smoke, blinded for a few seconds before he entered a foggy nightmare of destruction. Spotting a small space of relatively smooth ground, he went in for a light landing.

White-booted feet hit the ground, while blue-ribbed wings rapidly slipped back into their recesses. The white flyer stood motionless within the smoky air, taking a long moment to simply observe. He did not have to worry about suffocating – his helmet easily filtered the air for him.

His gaze spanned the area, seeing death, seeing destruction, seeing hopelessness. This place was dead.

The flyer took a step forward, careful to avoid setting his foot down on a bloodied arm. He spared a quick glance at the body the arm was attached to. I'm sorry. Then he moved on, traveling the ruins at a careful pace.

Time drew on slowly, sluggishly. In this dark, eerie place, he lost all sense of time. Yet, it didn't matter. Time did not matter to him.

As he walked on, he finally spotted what he was looking for – the crumbling remains of what used to be a huge wall. The white flyer adjusted his direction, heading straight for it. There were many bodies of the fallen here, limp and cold. He had to take special care, lest he trod upon any of them. If there weren't so many, perhaps he could have buried them, or at least prepared some kind of grave. There were hundreds upon thousands of the dead, though – it would take him more than a week to put them to rest.

His eyes were cast down, planning a route throughout the cold bodies. The white color of his boots were already stained with red by this point. It repulsed him, yet he forced himself to look, to see everything that he could. He wanted to remember everything.

He stepped over a still woman, who still clutched a bundle to her chest. Her arms had become rigid with death, and so the bundle had not even fallen from her grasp. The white flyer paused to look upon her, saddened by the scene. He turned away, intending to continue on, when a small whimper reached his ears.

He stopped. Listened. Again, a faint whimper, so weak and terribly faint. He turned back, eyes roaming the area. His gaze fell upon the bundle clutched to the dead woman's chest. No. . . .It can't be.

The white flyer stepped up to the woman's side, then crouched. He reached out with white-gloved hands, and gingerly pried the bundle free from her eternal grasp. Fingers brushed a flap of blanket away, and visor-hidden eyes peered inside.

A tiny creature stared up at him with wide brown eyes, a perfectly round face surrounded with golden curls. Miniature hands curled into fists, trembling with confused hurt. A tiny mouth opened, but no sound issued forth. The baby was too weak to even cry.

The flyer's heart broke, and he cradled the small human to his chest, seeking to offer it any comfort he could. He walked on, holding the bundle close. He did not want to leave it in the cold grasp of its mother, but maybe there was a survivor who would be able to care for it.

He approached the giant wall, immediately noticing that a huge section of it was nothing more than a giant pile of loose rubble. Adjusting his grip on his precious bundle, he surged up the rubble pile with powerful jumps. He paused at the top, looking down into the Forbidden Zone. . Compared to the rest of the city, it was in surprisingly good shape. Most of the damage done had been to the Wall itself, rather than what lay inside.