Mother Earth.

Prologue: March 17th, 2157.

Aaron, Agatha, and Annie Terra.

Edge of the Chinese Blight: Craters of Jiuquan.

The year 2157.

"Your people don't belong here."

Searing air sizzled on Aaron's shoulders, burning his flesh as he exhaled deeply. His cracked lips stung as he winced in pain—his knee popped. By his boot, imprinted on the square sectioned brick ground, was a shadow: a mother, father and their child. You could tell by how they held each other right before the firestorm erased them. "Billions of souls..."

Charred walls bore the captured, contorted terror of the masses on their walls. Aaron stumbled under this sudden jolt of pain in his joints, catching himself with his forearm on the beige walls of a nearby shop, clutching the bag strap in his other hand. His brown hair fell over his eyes as his vision fell low, shutting his exhausted eyes, creaking, swinging signs of Mandarin characters that he couldn't read ground against their metal hooks on the hipped roof above him. The people bustled inside the establishment with clanking glass, more speech he couldn't make out, grating at his aching mind. The golden ring on his left hand grated against the wall as his hand sprawled out against the coarse stone, his fingertips grazing the metal plates holding everything together.

The radiation settled here in the Suzhuo crater. The ones who remained here cleared out charred skeletons. This place was lucky. The bomb went off higher in the air compared to the rest.

Scratchy, stained white fabric itched, wrapped around Aaron's left bicep, exposed with his sunbleached maroon tank top, stitched together at every point. He swallowed with a dry throat, shutting his eyes as his heart stopped momentarily—listening to the whispers. "I don't need to speak their language to know what they say."

The way people look at him. They all know.

"The Blighted Countries..."

At least they couldn't contact the Bastions. Who knows what would happen if they could?

"..."

Flashes of blinding floodlights seared his eyes as he failed back and forth on the operating table, the stinging burning of scalpels slicing his chest open while he screamed-

"Blight-"

-He only saw children in this dark, metal encasing, silver gleams of neon lettering blinking while he was dragged kicking and screaming to his glass cage. Across him, he could hear the sobbing of a small girl around his age flooding her cell with water. She punched her glass walls again and again until her knuckles bled-

"-God dammit..." Aaron winced, the wall shaking with a slight tremor as he pressed his fingers down at the sharp intrusion of memory.

Sensitive, stinging pain ravaged the raw skin on his left arm, bleeding with ink grafted onto the side of his bicep. The girl's wavy hair floated as her screams dissolved into air bubbles rising up, staring into his eyes. She threw a hand down, and the flooding spiralled, transforming into a spiralling rapid vortex, splashing water droplets high in her cell until it formed a whirlpool.

He could see the sun burning through his eyelids, gracing his skin as his chest tightened with his quickened heartbeat. "Everything we did."

The floor beneath him sprawled out with cracks as the ceiling buckled, stumbling over himself as slates of rock like the face of a mountain sprouted over his arms, spikes raising from the floor and through his flesh as he screamed in agony at the horror of folding skin-