Mother Earth.

Prologue: March 17th, 2157.

Aaron, Agatha, and Annie Terra.

Edge of the Chinese Blight: Craters of Jiuquan.

The year 2157.

Earth. The holy land of life, struck down by humanity. She lived once. She lived for the people, the flora and fauna that bloomed from Her warm embrace, a comfort long dead. The labyrinth encircling the human world has driven them mad, wandering in endless circles, searching for answers they will never have as they helplessly trudge forward past the trenches, the bombshells, through tanks and gunfire. To the trees and the grass below their feet, all gone by in the rush of splitting atoms as missiles fall with mushroom clouds smothering the sun- to trip over the corpse of their comrades, their families light taken, their will whisked away upon that horrific sight, and the haunting realization that they won't ever see. These horrors are not Her doing. Even as oceans flood, as Her blood runs dry, and the rivers die out, the towers of machine and humanity grow higher, reaching for the answer, searching for the way out, but that lies not within the labyrinth. There is no answer; there is only a choice. There is always a choice.

To live is to die. If that were true, how could so many be okay to die if they have never chosen to live?

"Your people don't belong here."

Searing air weighed down on Aaron's shoulders, burning his flesh as he exhaled deeply. His cracked lips stung as he winced in pain, his knee popping. 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 talk about."

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-