Mother Earth.

Chapter 6: You and Me.

Lydia Armageddon, Svivla Falla.

Remains of Strasbourg,

The year 2167.

Silent winds swept over the burnt streets. Charred black squares placed in intricate patterns form up in hemispheres, waving and guiding the eye across the roads with the occasional manhole cover. Remnants of blood remained among the shattered glass splayed over the streets, from up high in balconies, a chair here and there, and bricks from the fallen buildings. A perfect stream of traffic, people living lively up and down the roads, now buried under piles of rubble. Skeletons of those who came before laid quietly, without a sound they cried out to the world to deaf ears, their tales never heard; lessons never learned time, and time again with guns still in their hands.

The black, skinny wood swayed in the wind from their squares of dirt along the sidewalk. Wispy soil crept along the sidewalk past Lydia's boots where she stepped as the winds swept through the silent streets. Her eyes trailed to a small, bony arm latched onto a smashed bicycle underneath a collapsed balcony of a café. Across the way to the left of Svivla and her path, a pile-up of dozens upon dozens of vehicles was smashed into each other, with their path blocked by the destruction of the buildings surrounding them; forever stuck with some passengers still inside. Remnants of bombshells lay idly in front of them, and Lydia kicked them to the side.
"Remind me why we are here?"
"So we do not starve."
"Some place to take us for that, huh? Where'd you get this bright idea in your delirious old man brain?"
"The part that has all the years of experience out here, kiddo."

Svivla's towering figure trudged forward in front of Lydia, the high sun beaming down on his white hair, flowing with his brown shawl wrapped around him. Lydia wiped her brow and kept following.
"Doesn't answer where we are going." She remarked. Even as she commented, he kept moving forward. Body after body, shell after shell, each life suspended in motionless animation. The smells of marrow and dust still linger.
"Hey! Svivla! Tell me fucking anything!"

They turned the corner without a response, he turned the corner with his back to her. She jogged to catch up, rounding the corner, and the marvel of the architecture of Strasbourg was before her. She had heard stories of it, the Cathedral.

"Look around you, Lydia. Tell me what you see."

Bodies.

"I... It's a war. It was a war."
"Wrong."
"The fuck it isn't!"
"You are wrong, look again. You see only what is on the surface. Anyone can watch from the comfort of their home and see war, hear about it, and read about it, but you are here. Tell me what you see." Svivla said again, moving over the spire that crumbled in the vicinity of the entrance. Statues of biblical figures fractured and buried, smashed to dust.
"This is war, this is what they trained you for."

Lydia listened, looking around again at the broken bodies and destroyed buildings. Bulletholes in the walls of shops, empty shells littering the ground of a cafe, blood staining the white mannequins with a pile of burnt skeletons inside past the shattered shop windows. A parent holding their child. Svivla took a step onto the stairs to the entrance, the right side of the wall left open in a massive chasm to peek inside.
"What is war, Lydia?" He asked, walking inside with Lydia behind him. The gorgeous, grandeur scale of this building was like no other that she had ever seen. Even inside, the towering spires on the outside with flowing ceilings with discoloured paint lost to time and lack of care. Dust filled her nose as she walked past the smashed chairs once in aisles, the left wall completely folded in on itself. Stained glass, shattered in droves across the ruined carpet, each majestic piece of art sullied.
"... A means to secure your nation's future, to protect your people from the enemies that surround us. That is the reason, to win so that we live."
"That is the definition of someone who has never been in war, let alone the War for the World." Svivla continued, he pointed to the center of the Cathedral, and lodged into the floor was a massive missile; a ginormous warhead far bigger than them, undetonated, and hauntingly so. Shining sunlight off of the edges of the fins and control vanes, the metal shell dented, covered in soot and dust from the bricks above. This place of worship was forever squandered by man, a reminder to both them and to the very God they revered, if He were watching still. The people didn't know if He had abandoned humanity, or if he was guiding their hands; they couldn't figure out which one was worse.
"This wasn't a battleground between two nations; this was an invasion. It was a means of plundering all the freshwater they could find so they may live, while the rest die of thirst. All food was stolen, and corpses were left behind so no more resources could be used up. This isn't the remnants of a war." Svivla commented, lifting open a trapdoor on the ground underneath the burnt carpet.
"..." Lydia began to understand. This is a mass execution.