Stormhaze

Chapter 7: Thoron

The sun was merely a floating red orb, hidden behind the thick orange fog covering Argead. Ash fell from the sky, the city reduced to complete silence with only rubble and ruin to remember it by. The black river was thick like tar, and as the boat slowly glided along the canal, Edras could feel the soft thud of his vessel hitting a pile of bodies floating lifelessly on the surface.

They had scavenged a set of tattered stormcloaks—capes used mostly to wrap around pets and clankers to shield from the fire—with a wet piece of cloth draped around their mouths to keep out the ash from their lungs. The young Mizdraki woman sat huddled in the middle of the boat, hugging her arms around her legs, face barely visible behind her mane of thick black hair. The six tattooed gunmen surrounded her, one lazily pointing a loaded rifle at Edras' chest, the others watching in spellbound silence at the city around them. It seemed reality was slowly sinking in.

The air was thick and almost unbreathable even with a wet mask, with ashen snowflakes trailing down onto the black river. And as they glided through, Edras felt like the ferryman of the dead crossing the river Styx, being reminded of the ancient Greek story of Charon as he sailed souls into the underworld. As he looked around the desolate vestiges of Argead, himself cloaked in black with a long oar firmly in hand, the ancient tales felt all too real.

"How long will burn like this?" one of the gunmen asked, his voice the darkest of them all. None of the others in his gang answered. But Edras could see the young woman squeezing her arms around her knees a little more tightly than before.

Though Edras had lived in Argead all his life, he felt blind and lost in his own home trying to see through the fog, doing his best to recognize the dead buildings around him and understand where they were. He did not know how long they had been travelling between the burnt-out husks of the city, but as his thoughts landed on the palace of Istendil, he wondered whether his fellow graduates had made it all the way alive.

Edras had, however, sailed discreetly past the Thoron family residence without saying a word to the gunmen. It appeared to have been untouched by the flames, only covered in a sheet of ash. Edras had rowed past it because he knew it would be empty—as it almost always was. If his family was still alive, Edras doubted they could even be found anywhere close to home, likely at one of the two facilities.

Perhaps the gunship facility? Though the Thoron name was best known for its handheld weapons, it was the gunships that kept the family-run company on top of everyone else. But now he wasn't sure whether any gunship was still operational, for any gunship online would have erupted in fire hours ago.

Edras had always felt conflicted about his position in life, and now more than ever. He despised any form of bloodshed with his entire being but could not deny that it also kept the people of Erylon safe from raiders. Like these marauders, there was always someone seeking to control the stock of Ezirell on land or sea. And though he had no intention of arming and enriching these tattooed marauders, he would have no choice but to do their bidding if no one else would come to his aid. He couldn't stop them by himself, even as an Etherion.

Edras recalled his uncle Karos and his grandfather Tarian saying they were on the verge of developing something new... something relating to cybernetics. Edras immediately felt a weight drop in his stomach. The cybernetics lab, then. It wouldn't be far, yet that made his heart sink even further. He knew what horrors he would see once they reached it.

As the small boat turned a corner, Edras could see a dark silhouette through the orange smoke, rising up from a lone island. The Thoron cybernetics lab looked like a metal pyramid cut in half, separated by an enormous chimney rising from the center. And as Edras expected, the courtyard was littered with dead robots and burnt corpses. The boat groaned and creaked as it slowly ran aground on a heap of dense debris that had accumulated by the shore of the island.