Quintessence

Chapter 1 - Elements

Chapter 1

 Elements

                Instinctively Avery’s hand few to his alarm clock. However he woke to a screaming pain in his head, and with much regard for morning reflexes his clock fell to the floor clumsily. “Ugh,” he mumbled. “This is going to be a great day.”

                Avery laid there in his bed for a moment, facedown in his pillow. His head rang louder, but not more annoying than his digital clock buzzing away on the floor. He paid no attention to it but rather he was concentrating on trying to remember something, his dream, he thought it was a dream. Over the last few weeks it had always been the same, he woke to a raging headache and he could never remember what he had been dreaming about, THAT part was annoying.

                He was out of bed and running around his room. The calendar adjacent from his bed side, located above a small working desk, had a larger circle around the 8th of September. The large ‘X’s leading up to it marked that today was an important day, the first day of classes back at Vars’ Nada Academy. The desk below was home to a small laptop computer however half buried in paper, particularly news paper.  Avery searched quickly through the papers after dressing quickly in jeans and a white button up collared shirt. His hands pushed aside a newspaper clipping from the Quettus Times which fell to the ground. There it read: FATAL FIRE CLAIMS LIVES AT PIER POINT. Avery stopped immediately what he was doing, cursed and picked up the clipping carefully. He should be more careful, he thought.

                It had been over three months since that night, the night when everything had gone wrong. Loren was gone. Days after that night had been a blur, but Loren was gone, gone, just like that! It had been an impossible statement to conceive. He had no memory from how he had gotten out of the building, yet alone how he found himself waking up in a tear soaked pillow in his room the morning after. How could someone so important in your life simple vanish? To have felt so strongly about someone and something then it all disappear. He didn’t understand, all he understood was that Loren was gone and he was helpless to have done anything. Wasn’t he? He fought with himself for weeks, months on those thoughts and he still didn’t have an answer, he didn’t know if he would ever conclude one.

                The government had covered it up, of course. A fire breaking out in an old abandoned warehouse, started by some ‘teenage hooligans’ had claimed their own lives, by their own foolishness is what the media had used to cover up the Apotheosis’s blunder. It’s as though Loren never existed. It had been made quite clear to everyone at school by the end of the year Loren and her family had moved out of town from well placed rumours. It was all so FAKE! Avery wanted to shout and rage at how corrupted, unfair, and idiotic the world was. However the matter had done one justice, the events of May 17th had opened Avery’s eyes. The world, even the city of Quettus, so far away from the core cities of the Apotheosis was corrupted. Caught in a dream world was the day to day aphorism, yet in the shadows there was so much evil, injustice, fear, and death. Fear in particular drove the world, fear of the Apotheosis. You could always tell how orchestrated everything was, how controlled a person's words were, how if conversation ever lingered on the critical ideas or principals of government or the religion of Apothesisim people became very uneasy, paranoid and scared.

                It could not be helped though. That was the world everyone knew and would continue to know until something was done which was very unlikely to happen. The Apotheosis were just too powerful, their agents rumoured beyond the abilities of any military, Varsciptim, or even the Narsciptim citizens. It was troubling and even though Avery wanted to do something, he had been ready to do something, but he didn’t know what one person, such as himself, could do.