When All Has Burned To Ashes

Chapter 1

Not a single blade of grass moved in the stillness of the night. The dusty wind blowing in from the east had finally passed, leaving behind only sandy deposits and empty silence in its wake.

Blaze shook out the remaining granules from the creases in his clothing, cursing quietly to himself when he felt some slip underneath the coarse fabric of the army fatigues he wore. As he shifted in an attempt to find a more comfortable position, a sudden flash of movement caught his eye.

His gun was up and out in a heartbeat. Peering through the scope of the rifle, he scanned the yard and fields ahead. Even with the bonfires burning in front of the building, it was too dark to make out much. Without night vision, it would be near impossible to find someone who did not want to be found.

When a few seconds had passed and nothing else had stirred, he let out a relieved sigh and lowered his gun.

"Jet must be making me jittery," he muttered to himself.

Chems weren't hard to come by, as nearly everyone carried some on them and no one would notice if a few items went missing from the loot pile here and there. Through years of practice, as well as a few others' fatal errors, Blaze had learned just how much he could sneak from the cache without the boss finding out. It had taken every ounce of patience he had and then some, but a strong aversion to being flayed alive and dumped into molten lava was incentive enough.

He didn't particularly enjoy the effects of chems. The shakes and shivers and nausea and hollowness were hardly worth the short-lived buzz they induced. Though for god knows what reason, other people did and would pay a fortune for them. Only on certain nights when the mind-numbing boredom became unbearable would he dip into his stash. It was risky, he knew, and someone could at any point find out, but no life came without risks.

He rubbed his eyes in an attempt to clear the haziness from his vision, but when that failed he resorted to simply staring into the far distance. Miles away he could see the faint outline of the old asylum up north. Its fairly intact, archaic architecture stood out like a sore thumb amidst the decrepit ruins of the crumbled world around it. There was something about the place that always set him on edge, that gave him a chill just thinking about it.

A muffled explosion somewhere to his right shattered the silence of the night. His gaze drifted lazily towards the distant fiery swell of smoke and ash. The fire burned gloriously and grandiosely, rising high and lighting up a sizeable block of the surrounding buildings, before it faded and disappeared. The next second, it was as if nothing had happened at all.

He sighed and fingered the trigger of his gun.

Sometimes, the rest of the Commonwealth felt like a world disconnected from the one the Forged had made for themselves. He had gone on his fair share of raids over the years and had gunned down his fair share of people; there were those who fought like him, those who fought from the shadows, those who ran and hid and those who did nothing at all. They were the ones that scared him the most. He wondered, and not for the first time, what would drive a person to give up like that. Everyone went through traumatic shit. It was just a part of life. And yet some emerged stronger and hardened from the wreckage, while others emerged broken and absent, as though they were already long gone.

Just as he was beginning to feel the lingering wisps of drug-induced disorientation ebb away, a voice hollered out from behind.

"Hey! Are you fucking deaf? I said to shoot the bastard down!"

As if a switch had been flipped, his body went on full-alert. He whipped his rifle up and held in a breath of air as he aimed at the retreating figure ramming its way through the front gates. A pause, then his finger squeezed the trigger.