Patience Is A Virtue
Prologue
The girl dreams, she dreams of love, of meadows of green filled with animals, she dreams of family and no war.
She dreams of a utopia, a world that can never exist for her, nor her children or her grandchildren if she lives to see them,
if her children live to have them, if she lives to have her children.
The girl is but twelve, she has nobody, no arms to hold her close as she cries, no hands to pull her up when she falls, this girl is alone.
The girl wakes up, her mind speeding back to cruel reality, where she works until her hands are blistered and bleeding; she works until she is permitted to return to the wasteland she calls home.
She works and sleeps, and finds scraps to eat, until sickness seizes her or the demons kill her. She has never known peace, she has never known love, and she has never slept a night without the fear of death.
This girl is Patience Brown, a girl who will change the world one day.
Awakened
Patience wakes up, her skin is covered in a thin sheet of ice, and her lips are completely blue. She is on the verge of hypothermia. She slowly moves her aching muscles in an attempt to stand up, and eventually she manages. She walks over slowly to the fire which burned out hours ago, and crouches down, savouring the faint drift of heat which she fears she may be imagining.
The wasteland is war-torn, the floor cannot be seen through the dense layer of rubble, a result of buildings, skyscrapers, torn down to the ground by fire, bombs, and weapons that no human could ever possess. Around the barren wasteland there is a wall, a wall to separate the humans from the beasts that won the battle, the battle over everything that the human’s possessed.
Patience stands up, her beautiful fiery-red hair flowing around her neck in the gentle breeze. Her hair is cut short, it is uneven, a job done by Patience, with no mirror and only a blunt hunting knife, it is a miracle that she didn’t end up cutting herself.
Less hair means less time wasted trying to find a source of water when she could be scavenging for food. That’s Patience’s opinion anyway.
Patience also has the opinion that she is extremely unattractive, it is true that she is not exactly a supermodel, but she is pretty and her features are incredibly striking. Her hair is like tongues of fire, and her eyes are an intense shade of blue. Her face is skinny, too skinny.
Her body is too skinny too, even through the layers of scraps she uses as clothing her ribs are still visible, her legs and arms are like matchsticks, and her spine looks like a colony of mountains on the canvas of her back when she bends over.
This is what starvation looks like. This is what a human who lives in this sort of world looks like.
This cannot go on forever, there is always a way out.
There has to be.
Otherwise there is no hope anymore.
