After Fate Fell

33 • ELLA

Hey guys! Hope you like this 2-chapters-in-a-few-hours thing haha. Don't get too used to it though! In a couple chapters things are about to get crazy....enjoy!
-Braden

1 year, 3 months, and 16 days after it all.
•ELLA•

"-ere's just nothing. Nobody," Marina's voice cracks over the walkie-talkie. She sounds like she's in pain. What could've happened to all of them?

"I don't understand this," I say back to her. "Stop the car," I tell Six. And she does so.

Marina's car stops just behind us, we don't even bother to get off to the side of the road, because who cares? There's no police to ticket us, no other drivers to honk at us, no pedestrians to stop and stare.

We all get out of the cars, some asking questions to each other, some just dead silent, taking it all in and wondering.

Adam is the first one who I can actually hear his voice and process it.

"There aren't any bodies. Why would they all just leave, evacuate?"

This makes us all stop and think. And it's then that I realize how utterly silent, how deathly silent it is. I've never been in a town or a city that's been this quiet before. It almost seems like an oxymoron, a silent city. They're always bustling with people, cars, and energy. But now that all the people are gone, there aren't any cars running, and without the cars, and nothing living in the buildings except the sand overtaking them, the silence is louder than any noise I've ever heard before. It's so quiet that it hurts.

"Maybe they ran out of freshwater? A pipe bust or something at a desalinization and there was nothing else they could do?" Five puts in.

"But how could there be nothing else to do?" Six asks. "This wasn't just a few families living here, it's not even a small town. This is almost a city. Whatever they needed, they could figure it out somehow right?" These are all good points, but I don't know if any of this will help us. They're gone, and that's that.

"Not if their desalinization plant somehow shut down completely. There's no freshwater here, they depend solely on salt water being processed to get the salt out and become freshwater for drinking water. If something bad enough happened, they could try for a few days to fix it, but if it was looking bad, people would probably start leaving. Without water, there's nothing for them," Five points out.

And then I realize that maybe the reason all these people left is important, and maybe it has something to do with why we're here.

"Guys, this may have to do with Legacy," I say. Everyone looks at me, and I can see it register in some of their eyes. "It makes sense, these reasons make sense Five, but there's something telling me this has to have something to do with Legacy and her depletion of energy."

"So how is her energy being depleted a reason for these people to leave? I'm not really catching on," Adam says.

"Legacy just has something about herself," Marina says, speaking up from a confused silence, suddenly awakened. "When her energy blossomed in this planet, humans got legacies. When her energy starts to go away, I guess it made the people leave here? I don't know. What I do know, though, is that this is Legacy."

Everyone just nods. I guess they may not fully understand, but they understand enough to know that this wasn't just a random decision by everyone to leave at the same time. This has something to do with us, with Legacy, with Lorien.

"So what do we do now?" Five asks. Everyone is looking to me for the next step. They really do see me as their leader in this. And I don't know what to say. But somehow it comes to me.

"We take a break. We don't spend a night. I need to focus, I need to reach out and see if I can reach Legacy, or just sense her presence. Once I do that, we decide which way to go. If I get Legacy's help, then we listen to whichever way she leads us. If not, we'll figure something out," I tell everyone. And I can see the unsure looks in some of their eyes, but I can see they all trust me.

//

Nobody goes far from the cars, because I told them to all stay close. I walk toward the ocean, toward the cool breeze that somehow contains no moisture. It takes a few minutes, because it's probably a half-mile walk or so down to the water. I just need to focus, get away from everybody, and try to hear Legacy's voice guiding me to her.

I walk out onto an abandoned dock, sitting out on the end. There are some boats tied to docks, abandoned. Not as many as I would expect though. I know this was a fishing town.

The breeze and the waves add to the effect, helping me find peace of mind and making me able to just completely focus in on Legacy. I listen for her voice. I don't hear it.

Legacy? I call out to her. I need to hear her voice, I can't settle with the idea that she's already gone. It's not true. But I don't hear anything.

I try to focus even harder, but there's still nothing. I open my eyes, peering down into the water. Something's wrong. But I guess I already knew that. This just affirms my fears. If she's not gone already, she's weaker than ever.

Then I see something in the water. A faint blue light, maybe twenty feet to my left in the water. Is that Lorialite?

I take off my shirt and decide to take a swim to check it out. I could use a break from the dryness of the air and the heat of the sun. I dip my feet in. It is some of the coldest water I've ever felt. It's so odd that in a place like this, out in the desert, the sand meets the ocean and the ocean is freezing cold. The water is a little escape from the dead world around me.

I lower myself in, submerging my whole body up to the neck beneath the surface of the shockingly cold water. I swim slowly toward the blue glow. The water is deep enough for boats to dock here, so it's hard to see the glow when I'm swimming. I put my head under to get a better look, and I see it, much closer now. I swim a little further, and then dip my head under again. The glow is now directly under me.

I take a breath and then go back under, swimming down, toward the glow. I won't be able to swim deep enough to actually reach it, but I want to get a closer look. As I come nearer to it, my earlier prediction is affirmed. It is the glow of Lorialite, with Loric energy sparking inside the stone. But that isn't all. It's a tiny glow, but not from a tiny rock.

The blue Loric energy only comes from a chunk of the rock the size of a skipping stone. The rock surrounding the blue part has faded to a dark, lifeless gray.

I flail my arms, swimming to the surface as fast as I can. Legacy may not be gone, but she won't last long. I need to figure out which way to go, and we need to leave right now.