The Winter War

Prologue

Prologue

      Deep violet clouds billowed in the heavens, just barely visible between the skyscrapers that filled the skyline. Red lightning flashed within the clouds bringing a certain sense of foreboding, a sense of dread that was rightly placed as the red lighting meant a buildup of carbon tetroxide and iron. Steel rain. Still barely understood by the top science academies, the literal tons of carbon and iron in the air mixed with other elements from the centuries of non-stop industry and absolute zero oversight and formed an amorphourous solid that fell and splashed like rain but soon hardened on whatever it touched. It hit like hail and could easily kill someone just from the toxins within.

      The lighter indigo sky was already beginning to darken as the sun sunk below the horizon meaning it was going to be a cold, miserable night for everyone in the city. Already the shutters were being lowered along the walls of the enormous three sided Quechita; an open sided skyscraper with multiple floors all serving as farms for the billions of citizens on Vasghyrr. Block 23-A, where Ezca stood now in the midst of an irrigation field, overlooked Bli-Yan Heights; the place he lived with his family and grew up. Once a prime example of luxury and of things to come the tenement buildings were named for King Bli-Yan who ushered in a new age of commerce and wealth for all the Druidth people, it now nothing more than a slum where crime was the order of the day, every day, and the police did nothing since they had more upscale neighborhoods to look after. The triangular building was covering in thick layers of lumpy metal from years of steel rain, the nicer districts hired people to come and clean it off but the poorer ones saw it as a way to patch holes in the walls and insulate the building from the harsh winters.

      As soon as the shutters were down large fans in the ceilings kicked on to provide air current for the workers, and Ezca felt the paper in his hands flap in the artificial breeze. He looked down, past his pale yellow tunic which denoted military service, and brought the recycled paper up. His deployment notice.

      Looking up from the soil with mud on her face, Te-Chu, his younger sister who was his ward after their parents died in the fire seven years ago, beamed proudly. She wore her light hair pulled back in a knot which kept it out of her eyes, and out of the mud, as she worked.

      “So you’re really going, Huh?” She asked while she worked her delicate hands around the root of a blue plant with lightning bolt shaped leaves. “I’ll have the flat all to myself?”

      “Quit joking,” He chided. “You know I won’t be coming home for a very long time.”

      Te-Chu’s face fell, no longer proud but more longing. The last of her family was leaving and she would be alone with the exception of a few friends that worked with her in the Quechita. “I know that big brother is going off to be the great war hero, to win battles and have monuments built in his honor.”

      “I didn’t have a choice,” Ezca reminded her. “It was enlist or we both starve. Or we could have taken Gre-Do up on his offer and sell your body to him to pay the rent each month.” This made Te-Chu look away in shame; she knew it was her fault her brother couldn’t finish school, she was too young to live on her own and he was on the other side of Vasghyrr when the fire happened. Old wiring from two centuries ago that had been chewed on too many times by rodents.