The Triad

My name until today was Mark. I am eighteen and I have spent my last fourteen years learning how to show to my Sentinel, during the seven days of Stagium Camp, that I’m the best in my Triad. I wake up early every morning, I glance out the window, see the red sun throwing his cold light on the basaltic rocks and I tell myself that I must fight and practice again and again, even harder. My family teaches me to think and act like this every day, hour, second of my life, telling me that it will be a day when this habit will save me. Not my life, just me. As a Triada’s child, I know what this means: today the Stagium Camp will start, and is supposed to make me the “Primus”. Don’t ask me what the “Primus” is; I’m too scared to explain it right now.

The first sun is up and the second one will be on the sky in a few hours. We have only five or six clock rotations until the light will turn violet and we should put on our protection masks. I hate them but I suppose I hate everything – how would you feel if you grew up surrounded by coldness, hard trainings and dissimulation? But forget about this; it’s time to wake up and leave home, so let’s do it.

I get down from bed and take a cold shower. My parents told me once that in my first three years they washed me with warm water but I can’t remember. As I can’t remember anything about hugs, songs, nor kisses. Sometimes I can see in my mother’s eyes a desire to hold me in her arms, but my father’s tough look prevents her from doing it. After that kind of moments, she always looks guilty and I can’t bear this. Later after early childhood period, we moved here, in the mountains, and the process began. I am “lucky”, because my family is rich and they could train and prepare me, but I didn’t take any other advantage of this situation. I didn’t have beautiful toys, fancy clothes or beautiful birthday parties. I’ve only learned how to fight, as I already mentioned.

My breakfast is waiting in the kitchen: eggs, cheese and some vegetable salad – all I need in the morning, prepared by my mom late in the night. I suppose I am the first one who woke  up but it wouldn’t bother me to eat alone; I could think about myself, my life and what I could become seven days from now. Will I be the “Primus” or one of the other two? Because of all those thoughts, the food has no taste today. Outside, the red light turns already in orange and will remain so until the second sunrise. The big mountain in front of me is grey and empty. No trees, no bushes, not even grass. Everything is dead, as is the whole planet. Only the smooth, beautiful sun light polishes the sharp edges of rocks. Our house sits on the top of a hill known as “Berry Crane Peak”. Ironically, this guy is our hero, the one who, one hundred years ago, invented The Confluence. We should “die” somehow, disappear from this world and live a very limited life, facing our sad condition, knowing what we could’ve been. This “hero” thinks it’s much better for us to survive no matter how, even three people in one, and squeezing our consciousness in the same body.

We are all too many for our poor Earth and this is the reason I am here today, waiting for the Stagium Camp. Everywhere you look there are only gravel and rocks, old empty riverbeds, barren plains, sharp mountains under the fire sky. Nothing left from ancient civilizations, no birds, no flowers, no grass. Our cities are carved in stone or built in metal and glass and this is all left from ancient civilizations and nature of beautiful earth. We are rich and poor in the same time, having houses and technologies but no food. There are here people who have never tasted meat or cheese. They live only on seeds, vegetable and bread made with horrible flour obtained from dry herbs. I tasted it once; it’s a choking, stifling powder. However, some underground springs satisfy our thirst and that’s why we survived until now, even with such a big price like the Assimilation. I’m not ready to be assimilated and, surprisingly, nor to assimilate somebody else. Even if my entire life I grew up with this perspective and I heard about this being something natural and necessary, I cannot accept it. I cannot accept that somebody will transform me in a second personality for himself or reversely, that I could do it to somebody else.