Morning came fast and to Havillah's delight it brought a blazing sunlight with it. The sky was cloudless and blue and the warm rays of the sun were now kissing her skin even as she stretched out her joints and the site muscles of her back.
It had been a long night tied to that tree branch. A tree branch that was quite thick and strategically placed in the upper most parts of the forest's canopy. The height being safe from any wandering wildlife and the ocassional predator that may have stalked the night. However and despite this relative 'safety' her wooden mattress had not been that comfortable and when the mosquitos had not been trying to bite, the cold wind had been quite violent, howling even as it shook the very branches that Havillah had taken to resting upon. Had it not been for her cloak wrapped around her shoulders, Havillah was sure that she would have been frozen to death.
Thus was the asperity of Havillah's night. A night spent on a bark mattress and a pillow that was so lumpy from all the stuff it contained including the not so soft water bottles. All in all she could not wait for the morning to dawn and when first birds began singing, Havillah was quite impatient to leave. To quickly move on, not just to put enough space between herself and the people she had left behind, but also to explore the vast forest that was spread out below and before her.
It had been so long since Havillah had been in a forest and forests fascinated her. How a cove of trees growing so closely together could harbor so much life? A single tree on it own carried enough life as it was, but the biodiversity within an untouched forest? Havillah could only smile lightly as she thought back to the Misty Mountains of Triberias.
The Misty Mountains had not been mountains per see, but that was the name that the people had given to the towering canopies of green and brown that had stood proud for many years among the clouds. The forests that had one day disappeared around Havillah's twelvth year.
Her own mother, the Elder Tamaar had been there to witness it. She had seen with her own eyes as yet another piece of the great city crumbled into oblivion leaving behind it kilometres upon kilometres of blue skies and the ocassional cloud here and there. In one moment the Misty Mountains were gone and little Havillah had always thought that they had fallen into the sea. Growing up, she hated to think of what had happened to the people or animals who had had the misfortune of having great giant trees rain down upon them, upon their heads and upon their homes seemingly from nowhere. Or maybe, it was just like they had said. That the trees had fallen into nullity. Into a void of nothingness. Havillah really hoped that these sentiments were true and that those forests mighty as they were had not ended up on some poor human's head.
For along time, Havillah could only wonder. Her disturbed tranquility being the same thing that led her to explore. Her perturbation from the occurrence leading to the very edges of the city and that was how she discovered the viewpoints. Her discovery of the viewpoints had led to a new fascination. A great curious about the things of world below and the reasons why they were forbiden mingle. She also wondered why the city was crumbling. Why piece by piece the land area of Triberias was diminishing. When she finally gathered enough courage to question her mother, the woman had explained it with a tale of a lost Virtue. A third Virtue that had been wielded by the ancients. That now, not even the Council of Elders knew how to wield. No one had the knowledge and the people were now perishing for it. All that the Council knew was that it had once existed but no one could wield it now and because of this, there was a disparity and the Inner Sanctum continued to remain closed. With every passing day, as the sands of time continued to flow, the foundations of the city continued to crumble, forging panic even though it was common knowledge that the Cataclysm would never go beyond the gates.
Havillah had also been among the many who were panicking and her mother had given her this information in order to reassure her and it had worked back then. All the people in Triberias lived within the gates and because of that, they would always be safe. As a twelve year old, that had been enough to sate her. To quell her panic, but as she grew up, Havilalh understood more and the matters of the past that continued to reoccur, began to worry her.
All the farms were beyond the gates.
The livelihoods of the people and everything that had been built over the years was also beyond those gates. Without these resources, the farms and the livestock, the population would begin to fade and surely, they would all be starved to death.
As long as the gates remained open, she knew that there would be other alternative sources of food, but who would knew how bad things would get? She had read somewhere that the gates were alive and that they could close themselves. They could close themselves if things got so bad in order to defend the Sanctuary.
In the last couple of years thing had gotten worse and without this third Virtue Havillah had wondered what kind of trouble it would spell out for her and her people.
After being banished, she now knew what it meant for them. What it meant for those who were deemed weaklings. Those who had been found to be weak in Virtue. They were sacrificed for the sake of the rest and wether it was to buy time or just out of malice, Havillah could not tell what the plan was or even what it intended to achieve. However, it made her wonder,what would truly happen when there was finally no one left.