(Zeslinry)
The boat carrying me to the old kingdom was small, with an older diesel engine I think.
This once had been a fishing boat, but now it carried refugees, immigrants or pilgrims. Depending how one wanted to look at it.
Not exactly travellers on board, nor bandits either.
I looked at the waves, listening to the boat engine steady rhythm.
The other people around me were mostly families.
Often, one parent at least was missing.
As I was too.
Knowing how unlikely I would ever hear from my parents again, I eventually followed their advice and fled north.
Because none of us heard any good news returning from the starving conflict so far, one after the other we came to assume the worst.
Many parents had left for that weird war at the end of the world, in the longest low intensity conflict of the century. But the conflict of long and slow attrition was likely reaching its end.
And the princesses long struggle failed.
My parents told me to flee from likely retaliation if our side came to fail.
These political struggles and conflicts happening literally on the other side of the globe always felt unreal and odd to me.
It felt pointless to still send people and material to die in a prostrated war where lines barely changed in over a decade and longer even since I was born.
Information was fragmented, eventually dimming. And after years without reliable news, we feared the worst. And when there was nothing left but silence coming back from overseas, a wide sentiment of worry gained not only me, but entire cities if not countries.
If we've lost, maybe the enemy will soon surge to exterminate us. So more and more over the last few months, there was this rising tendency of leaving the old cities to head into the wilder northern lands. Maybe millions emigrated to all the countries of northern latitude. The further away from the equator one could get, the safer it would feel.
With most mechanised military forces disappearing, we were defenceless. Really worldwide, there had been only that one disputed frontier and battlefield left. Now it was shrouded in defeat.
~
Like every children of my generation, I had wanted to enrol at some point.
My parents berated me and even hit me, for the first and last time, on that day when I suggested it.
For me, they had higher hopes they said...
They wanted me to be resourceful and educated, not vain cannon fodder. But all we could see was injustice winning so far away. It was an intolerable reality we all had to swallow as teenager. We hated it, of course we wanted to fight.
And I had to swallow bitterly my parents lesson then.
Not long after, as if to give me an ultimate lesson, or to sacrifice themselves in my stead, they enrolled. Stunning me in an awful way.
As if to prove their point to me that war wasn't the smart option.
See how we return, if we even return, and then think again for yourself.
If someone had to die pointlessly... They chose to go instead of me, so I could still have in a way my impulse be satisfied, only by somebody else, and be proven wrong in the end...
They never returned.
And as all the lines of communication with the south definitely went silent, people began to really flee this country.
I waited for nearly another year, wandering through streets growing more hollow and dirty. Anxiety and the shared fears got to me gradually, and I followed the general tendencies.
Now I was looking at the sea, to bring myself toward this old and new land of opportunities.
We might never have heard anything back from the south, but life carried on.
Here and ahead in the distance, on the wide and old island, there were some cities with good activity.
Out there hopefully, I would be safer from the possible aftermath of the losing war of Intemporelle.
It wasn't quite the future they had ambitioned for me, but good enough that I was alive even without them.
I knew that most of the islands lands were inhabited, despite being fertile.
Fertile deserts, that could be enough to live on.
The boat was meant to bring us to one of the busiest port cities of the Eastern shore. From that start, I would see.
It was gently floating its way closer. The weather was alright but the winds could still get freezing, in this early month of January.
I was only a few days away from an apocalypse that would make as if every other land had been spirited away.
~
As long as we would keep ourselves in remote rural areas, we should be safe.
I embraced my parents' advice, which they couldn't in the end follow themselves.
I would cultivate and grow vegetables to survive, and that would be it. A good field and a few animals would suffice.
With the others, in the fears from the loss of the war, we thought our best chances at survival were on these forgotten islands.
Out there, everything was lost or abandoned nowadays. Almost. On a global scale, it would now be wiser to lay low and away from the exposed cities.
Forget justice and equity, just survive, away from their sight.
Our societies and maybe even species were already on a steady decline actually, long even before the fateful day.
The world's population hadn't waited for this sudden apocalypse to shrink in steady and rapid decline toward hazardous thresholds.
Languages and genotypes were disappearing for good every other day.
The white day only shut more abruptly the last page of our history as a global union of societies.
~
The small group I was landing in England with, they were mostly bound to an old natural reserve. Out there they would exploit a new mine or two.
It was a budding small city-state out there in the mountains and forests, hidden under the shroud of the wider ghost state of the old kingdom.
The port city, away from where we debarked, looked promising to me for a start. And I wasn't naïve enough to believe all would be happy and free in that new town, if I were to follow the others.
Everyone with some education knows what to expect in hidden and remote colonies.
With others that didn't buy the promises any better than me, we jumped off the truck along the road. We had reached this land, which had been the most difficult part.
We immediately began to scatter along into the wild, before our would be captors or saviours would catch up on us.
I never planned to work for the likes of them, but I needed to hitch the boat ride.
After a few days in the moors, feeling odd and lonely, I found back the coastal roads and the distant but lively city.
At that time I was hungry and planning to steal some things to hold on if I had to.
But onward I wanted to get a job for a short while, just enough to get a proper start.
The city was mostly self-organised, so I could see opportunities to steal little bits and putting them aside for a while, like everyone else. Some places were too chaotic to notice if a box of potatoes went missing once in a while.
That was my immoral, improvised and hopeless plan anyway. As much as I wished to do better.
Funnily enough and bittersweetly surprising to me, disclosing my level of education and abilities as such, landed me quickly a job good enough not to need to resort to theft even once.
The higher hierarchy of the city was in a day to day struggle to keep things standing and going.
What they lacked in our days were not strong arms and deft hands, but organised minds able to complement what the few computers couldn't directly organize.
Before the end of the first day, I had found a job in maintenance logistics, and been given a place to stay.
The flat was dusty and clearly had belonged to someone else before, but no one had bothered to sort, empty or clean the place, in at least a few years. That was common.
I entered my new place to live in in a little daze though. I had been hired immediately and been given this.
They were places where one could be useful and recognised for it rapidly.
It made me even wonder whether I should rethink my ambitions, if there was still so many opportunities to build and maintain the organisation to keep things alive in this city.
But I wanted to think it over for the night.
Unknowingly to me, that would be the only night.
The next dawn, was on that painful day.
Most things and thoughts just went away.
~