(Rose)
Our hair was more beautiful than it ever was, smooth brilliant and black. Gorgeous.
We left at dawn this south eastern European castle, heading south across the mountains.
The place where our love first blossomed in a new way, you said. I would have used less elegant way to state it.
I'm feeling still a little confused and overwhelmed about it, but not bad or nauseous. I was happy too.
Bleue sure is radiant now, and filled with new energy and will.
Sometimes she's holding my hand while wearing a blinding bright smile. She has a halo of happiness around her. I can't help but enjoy it as well.
As we head south toward the sea, whichever sea it may be, the climate progressively shifted from alpine to mediterranean.
After crossing a few smaller mountains, we reached an airport. We could see it below in the valley as we climbed down. The bigger planes are easy to spot from a distance.
As we entered its domain, we saw the rust everywhere we couldn't see from the distance. The giant white planes turned into decaying wrecks. From afar, they looked pristine. From below, they were flaking their paint making a glittery shadow around them. They also had begun melting and fusing with the road where they stood.
They still looked impressive. How were we able to make suck monsters fly is magic to me. It's so different from the Zeppelin aircrafts we used to have in my days.
We didn't dare using the spacecraft we found before, and we probably won't use any other aircraft found here either. We still look around though.
Some of the planes have melted and sunk in the ground as if it had been a swamp.
Inside the building, entering from the tarmac, it looks like a factory, not an airport.
Where they loaded and unloaded cargo freight and goods is now a jungle of various colours of rust.
By some odd chemical reactions, some of the stains move around under the light, like living things. Maybe they are in some way.
We observed a stain of rust spreading on a side, oxidising the metal and making the paint flake off and fall; while on the other end, the stain was receding, reducing the metallic rust back to its clean metal state.
Thus, the stains were moving around, like worms over this jungle of materials.
The whole room had a small music to it, mostly from the occasional falling of a paint flake or the metal being stressed on some points, when the rust stains passed there.
We spend some time looking through a pack of long abandoned luggage for anything useful to us.
Mostly clothing. Some books being in Greek, others in Arabic, and others in Hebrew I think. I guess we're heading in the right direction.
We found some money, ironically.
We took the soaps, and a bag of new clothes to sum it up.
The deserted halls of the airport still looked as if they could work. Except for the giant snake sleeping in one of the halls perhaps. It blinked and saw us. It twitched, but didn't move. Only its eye the same size as either of us followed us carefully around.
We left it there without bothering it. Even if I never had any bad encounter with snake-looking creatures before.
Seeing the sun and its warmth outside, we went to find some water in another building before leaving this place.
With sunglasses and hats on, we left by the main gate, along a road stretching ahead for kilometres.
~
We walk by many abandoned vehicles along the road. Like in England, some look like they've been there for hundreds of years, and some as if they left their factory only a few days ago.
We can see the full range of possibilities between these two extremes. Some clean, some with giant mushrooms inside, some melted in rusts, some obviously burnt to a crisp, up to an alchemical point, as the steel itself turned into coal.
And one of them still working, oddly.
It has a very odd look, and black or dark blue mirrors all over. It's oddly cold to the touch under this sun.
It looked pristine, and it made some noises as we got close to it. And after curiosity led us to further investigating, we managed to make it start.
With a tire missing, it doesn't roll very well, and the engine is spitting burning plastics at regular intervals, so it probably won't last for very long; but it still works.
We're rolling ahead along the road while incomprehensible things appear on the front glass and screen. It also tries to speak we think, but the sound is just scratchy static noise.
We manage to make it roll over a few kilometres of adventure, before the engine finally collapses on itself. A cloud of smoke from burnt plastic and metal begins to rise from it, even though there's no flame, it's clearly too hot by far, and done for.
We take back our bags and leave it be, resuming our walk toward the sea.
~
As night finally falls on that blazing day, we go into an upside down truck beside the road to settle ourselves for the night and rest.
In a thousand years, when nature will have swallowed all of our ruins and leftovers, the landscapes dented with them will look surreal.
We talk a little about Blume as we doze off. It will still take months before we reach her I think.
I wonder how she's been holding on without me. She was really enamoured, even though she was beginning to outgrow this primordial love of hers in the final times together.
With the little leftovers of her within me, I'm pretty sure that she's aware of my survival.
Just a little more patience Blume...
We'll see that you're alright.
And if you want, you'll accompany us as well.
~
The next morning, as we resume walking, we see a second and third sun in the sky.
Blume told me about that optical oddity before. The real and only sun being the brightest one.
I don't remember what needs to happen in the layers of the air and sky for that illusion to happen however.
We push further south as usual, feeling like we're in the great Maghreb desert already.
And then the landscape suddenly shifts.
What looked like a weird looking mountain from the distance turns out to be a gigantic land plateau, broken, leaning and sinking on one side.
It's like a giant plate being stuck into the ground. Only this plate is at least a dozen kilometres wide. It's leaning by about a 45° angle sideway.
And below its shadow, we recognise the glitter of the sea. At last.
The port town near that sudden land rift suffered a nameless geological catastrophe. An impossible one really.
Nonetheless, in a few hours, we will have reached the Mediterranean sea.
~