Pieces of People.
Prologue – Fate
“I can’t feel you, I can’t touch you
Do you still exist?
I can’t taste you, I can’t think of you
Do we exist at all?”
-“The Phantom Agony” by Epica
There was nothing left anymore. The world was desolate. Sands took over the land, covering any most traces of anything that was there before. Structures that used to tower above the ground soon became part of the ground. Winds whipped around, uselessly only finding the sand to annoy. A great silence took hold. Ever since the Great Change, nothing was left alive. The only thing that remained was the wandering people. People who were unaffected by the great change and had to continue their sad existence meaninglessly wandering around.
They accepted this as their punishment, their personal hell. For whatever they committed in their life before the Change, they now burdened the sorrow of a meaningless existence. They called themselves Humes.
Humes had two characteristics. They were unable to die; no matter how much physical or mental torture they were put through and no matter how many times they were impaled, torn, broken or cut. They would always mend. Always return to their former state. They could not even age. Time seemingly ebbed away from them and left them and their pale selves in a frozen state. Nothing could affect them. Nothing but sorrow.
Their second characteristic was perhaps a more interesting one. They each developed a unique and individual ability that somehow had to do with their surroundings. Some could control air, some ice and some even light and fire. These abilities had no particular use. Since the Humes were people of a hermit nature, they would barely ever interact between themselves neither socially nor using their ability. To them, it was nothing but an added perk, a sort of consolation prize for being the losers at life.
***
Green was a village that was quite peaceful in its time, home to simple people, who preferred life in the country. Now it was as desolate as any other place. But perhaps not entirely. A boy Hume passed through its boundaries. He was tall, barely sixteen and donned but a dirty black tee and a ripped black pair of jeans. His hair was sleek, long and black that would cover most of his left eye had the wind not been blowing it out of place. His face showed nothing but sorrow. He had one of the strangest abilities. He could connect with places, people and things that were not necessarily there any longer and once connected, he could feel most emotions that they had attached to them.
These enhanced empathic connections with things were the cause of the sorrow on the boy’s face. For the only thing that emanated from these invisible objects was sorrow. Perhaps tinged with regret. Bent over by the effect of his ability, he silently trudged through Green, perceiving its long gone people working, playing, sleeping, reading, writing, thinking, cooking and doing anything else imaginable. It was like the spirit of the village was thrusting all the sorrows of its people directly onto his heart. And it caused in the boy, a pain which even his people’s characteristic healing could never mend.
Trying hard to ignore the pain, the boy looked at his feet moving one in front of the other. A step and then another. Concentrating hard on his motion, he began to make progress and proceed closer to where the village once stopped. His mind flashed with visions of the past with each one of those steps. Now he began to wince with every step, as the flashes became more intense. Still he kept his pace and soon left the village’s empathic area.
At that moment, the desolation and silence of the world would always hit him. He stopped in his tracks to catch his breath and slowly rid himself of the effects of his ability. His breath deepened and his glass green eyes turned to the road ahead. And with immense will power he forced himself to continue on the desolate road to nowhere. To him there was just nothing better to do and that if he ever stopped moving he would lose himself to his powers and then go mad. And who knew what would happen after that.
***
Hours, minutes, seconds, days, years. Time lost meaning. The boy walked. The sun never rose or set. There was just the light of the Change and the dark clouds above it. The boy could barely even remember how the sky was before the Change, and did not even try. There was no point in trying. It would only make him long for something that he would never be able to get. And that would only cause him more sorrow and regret that he himself had had enough of. So without giving it a second thought, he continued on.
The wind suddenly died. The boy’s face flicked down. Knowing what was coming, the boy braced himself. As suddenly as it had died, the wind picked up again with tremendous force. The sands began to twist and turn until suddenly they all were picked up by invisible hands and were flung with an intense force forward. Each grain punctured the boy in many different places. Blood gushed out of each wound but still the boy remained braced. The pain the sandstorm was causing him was nothing. Each sharp sting of every single grain passing straight through his body many times over was nothing.
What caused the wince on the boy’s face was not the pain from the sand. It was the pain of knowing that no matter how many times he was pummelled and torn by the sands, they could never kill him. All the pain the sands would cause would be repeated for eternity and for eternity he would endure it. With no visible end of the storm in sight, the boy made his way through it, leaving behind him a trail of crimson red despair.
With no consolation, no salvation and no hope, Sayr walked on into the depths of the storm.
