Under the pale red sky, Part 1

I stepped into the cold dark night of Christmas Eve. People were singing. Kids were yelling and screaming. This is the only Christmas memory I ever had: stepping out of the training center. My hands were still shaking, the vibrations from the sword hitting each other.

As I walked out, about twenty feet from the door a snowball hit me straight in the face. I turned to a kid with his eyes wide open not knowing what to say, I turned the other way and saw another kid with the same expression. I reached for the ground and threw a snowball at the kid that threw one at me. He laughed and I laughed. I slowly walked away, still smiling.

I returned to my house, with all my stuff packed up at the door. I was surely puzzled. I moved my way in between my stuff and reached for my door, with the key I unlocked it. I jumped over my two hundred year old spell books, which were scatted on the ground, which made my quite mad. Inside I saw my wife and my child. My wife asked me politely to leave. I didn’t understand I asked her why, and then she shouted, “leave”… My son was crying next to the Christmas tree. My mouth was open; I stared blankly into her eyes. I finally got a real expression on my face but for some reason, it was a smile. I grabbed my spell books and my clothes and left.

I should probably shed some light on this; I work for the High Society of Kingdom Defenses, or, H.S.K.D. All we really do it protect this land from foreign invaders. I am Second Captain, which means I spend a lot of my time with my group. And not very much time with my family… I guess my wife had enough of it. At first, I thought it wasn’t that bad, I could win her back, we could still be together, I could change. But soon, I would have nothing.

So, after I left I went back to my group and decided to spend the night with them, until I could find somewhere to live. The guys were making jokes about her, how she was a she-devil and how they could see her horns when she reached to get something off the ground; I punched them in there face. After the stupid jokes, we went to sleep. Suddenly, an alarm went off. We were all puzzled, and dazed. Our General ran into the room and told us we had to evacuate this whole kingdom in sixty minutes.

We ran outside, the sky was blood red. I looked out to the east and the sun was rising. But, at first, it didn’t look like the sun; it was a red ball of mass. It didn’t shine, I stared at it and my eyes didn’t burn. It was hard to describe. The city alarm was going off, people were running out of their houses in panic. We tried to calm down people, but it was useless. Eventually I sent a flare into the sky, making a HUGE sound. Everyone got quiet. I yelled “Shut up!” I said “no one knows what’s going on here, and if we did know I don’t think you would want to hear it. Now get your crap and load it onto the caravan. We need to evacuate, now!”

To my surprise, they did. People got their clothes and food, because that was all we allowed the to bring. I couldn’t stop looking up into the sky. It was beautiful. I would get lost in it, until one of my guys pulled me back. We had about half the kingdom loaded up when the sun exploded. There was a terrifying, ear piercing sound. Not like a normal explosion. It was more like nails on a chalk board.

People jumped out of the caravans in a panic, running out of the kingdom. I was once again lost in the sky. Not looking away, like a force was keeping me from looking down. The sun exploding made the sky even redder. A few seconds later there was a meteor shower, coming down to earth right on top of us. But it was coming from where the sun had been.

I finally came back to my mind “It wasn’t the sun”. I thought to my self. Then I yelled: “It wasn’t the sun!”

I was yelling “get out of here, get the caravans going”.

One after another, rocks about six feet long were crashing right on top of us. I hoped on a caravan and looked back. Others were still loading. I had to help, so I jumped off the caravan I was on and ran over to the other. I herd a huge crash right behind me; I dared myself to look back. The group of caravans I was just on, with half the Kingdom on it, and almost all of the members of the H.S.K.D, were gone. All in their place were a perfect line of meteors. I screamed “No!”

I looked back at the other caravans, I ran over to them.

I said “No time, we need to run for it!”

The driver of the caravan hopped out, and yelled for everyone to leave their stuff and run.

I remember looking up into the sky again. Like everything was slowing down. It looked like it was raining fire, down on our kingdom.

I remember running. Every now and then looking back. And looking at people around me. Not saying a word.

I remember it was quite, no one was screaming anymore, they were done screaming, no one was crying anymore, they were done crying. No one was talking, they were too busy to talk. We were just running.

I remember waking up in a tent with a person looking down at me. There was a white light in his hand, and he had his hand hovering my chest. He was healing me. “What’s wrong with me?” I asked. “Nothing” He replied. “I’m just making sure your alive and well”. “Thanks” I said.

I got up and looked outside the tent expecting a huge camp of half the kingdom. I was terribly wrong, it was a small camp of about one hundred people.

There were about eight hundred people in the Kingdom before the attack, seven hundred died, and sixty-four were going to die from one disease, never recorded before. None of the six doctors we had knew how to cure it. But we did know that it was contagious and spreading fast. Me and the other fifty people knew what we had to do. We left the ones with the disease at the camp. We had to, or we all would have died.

We walked for miles… We walked for hours…we didn’t know where we were going. But we would get there, one way or another.

Eventually, we got there. After hours of walking, we knew where we were. We were in to territory of our sister Kingdom: Terranus.

We rejoiced! We ran up the hill as fast as our feet would take us. When we got up to the top, we froze. With eyes wide and jaws open. We saw Terranus was in ruins. We froze like statues. Some cried some fell on the ground. I just stood there.

Eventually, we went down to the ruins of our sister Kingdom. We split up into two teams, and looked for survivors.

As my team walked, we saw the meteors that hit, were opened, and were hollow inside. And when I touched it, it was cold, amazingly cold.

We kept walking. Until we saw movement in a destroyed building. I pulled out my sword from my left side, and approached it slowly. There was a hole going into the ground big enough for one person. I went into it, it smelled of death and decay. When I started to go out, a woman in ragged clothes, and dirt and junk all over her, charged at me with a stick with a sharp rock tied onto it. She cut down at me, aiming to hit me on the head with the stick. I quickly parried with my sword and shoved my way out of the hole. When I got out of the hole, we stared each other down.

She lunged at me; I jumped out of the way, and charged at her with the handle of my sword, the bladed pointing away from her. She quickly moved out of the way and jumped to try to hit me with a crushing movement. I dropped my sword and caught the stick, I tugged on it, and she let go. I threw the stick behind me. She charged at me with her fists. She threw a punch at me, I caught it, and threw her fist to the side, she still had momentum, and then fell on me, I caught her and held her in my arms.

I slowly put her down. She looked up at me. I got a good look at her face; she was beautiful. She had long hair, and huge blue eyes.

She whispered to me “I’m sorry, they always come, I must defend myself.”

“Who always come? What happened here?”

“They came out of the rocks, from the sun. They killed my brother, and our king, some fled, but they died before they could get out of the front gates.”

“You need to come with us, we can help you”

She didn’t say anything after that.

I laid her down into my arms and carried her to out campsite.

I sat in my tent thinking about her. But I knew I had to keep my mind focused, what happened, why did it happen. Who can help us? But she kept popping into my mind. Eventually, I went to sleep.

The next morning, I walked over to her tent. She was awake and was combing her wet hair. She had on new clothes (still ragged, but new) she didn’t have any dirt on her anymore and she didn’t smell like a rotting corpse. I got her attention.

She looked at me and smiled.

“Nice to see you again.” she said “Sorry about yesterday. I have to keep on my toes if I want to survive.”

“Yeah, your right.” I sat down in front of her. We stared into each others eyes.

“You fight pretty well for a commoner.” I said.

“I’m not a commoner; I was the Captain of the Kingdom watch.” She said somewhat braggingly.

“You know, me and my squad are on our way to look for the people responsible for these attacks, care to come with us?”

“Its not as if I have anything to look forward to staying here so, very well.”