Silent Rain

[Geno]

A desolate wasteland, painted with wild, radioactive storms accompanied by a hundred more clouds of any kind and colour, inbound from unknown directions. Time was irrelevant, and so was the wind. Such things are trivial in a rotting world, after all.

Only a lone figure in a dark hazmat suit stood in the midst of the abandoned landing pad, which was speckled with people less than a year ago. But now, only the shadowy wraiths of men and women who had passed away long before she arrived on the Crèmont plaza remained, forever cursed to wander the infinite remains of Planet Leeds, whose fire would never fade. Her parents, her friends, even her mentor, everyone was gone from her life. Buried under towering pillars of screaming, collapsed buildings. A literal dreg heap of death and corpses, oh, the corpses. Adorning the streets leading up to the previously industrialized plaza; some were missing their shoes, and some were entirely stripped off of their clothes, leaving nothing but a husk of a naked, decaying man behind. The air was so polluted and toxic, that not even the carrion eaters would dare to approach the corpse of any human lying on the floor, the most rotten beast of them all.

"I remember the days when I've used to be known as Tracy."

She morbidly thought to herself, well aware that no one would ever hear her chatter ever again. Her hazmat suit was the only moving figure that resembled a human, after all. Tattered with strange but sturdy clothing, both from Gauls and Bretonians. She looked up one more time to take a gander at yet another thunderstorm, a harbinger of countless more flakes of ash and cinder which were about to adorn the infinity of rotting bodies and abandoned ships as though it was going to be a very, very grim Christmas. There were no noises at all, other than the eventual collapsing building at the Southern blocks, the ones carried all the way from the Taus by the Gauls themselves. Even though they were makeshift storage rooms for soldiers presumably, they were light enough to be constructed in less than a month and sturdy enough to last sixty hours of orbital bombardments. It all looked like a painted world, where the ash-covered roads would be the canvas and the collapsing pillars and tons of rubble would be a drop of monotonous paint left by an artist who had little creativity in the choice of colors.

Only the howling wind was the only hearable voice in that desolate, abandoned world. A remainder of Toledo, the planet spoke of in rumors and legends, a world so great and majestic that fell from grace on the moment mankind tried to push itself even further on the research of the Nomads. And, much like Icarus, a fall from grace that no one would even remember or mourn. Many were the citizens lost, and many more were the ones who are still dying, hiding in some rotting bunker. She sighed to herself, hoping that she would have a chance to sit in a bed and read Holobooks or paper books of any kind until she would just collapse on one.

The biggest massacre in Human history, five billion angels were lost at the hands of the Gauls. This thought alone has always been too much for her to handle, and while she expressed anger and resentment against the devils who unleashed a miasma of death and destruction upon every living being in Leeds, she eventually realized that her frustration was all for naught. None of it even mattered, and none of it will ever matter, still. All that remains in her broken life are broken walls, and broken ships left behind by broken men. Scars and white linings etch both of her pale and frail arms, a reminder to herself that she was still alive and well, because pain not only pushes humans towards safety, but it brings them to absolution, evolution, even forgiveness at times.

"What is it that's stopping me from taking this helmet off, anyway?"

Suddenly, some footsteps echo throughout the landing pad adorned with Kestrels and other freighters full of civilians who were on a rush to leave, presumably. Upon hearing that noise, which she hadn't heard of in what seemed to be forever, her soul felt a jolt of warmth, and happiness, something that was lost hundreds of years ago.

But much to her dismay, there was no one behind her. No one to comfort her broken spirit. No one to save her, no one to take her out of that dreg heap of despair. No one to kiss her forehead to tell her that it was all just a bad, bad fever dream. No one to wake her up from that nightmare, and to help her limp to a hospital bed, or any bed at all.

Only a trail of bodies, gathering dust and cold.

She fell on her knees. Collapsed, crestfallen. There was no point in moving out of that incoherent bundle of pylons and dismantled warships, she would only find even worse in the outer world.

The wind howls.