480. Wilderness, 8 - Jahr 13 ~ Book of Magenta

(Myls)

We passed a young mountain range and entered a desert.

We don’t slow down to enjoy the sceneries. There’s a good reason why.

But when the path ahead is just empty and clear, my gaze wanders around a little.

It’s so not-like Europe. The landscapes are much more impressive.

And the sky became that deep clean blue unlike anywhere else.

It’s a little exhilarating to ride a bike in such infinite spaces.

As for why we have to hurry, is because something else is racing against us.

A pink glint rising above the horizon.

It’s brighter than Venus, but it’s so much worse than that.

When I spot it in the horizon, now I start shivering.

Because it means the countdown is on.

About three hours left to find a sold shelter, before the insane orbital strike begins.

Otherwise, it’s death. And feeding the star.

And as we ride on that ancient road to Solaris, I wonder if that isn’t somewhat similar to what the people from that age felt.

When that sun is rising, the sky becomes oppressive.

Unthinkable death will follow in its wake...

I can’t relate to such ancient history. All I know are the post war summaries.

All I know is I begin to fear for my life when I’m outside and this sunrise occur.

We speed up to the closest town-looking pile of rubbles.

Meanwhile, the pale glint of that satellite rises alone in the perfectly pure sky. At least it’s easier to spot and track in this land during daytime.

We find collapsed buildings into a network of caves. It’s a buried city.

It’s not the best. The ground is unstable.

We have to try.

We hide in a heavy building, still close to the surface. We don’t want to get flooded in when the rain comes.

Zenith comes for the two suns.

And the purifying flood follows.

Though in that desert where almost nothing grows, not much actually changes. Not much is dissolved or discoloured here.

However the earth quickly flows into muds here. The earth moves under the rain. As if the desert was a liquid, a sea frozen in time suddenly waking up.

Under that rain, for a moment, it resumes its flow.

And as we expected, the sunken city crumbles further and collapses dramatically because of it.

We hold on where we are, ready to jump inside the next building if ours collapse, panic in our hearts.

Blume tries to design clothes that could survive that rain and protect us, but it seems harder than It sounds.

Probably because that rain isn’t technically an acid, but a cluster of exotic elements based on T.I. that are meant to break down baryons.

M - Which means?

B - It’s not a molecular acid and not even a nuclear acid, it’s a quantum acid. It’s meant to break apart not molecules or atoms but quarks themselves. This T.I. goes against strong force completely, so long it hits something organic... Or made of T.I.

M - There must be a way to stop it or even turn it against it...

B - I’m thinking.

The rain finally stops outside meanwhile.

Our building held mostly. Others across the chasms are collapsing into the new lake.

After a moment, we feel small quakes. Something is wrong.

We run out to the motorcycle and rush outside.

~

The rain began flying upward, carrying a lot more mud than usual.

It lifted in the air large amounts of dirt, causing a new ring of waves to spread around, bringing even more collapsing of buildings.

We rode out fast enough to avoid being caught in the upward rain. That was very risky, but there’s the minute gap.

That second kind of rain is not as deadly as when it falls but we don’t want to fully check how dangerous it still is.

We stopped right outside the circle of damp devastation. I laid the bike down to let the mud on the tires escape. They are beings dissolved slightly as the drops escape.

As we looked at the city collapse and the twister vacuuming the rain back into the depths of the sky, we didn’t notice what happened behind us.

We just heard an odd splattering noise, followed rapidly by smaller noises as we turned around.

Just a little further, we found charred corpses again. Completely destroyed human bodies. At least three of them, scattered, turned to mush.

Something was really off.

I still couldn’t understand.

Blume didn’t want to tell me what her hypothesis were, but she looked dark.

I noticed that one of the torsos lying there had abnormal growths in the back. Maybe it wasn’t quite human.

What I know is they were not there when we rode to here and stopped. So they must have fallen from the sky.

We didn’t speak.

We both knew something bad and grim was getting closer.

I raised the bike up and hopped on. Blume followed and we resumed our ride quickly away from this place.

It is a race. And we can’t afford to underestimate Magenta...

~

We’re getting close to the land of Solaris.

I know I should not expect to see anything left to remind me of what was once the splendour of the richest city on Earth.

I know nothing would have been left after a century of abandon.

But still... It’s like I’m on the moon or Mars. Nothing alive as far as I can see. Just desert.

Nothing human-made remaining in sight.

It’s darker, the sands being of a different colour . And they’re more itching.

There are sharper bits in here around. Glass. Metals.

Hard to believe there ever was any human activity at all in this wide and barren corner of the world.

Nothing but rocks and boulders if you’re lucky, sand and soot. Ageless soot.

And then, the dreadful sun rose again over there.

Countdown starts. My heart is squeezed, and I speed up. Because there’s no building in sight in this land.

I speed up ahead toward a kind of rock wall or cliff rising in the distance.

As we get closer, we realise that this rock cliff was actually a human made wall. It’s so eroded it’s part of the landscape now.

A billion tons of concrete made from the sand and crushed stones of the same landscape. It’s the same colours, but it’s dense and hard like corundum.

It’s the outer wall of the city of the sun we’ve just reached.

We climb into the collapsed parts until we find a hollow we could see. A tunnel. A centuries old crypt unfolds.

Blume lifted the motorcycles over her shoulders to bring it inside, crushing the rocks under her feet. She left footsteps on the rocks as if it was mud. They’re all monsters...

In a million years, an archaeologist will wonder about those.

I switch on the bike engine inside the tunnel, and we ride in the hollow corridor from the depths of that wall, into the dusty darkness.

~