Gloria - Part 3All around him were the corpses of dead skyscrapers. He stood midst the remains of a basement, lit dimly by the starry sky. Raphaela was nowhere in sight. In fact, he couldn't see much of anything in this lighting. "Raphaela? Where are you? Ah!" A bright flash suddenly attacked the front of his face. "Don't do that! What is this thing?"She waved her beam of light in a slow circle, carefully scanning the rubble for something in particular. "Faux-Paradis technology, as you would call it. It's called a flashlight, powered by a battery.""That's a flashlight?" He was about to inquire further when she began walking towards an unfamiliar contrap
Gloria - Part 2A group of silent figures stood at the edge of town, looking to the desert with squinting eyes that stung from the late-summer light. The footsteps always led through the sand and vanished in the night. The next morning, nothing would return. "That's the fifth one..." The gray-haired and balding leader of the village sighed deeply, his brows furrowed deeper than canyon fissures as he shook his head. Slowly, the small crowd dispersed and scattered back to their places like tributaries from a river.Three moons have passed, and the refugees were fitting in well. Fears that the war was moving further north had subsided with no further groups of
Gloria - Part 1"This is the end, isn't it? The end is when a period is placed on the paper, and all definite things cease to exist. This is the end of my story, or it should be. Yet I'm still hesitant to nail the last mark through the parchment.The evil wizard had been vanquished. The dragon had been slain. The quest was completed. The prince prevailed and married the lovely damsel in distress, and they'll live in a spacious castle by the sea, happily ever af... no...There is no such thing as a truly happy ending. Everyone has their own reason and story, each telling the tale of another, manifold... manifold... In fact there is no such thing as a finish
A Line Between Here and Heaven For the longest time, I've envied birds for their wings... What does it feel like to be in midair... suspended by nothing with nothing but the breath of wind dancing around my body...? Does it feel like heaven? What does it feel like to be in heaven? When people ask me why I waste so much time lying on my back, staring at the moon and stars, I ask them why they're wasting their time trying to kill each other. Sadly enough, their reason sounds better than mine. It pays. Twenty years of war and half the usable land on the planet turned to waste land. The other half is layered steel and concrete hexagonal platforms, like a beehive. I wonder