Prologue

A Chapter by Ally Baker

Prologue

My name is Vendellyne Jaron Liliquoi Orion Leanbow. The year in which I live is 3647. The place in which I live in Antocleptia, one of the two countries left in the world today. It is the larger of the two countries, both only one mass of land. The other country is known as Kleenomia. Every other piece of land, including islands, has either been destroyed, it’s surfaces left barren and inhabitable with no fertile soil or resources left, or has become so polluted that even venturing close would mean risking deadly toxins.

In my history lessons when I was younger, I learned that our country used to be much larger and was made up of multiple countries. It was known as a “continent” which they called “South America.” But that was centuries ago. Years of neglect and denial about global warming and dwindling natural resources left the population of the continent to slowly die off from hunger as well as many biological diseases. A continent to the north, coincidentally called “North America” had the advantage of what was considered advanced technology of their time and was able to pull through most of the difficulties of that time period. While North America thrived, South America died off and eventually, there was no one left to inhabit the area.

Similar epidemics were happening around the world in countries with limited resources. After about a century of this, the world’s population had dwindled incredibly, almost one fifth of what it used to be. Eventually, nature took its course on North America, among other places; the coastlines moving inwards, tornadoes, tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions. Two large areas were left, not completely unharmed, but the best of what was left of the world, and populations near those areas migrated, coming together, all of their different cultures mixing.

Fortunately, in what was left of the world, some of the people were smart enough to figure out ways to keep everyone alive and even regenerate our resources at an increased rate. The two countries even worked together to attempt to rebuild and nurture some of the destroyed lands back to habitable conditions. They succeeded.

Unfortunately, there was some dispute over which country would get which lands. Some were more habitable; others were larger. Around year 2800 the peace treaties signed by all of the countries in the year 2135 were dismissed, the governments stating that they no longer held authority over them, considering that these new countries did not exist at the time of the signing. After not too very long, World War III broke out.

It has been raging for a little more than eight centuries now. The land over which the war was initiated has long ago been contaminated once again. Resources are back to being limited, although I, nor most anyone else alive today, would know the difference. The government’s main concern is biological, technical, and nuclear weaponry for protection and attacks. It is stressed to never venture past the walls built 5 miles high to protect the citizens of Antocleptia. And I have also believed what I was told; swallowed their stories without a second thought about the lack of evidence they provided… until the day that I met Halon Mave Kellath Tade.

Since that day, my world has been turned upside down. Meeting him was completely coincidental and I couldn’t be more grateful for such an event. It was about a year ago when I met him. Some friends of mine had dared me to use an abandoned tunnel that led to the outside of the wall, grab something to prove that I had made it to the other side, and comeback to the inside of the walls before the toxic air killed me.

I took the challenge and as I entered the tunnel, I stared ahead and focused on the pinprick of light that had to be the other end of the tunnel. I jumped at the sound of the seal closing behind me and locking. I knew my friends were only being safe, trying not to let the air from outside get in, but the sound of that lock still left goose bumps on my skin and a cold feeling of unease in my bones. As I made my way to the end of the tunnel, I made sure to ration the air mask that we had managed to get a hold of. I tried to pick up my pace without making my breathing more rapid. The mask was used and didn’t have much air left in it; we figured about as much as it would take for me to get outside and back in.

By the time I made it to the end of the tunnel, I didn’t have to worry about rationing the air. What my eyes tried to do their best to take in completely stole my breath away. It wasn’t anything like what they had told us about in school. There was grass and it didn’t look like the genetically altered kind that grew faster than what they said used to be “normal”; it was real. I didn’t know how I could tell, but when I ran my hand through it, I just knew.

As I crouched on the ground, awing at the amazing sight of grass, I did not hear his approach, assuming he had even made a sound. All of the sudden, there was a shadow over me. I jumped backwards into his legs, knocking him over. Scrambling to my feet, gasping for the air that wasn’t there, I began to panic. I looked at the screen which informed me what I already knew: there was no air left in the mask. The only thought running through my mind was: I am going to die.

But then I looked at what, or rather who, I had jumped into. It was a man… no, just a very unkempt boy who couldn’t have been much older than me. I learned later that he is only 3 years my senior. I stared him down, my mouth falling slightly open at his obvious beauty even beneath all of his tangled, unwashed hair and dirtied face. My eyes traveled from his long, dark, curly, black hair to broad shoulders which lead to large, muscular, tanned arms and a torso which contained very toned abs.

Finally my eyes reluctantly traveled back to his face and I noticed that while I had been gasping for air that did not exist inside of this mask anymore, this entire time he had been breathing freely, no mask attached to his rugged face. My vision started to blur and the edges were darkening as the lack of oxygen began to take effect on my brain. I started to back away from this strange being and move toward the tunnel opening but the quick movements sent me spinning towards the ground.

I never felt that hard packed ground come in contact with my body though. Instead, something hard and yet soft at the same time caught my fall. Rough hands and hard biceps cradled me as they gently lowered me to the ground. My head was swimming and I was seeing double as this stranger leaned over me. I watched his hand reach out, towards my face, hesitate, and then continue once more. With a bit of difficulty, he removed the mask against my weak and fable attempts to stop him.

Suddenly, new air was filling my lungs and it was unlike any air that I knew. I could feel the difference as I breathed it in, felt the particles from the environment mingling pleasantly with the oxygen. The air in Antocleptia was filtered through the dome that rose over the top of the walls. It was so thin that from anywhere in the country, you could not tell that it was there; it was just common knowledge. The technology of the dome roof filtered out almost everything from outside the walls except for small amounts of oxygen. For this reason, there was an oxygen generator within every quarter square mile.

Hesitantly, I began to breath the air on my own instead of inhaling the possibly toxic chemicals floating around as my body’s instincts for survival took over. Eyes wide, I stared at the person who held me in his arms until my vision steadied and there was only one of him to look at. Once again, the obvious beauty of his face, even under all of that grime, struck me hard enough to make me gasp.

His brows knit together and his dry, cracked lips pursed as concern shown clearly in his crystal-like eyes. My own dull, murky brown eyes found this fascinating and couldn’t focus on anything else. I stared into those deep, soulful orbs of crystallized beauty until he shifted his weight slightly and cleared his throat.

I realized I must have been making him uncomfortable and quickly scrambled to my feet and backed away a couple of paces. I opened my mouth to thank him for catching my fall, saving me from suffocation, say anything. Then it struck me: does he even speak my language? Speak at all?

In Antocleptia, everyone spoke the same language to each other, only the people with jobs high up in the society spoke the only other language in the world and that was only so they could communicate more efficiently with Kleenomians. No one else in the country had even heard what the other language sounded like.

The strange boy opened his mouth, and unlike me, he did not hesitate to speak. “Are you alright?” My mouth fell open, and surprise must have been etched into every part of my face at hearing my own language spoken by this odd boy. Even more surprisingly, he threw his head back slightly and made the most musical, lovely noise I had ever heard. He’s laughing at me! Say something!

“Yes…thank you,” I managed to whisper back in reply.

He extending his right hand, offering me an open palm. “I’m glad to hear to it. My name is Halon Mave Kellath Tade. It’s a bit long, I know, but I assure you, I have earned every name.”

I crinkled my forehead in confusion at his words, not the words themselves, but their meaning. What does he mean he earned his names? He was looking at me expectantly and I realized he was waiting for me to tell him my own name.

“My name is Vendellyne Jaron Liliquoi Orion Leanbow,” I informed him and his eyebrows shot almost all the way up to his hairline in surprise. I glanced down at his right hand which was still extended. “Why are you doing that?” I asked him, waving my own hand at his. Somehow he managed to look even more surprised.

Slowly, he pulled his hand back and let it hang by his leg, his fingers twitching with…unease? Remembering my manners, I took a step forward and reached up to place my left hand on his shoulder. “Peachy match,” I told him and smiled out of politeness.

That musical noise escaped from his mouth again as he shifted so that my hand fell from his shoulder. The look of confusion on my face must have amused him because the laughter continued to the point where he was gripping his sides.

“Do I amuse you Halon of the Tades?” I asked him, but this only caused more laughter. My cheeks began to burn from frustration and embarrassment. Quickly, I turned on my heels and started to head back towards the tunnel.

His hand wrapped around my wrist was so unexpected that I jumped and made an embarrassing squealing sound that made him attempt to suppress a smile.

“I am sorry for laughing. It was rude,” he told me, looking every bit apologetic as he sounded.

“It is forgiven,” I told him, even though I wasn’t so sure that it was.

“Why did you say ‘Peachy match’?” he asked me.

I stared at him in disbelief. After a couple of seconds with no hint of amusement on his face, I realized that he was being serious.

“It is what you say when you meet someone you have not yet met,” I told him as if he was a small child, asking the questions that don’t really require an answer. Then I remembered how he shrugged off my hand when I placed it on his shoulder, insinuating that he did not wish to meet me… or perhaps was not familiar with the gesture. “But you didn’t know that, did you? And when I put my hand on your shoulder, you had no idea what I was doing, did you?”

I started to get more and more excited as I made these realizations. If he didn’t understand any of that, then he had to be from Kleenomia. But… he speaks my language. My head began to throb as I confused myself more and more with each thought and new idea.

I looked back to his face and he was biting his lip, unsure of what to do or say. I thought about what to do for a moment and then finally decided to come outright and ask him what I desperately wanted to know.

“Are you from Kleenomia?” I asked him, holding my breath, awaiting his ‘yes.’

What I wasn’t expecting was for him to look at me like I was mentally unstable and ask, “What’s Kleenomia?” He drew out the word as if he were unsure of how to pronounce the word.

I stared in disbelief and looked around us, half expecting one of my friends to roll out of the bushes in fits of laughter. There wasn’t a sound coming from anywhere though. The outside world was completely silent except for the sound of my weary breathing.

Deciding it must be a joke, I tried another question. “Then you are from Antocleptia?” I asked, but again the response I received was a confused look.

I began to grow light headed. This isn’t happening, I told myself repeatedly until I realized that I was mumbling the words aloud and that I must seem like a madwoman to this stranger. I let out a sharp, bitter note of laughter at the irony of this -- worrying about what a madman thought of me. He had to be a madman, didn’t he? He was saying that he had never heard of Antocleptia nor Kleenomia.

“I am from the Forest of the North,” he informed me. I stared bleakly at him, having no idea what this place was or why he sounded so proud to be from some place called a forest. I replayed the word in my mind over and over again until I was sure that I had heard it somewhere before.

Aha! I suddenly remembered a time in my Second Year when I was doing research on an odd, long-extinct animal which had lived in a place called a forest. I groped my memory for the definition of this odd word, it having been so many years since I had given it any thought at all.

Then a picture popped into my mind; thousands among thousands of tall, mighty trees grouped together, thriving in the same environment. It seemed impossible to me at the time, but that was what the Archives had stated so I wrote it in my paper, not quite believing it. But now, some boy was telling me that he lived in one.

No, he wasn’t just living in one, he was from one, which was far more significant. It meant that there were more people there… more people like him and that they had been living there for a long period of time. But… that didn’t make any sense to me, at least not at the time. They had always told us that life of any kind was unsustainable outside the walls of Antocleptia or Kleenomia. It was something that was drilled into the mind of every citizen from the day they were born, so much so that the walls were virtually unprotected on the inside and out. The only time that there were any guards to watch the borders of the country was when there was threat of an attack from Kleenomia.

As I was thinking things over, I could tell from the expression his face wore that he was thinking about something as well. Finally, he opened his mouth to voice whatever it was that had been plaguing his mind the past few minutes. It was about another minute or so before he actually spoke the words.

“Are you from behind those walls?” he asked, a simple question yet I could tell that it was loaded.

After having a chance to look around, I knew that he had to have seen me come out of the tunnel. The hills right outside of the walls were tall -- not nearly as tall as the walls of Antocleptia, but tall all the same -- and there was no way that he could have been at a distance where he did not see me crawl out of the tunnel. He had surprised me almost immediately and there was nothing out here but grass and hills to hide in.

But if he isn’t from Kleenomia -- and he obviously isn’t from Antocleptia -- could he be from another enemy society that the public had not been told about? I began to feel dizzy at the mere thought of such a large-scale betrayal. Not stopping to think what my action might lead to, I answered his question with a wary nod as I tried to stop my brain from swimming around inside of my skull.

The look that overcame his face then was one that I was not familiar with and was unable to describe at the time. Even now, after having so much time to think it over, I’m still not sure of a word that can describe it accurately enough. The closest thing I can think of is enlightenment, as if the answers to all of the world’s problems had just been whispered in his ear.

Finding my voice, I was able to ask, “Now that you know where I come from, and you have told me of where you are from, may I ask you something?”

He looked cautious of me, yet he gave his approval anyways.

“What is the … ‘Forest of the North’ like?” I asked. I mouthed my question again to myself and decided that I liked the way the name felt on my tongue.

I realized I was fidgeting with my hands and had my eyes glued to my feet. I quickly looked up to meet a wide grin on the dirty face. Not understanding, I opened my mouth to ask him why he was smiling so widely but never got the chance.

“Would you like to see for yourself?” he asked, offering his hand to me.

With that simple gesture, he was offering to change my life. He was offering to change the way I saw the world. He was offering to question everything that I had every been told or learned. He was offering to show me a new world. He was offering to show me things that I would never again have the chance to see.

I reached out and placed my palm in his, wrapping my fingers around his hand, and in doing so, accepted all of his offers.