The Journal of Emasus Deed

I hope this doesn't confuse anyone, but this is an entirely different character. :S

Peacetime 13, 2058

???

Late, very late

It's a shame we're all dying. We might have had some great war stories to tell back home. As it is, I finally have a reason to use this journal Grams gave me before I left. Grams always said writing things down was a balm for the soul. I don't know about all that, but at least it's something. I've led an unproductive life, I've disappointed people, I've betrayed my friends. I leave nothing behind but my body and my voice. Maybe it will be enough. Maybe it will be just enough to set free those I leave behind. It's not much, but at this hopeless hour, it is what I cling to.

My name is Emasus Deed. I am fifteen years old. I wasn't meant to be a soldier.

This might be a funny story someday, to somebody, but right now I'm not laughing. (And anyway, it would probably be fatal if I was; the enemy isn't camped far from here, and they have exceptional hearing.)

When I remembered to add the date, I remembered something Julius had told me a long time ago. He said that about fifty years ago, before the City People took us Country People as slaves after World War Three, they called this month January and celebrated the changing of the year by watching a shiny ball slowly fall to the ground at midnight. I didn't believe him, still don't, or any of the other events he himself wasn't around to witness, but I secretly clung to stories like that, the ones he got from the books Grams smuggled him.

I read them too, although my favorites were always by far the fiction: wizards who faced their fears and defeated dark lords, hobbits and elves and humans who destroyed powerful rings, girls who overthrew their unjust governments to save lives. This last one really struck a chord with me.

Those books were all banned almost the minute the City People came to power, but Grams was insistent that the voices of the past live on in our minds. Granny was pleased, who's eighty going on a thousand, but she still somehow gets around. She's as crazy as all the women I know her age (there aren't many; we die young in Bonshire), but she's definitely the most interesting person I've ever met. She claims she once wrestled a supposedly brutal man named Chuck Norris on a hot air balloon hovering over a place once known as Niagara Falls. She was also great at singing and dancing. She once tried to teach me a dance she called the Cupid Shuffle, but I never inherited her ear for music and ended up flopping around the kitchen like a fish out of water. Julius caught on fast, though, and I was content to sit at the table and watch them, my two favorite people in the world, twirling around in the setting light streaming through the window to the ancient dance.

In fact, the only music I've ever heard has come from Grams and Granny. Grams, in fact, played the piano. She used to have her own piano sitting in a corner of her bedroom, but she insisted it was a crumby keyboard, at best. Once, when I referred to it as a piano in front of her, she ran out of the room sobbing.

Granny actually remembers a time when people were free in this world. She said there were other places, known as countries, a term I'm familiar with, but in the past it had an entirely different meaning. Nowadays the term 'country' is the same as 'slave.'

We were born to work. That's all. We were designed to slave away for the City People who send us away once we turn eighteen to fight in their own "civil war," their fight for the right to own slaves. But what I still don't understand is, here in the East, where the City Folk are supposedly opposed to slavery, why in the worlds do they send us to fight their own war?

I'm not bitter. Not at all.

I don't care who finds this diary, so long as whoever it is doesn't destroy it. They probably will, though. I'm not sure why I bother. I guess because there's always a chance, just a slight chance. Hope springs eternal, and all that. I'm mostly lonely, though. This journal can at least serve as--I don't know--my audience. The ear to my angry, dying voice.

I guess I can say it now: I wear an eyepatch, and I wear it for a reason. I have

More later. Being bombed.