Prophecy Road

Chapter One

"The sky fire unshackled the well-laid architecture of heaven," his father told the boy who grasped the metal pod against his small-chest.

"I don't remember," the son replied through eight-year old teeth.

The gravity skiff beneath them, aged and paint-stripped to its hearty bones, bounced and shook. It skirted the charred, yet somehow sparsely green earth. Stubborn lichen and mana-moss thrived in the Deep Black, even more so than in some less damaged locales, lashing themselves flat to the black and dead rock.

"I suspect there are yet places that would remind you of what you've forgotten," Luke's father told him; the man spoke as carefully as he always did, scientific almost in all things, but clearly gave most of his attention to the skiff's erratic looking inputs.

"What was it like?" Luke asked; the boy pulled the metal pod closer to his chest, almost trying to protect it from the increasingly heated dust-storm.

His father put on the well-hidden airs of a sigh, and the restraint great enough not to accompany the mood with the sound. Clearly he pondered how to put the past into words appropriate for a youth. How did one describe that zeitgeist-fueled madness to a youth raised on the burned fringes of the Black?

But the boy wanted to know of the world he had only briefly existed within. Perhaps some part of him did remember, Marcus mused, despite his words, and sought to correlate half-fractured memories with oral story.

The skiff began to shake more strongly than Luke could ever remember it to have, especially in the back. For a few moments, it even almost appeared to do the unthinkable and scratch off some of the delicate greenery below.

"Life existed without the aid of that which has pushed it to near extinction. And the Other remained as the pillar that held natural law up as a mostly-constant," Marcus attempted to explain.

"And now?" Luke asked.

His father looked back towards him, leaving one half of his face angled towards the disheveled foot path. His mask hid his deep, intelligent blue eyes, but it did little to obscure his concern.

"Now? Take the wheel," he urged his son.

Luke remained calm. Something new was happening and it excited him just a little bit. Maybe scared his young heart some too.

He stood up on cramped legs made shaky by the unstable surface beneath them. But not before carefully laying the metal pod down into a pocketed away alcove of the skiff. He checked and double checked its security before making his way to his half-distracted father.

"Straight away. Maintain my course, elevate and right for the ground's irregularities," Marcus instructed.

"Yes father," Luke said.

Marcus afforded him an appraising look before passing him with a brief clasp on the shoulder.

The older man retrieved a leather bag of tools as he went. Its handle hung thickly and its content heavy from his rubber gauntleted hand; the father and son's garb was strangely thick for the heat and oddly fitted and proportioned in its look, covering every bit of skin and concealing them completely from the air of the wastes.

His father began his work carefully. He uplifted the engine cover in back and withdrew a select few instruments from his bag upon his initial apprasial.

Oily purple light eked out from the skiffs internals, painting the man's gask mask in a grisly manner.

His hands moved and opened, at times using his tools to work and during other moments his words and contorting fingers to try and tweak and tune the craft's innards back to some manner of normalcy.