Our New World

This is my take on 'The New Earth' by Audiomachine, a prompt for a group I've joined in with to improve writing skill. Funny how I can write this without too much trouble, but not any of my other ongoing novels, huh? Hope this is okay, in any case.

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Below her laid a broken world; a chasm in the face of time filled with death and despair. Below her laid the story of repression and an uprising- an end that would bring on a new beginning. Crimson stained the blackened grass, painting a picture of lives lost and drained hope. The blood of both sides soaked the ground, mingling together in a crude illustration telling of the fact that no one could truly win, not when so many had suffered. She had lost her brother, the other side of the coin she always assumed they'd been. How could he be gone, when she was still there? There couldn't be one without the other, it just didn't work that way.

You need to be here, he'd said. His words had been poisoned with that wistful type of hope, the kind that only dying men could have. You need to be here to show them the way.

It'd been enough to break the air of calm around Cassie; the regal, controlled way that she carried herself had fallen away, fractured until it disintegrated with her brother's every dying breath. Felix had been her opposite: the fire to her ice, and the impulse behind the authority they held. He had done everything with a conviction and certainty that caught and spread like wildfire through the members of the force. It was his word that was hope in itself, the very embodiment of energy that had in the end, Cassie was sure of it, brought them to this moment.

Her careful planning, her cunning tactics- they'd all become meaningless when men started being slaughtered and the reality of the horror had finally caught up. People were dying, for a cause to be sure, but dying nonetheless. Felix's deep timbre had carried through the ranks, rekindling the embers of faith in the men's very souls and turning it into a furnace of We Will Not Be Beaten.

"This is our land," he had yelled, and Cassie had felt it too, that beautiful assurance. "And we will not give it up until they take it from each and every one of us in our deaths."

Those men had gone out and killed and died. They had carried Felix's words to the grave, simply because they believed in him. Not because of Cassie's battle strategies, not because of her calculated risks. She could not lead these men, and she had told him as much, her voice but a broken whisper edged with heartbreak.

And he had smiled, his shaking hand on her cheek, the blood staining his teeth red. He had smiled and nodded to her, melting the frozen dam of tears in her throat.

You have to, Cassie. You're all they have left.

Felix had been all she'd had left too, but he had died in her arms. So Cassie had risen to her feet, the tears welling in her eyes and the fierce air of fervor rising in her chest. The burn of her brother's existence slipped through her veins. She would not forget him. She would not let him down.