On the Wings of Hope: Prose (Chosen)

Great Exodus

At first, they all called us madmen – too brave or naive to dare to implement what was once conceived. Maybe too big dreamers. Freaky adventurers who can't sit idle in their cozy concrete stone jungles. They all laughed at us when we began to emerge from our new old Babylons, which had oppressed our proud spirit for centuries. They sent curses after those who left, secretly in their hearts fearing to remain abandoned and be left alone forever. In the first days of the Great Exodus, they tried to put all kinds of obstacles in our way out. Their hatred and anger were great. Yet we weren't broken.

Man after a man, family after a family, city after a city, wave after a wave – this is how our Great Exodus began. New people diverged on all four sides of the world, moving away from their recent habitats. We left our stone prisons – inhuman heaps of giant ugly monsters of stone and glass, who decided, as it seemed, to eclipse the sun itself. Without regret, we left behind the dark silhouettes of endless robotic factories, which has poisoned earth, water, and air for many years and transformed people into an insignificant resemblance of machines, destroying their fortitude and burning in the furnace of monotony and routine the will for own spiritual transformation. We left there, in our bitter past, almost everything we had – everything that enslaved our spirit, taking away the precious time of life, forcing us to keep spinning inside the wheel of incessant production and consumption. Now we traveled lightly, having taken with us only what was the most necessary for the upcoming new construction. And we didn't require much.

Left behind were the city's clinging residential neighborhoods, skyscrapers of the ones-in-power, ascended into heaven in anticipation of own destruction, smoky factories, half-empty prisons, half-ruined churches – everything that represented the essence of the old man. Left behind were high city walls, surrounded by iron wire, black and red sky and acrid, suffocating air of "the only possible freedom of living". All this was now slowly and unstoppably being left behind us permanently. All this was given to the feast of natural forces – ones who are much wiser than us, humans.

Processions moved and moved, and there seemed to be no end for them. Yet even they had run out once. There were no more desiring the change, and nature elements absorbed those who decided to stay behind. And those people who marched into their last new campaign dispersed to the most remote corners of the native land. The rapidly changing climate of their world has allowed them to get to places where no man's feet stepped before. And they began to colonize these new territories, spreading over them evenly. They were the daredevils – or even madmen – who started the great new construction, who did the seemingly impossible – not subjugated, but united themselves with nature in great harmony and beauty. Their first settlements became prototypes of the new settlement of mankind which then once erased all borders of all states.

At first, it was not an easy mission to bear. Too habitual and too blood-poisoning were the methods of the old construction, too many ridiculous stereotypes and prejudices tormented people's minds, preventing it from revealing its full potential. Too mechanistic many of them have already become – verified, lined, marked, sorted and packed in coffins of their past views. But, despite all the obstacles on the way, they still managed to achieve seemingly impossible, and their own children were the ones who have helped adults in their transformation. Truly alive, with a curious and open mind, rich imagination, they showed their parents the most unexpected ways, the most dizzying designs, the most successful forms. And the work skyrocketed.

Everything that was contrary to the newly opened truth of life, was removed, everything that elevated human's spirit was praised. And then it was only a matter of time. Truly enormous the building after the Great Exodus has become, and there was not a single living soul left in the whole world which has not taken part in it.

Life on the Earth was changing so rapidly as if being done in an instant between the usual flick of someone's fingers. New deed demanded new people, and they did not hesitate to answer the call. But all of this, however, was a completely different story...