Void

Chapter 1

Thorne dragged his feet across the ground, his head spinning.

The heat... It had been digging into every crevice of his body, through his nerves and pores. Although the gloriously burning sun was covered by heavy grey clouds, there was still the overall heat in the air lingering around him and his father.

As if the thought of his father had summoned the man, Thorne felt paternal hands around his body as he continued to drag himself across the wasteland. His body felt like jelly at every corner, but he pushed forward nonetheless while his father pushed him up.

"C'mon, son," his father, Samuel, rasped. Samuel's breath stirred against Thorne's neck. Even though Thorne was only sixteen, he was still tall enough to reach his father's shoulder—but no more than that. "We've only got a few... a few more hours until we reach it."

Thorne pressured his lungs into allowing him to breathe. Once a slip of oxygen made its way through him, he said, "Where, Dad? Where...? Until we reach what?"

By the looks of it, it surely seemed as if there were nothing around them but for sandy dunes lingering on the horizon. The road beneath them had been long since trod upon, and so, dust and sand now lay where millions of footprints had been. The Chasm, it was called; the wasteland was a chasm formed by weather and rock and generations of time and people. Suffocating heat trekked through their lungs as much as they trekked through the Chasm. Thorne shook his head in disbelief at the thought of what had been here a hundred, a thousand years ago.

It seemed like nothing had existed. Not a drop of life at all.

"The marketplace," Samuel said. "There's a small marketplace. C'mon, son, we can buy something. We can buy food. You've got those coppers, eh?"

He did. He nodded, yes, he did but... If Thorne knew any inch of his father's manipulative mind, then he knew his father would shovel the food down both of their throats instead of save it for prolonged journeys that would cause them even further damage to their bodies.

"Dad, we can't... We can't keep on spending all this money." Thorne ripped out a racketing cough that left the boy's chest shuddering. Left him bending over. Left him with the remaining words he had to say, "It's going to run us dry."

"It's not." His father's determination was always his biggest weakness. Even if you had the strength to power on, sometimes you needed to know when to stop.

"It is, Dad, it is." Oft times, Thorne thought only repetition would get his father to understand what they were going through. The rough times they'd have to face. "And there are bad people in markets. Bad men."

"The bad men don't hurt you if you don't seem vulnerable, kiddo," Samuel chucked, ruffling his son's hair and looking skyward as if remembering a particularly part in his life. "We don't need to become strong, we just gotta act it."

The skies churned up above, the clouds tossing and turning and filtering the golden sunlight peeking through their ominous, murky masses. Reports via madmen along the wasteland's road had claimed a storm was coming, but Thorne doubted it was of the geographical type. A chill ran up and down his spine, coating him in fire and ice, before he turned back to his father.

"It's not going to be enough. It's never going to be enough."

"The War damaged us, boy. It took down the world's walls of safety and protection. If we don't fight back, if we don't at least try to be strong, it'll all come back down in waves."