Ruin and Revival

Prologue

The soldier forgot her mission, forgot her name, forgot the color of the sky. Only one thought was on her mind, eating away at her brain like a parasite until it threatened to consume her alive.

Where is the water?

She stumbles drunkenly through the slums, ignoring the unremitting cries of the homeless in thirst that matched that of her own.

"Ma'am, do you have any water to spare?" She starts as a wrinkled hand clasps around her ankle, an old man with haunted, hollow eyes hangs onto her desperately. She shakes him off, the world tilting with the movement, the vertigo in her head showing no sign of halting.

"If I had any, I'd drink it and get the hell of this shithole." The soldier cocks her gun, letting the bullet loose, watching as it embeds into the bones of the convulsing man.

"There. Put you out of your misery." No one dared question her actions as she trudged toward the decrepit station.

She repeated the words she had forced herself to engrave into every layer of her conscience.

Find the last forest left on this planet. And return with water. The mere idea of live, luscious trees seemed impossible to her, but the rumors that had run rampant here said otherwise.

The train is packed with emaciated harlots trying to earn a living and their deathly pale children. The soldier could only grip onto the handlebars, holding back the bile building in the back of her throat from the reek, waiting for the broken city to blur out of sight.

She didn't know if it was a side effect of dehydration, a mirage taken straight out of her dreams, but before her were grooves of emerald green trees, swaying gently in the arid wind.

How many years has it been since forest like these existed?

She reaches toward the oasis yearningly with her fingers, giggling hysterically as she crawls through the otherwise bleak field.

This must be it. Rings of victory distracted her from the dehydration rotting away her body. 

Her hand was stopped by some invisible force, the image of the forest shimmering strangely. Cool, heavenly mist wafts out from the forest and suddenly, the world fades away, and the soldier collapses, alone in a foreign land on the edge of a lifeless clearing.

But a pair of gloved hands drags her by her raven black hair into the mist, and it was like her body was never there.

And a man with piercing blue eyes smiles knowingly on his throne.