Sempiternity (COMPLETED)

III

Cold winds blew throughout the air, but Arend did not feel them at all. He stood atop a small hill, overlooking the country before him and taking in every inch of its blackened plains and ruined ground. As was normal for every large city, the surrounding land had been sterilized and destroyed in preparation for further growth, and aside from a few feet outside the city limits, miles and miles of dead land lay around in the horizon. The setting of the sun painted the sky in a brilliant red and orange as night quickly came, and before long, the frontiers of the city were empty deserts of nothingness.

The Collapse had changed everything, and destroyed what wasn't able to adapt. The land had been one of these things that couldn't get used to the new rules of existence, and had been wiped out within days. The human race was one of the few living species that had survived, and it was only through the ingenuity of current science and intelligence that they managed to squeeze out what resources they had from the dead world they inhabited.

That was why a huge majority of the world's population lived in gigantic cities spread throughout the countries of the world. The very fact that countries even continued to exist were proof that humans, as hardy and adaptable as they proved themselves to be, were unable to leave behind everything of the past. America, Russia, Portugal, England... These places still existed, but in name alone. 

The fragile government was the same everywhere, as was the human condition. Where nations and regions may have had unique landscapes and customs were now living fossils, skeletons of previous prosperity that humanity had taken refuge in. Besides wastelands, desert, and arid beaches, there wasn't much else to see anymore. The world was uniformly barren.

There was no difference between any of these places.  

Arend turned and began to walk back towards the sprawling city. He did not completely remember when or why he had left the metropolis and decided to walk towards the dead plains, but he had not bothered to walk any further into them and simply stood entranced in watching the stagnant landscape for almost an hour, until the sun began to set. The frontier was one large plain of unremarkable, arid land, and traveling into it without any sort of navigation would spell certain and eventual death. 

He was not yet ready to die.

He did not remember how long ago it was that he went for his first day of school, nor how long he had been in the city, but it wasn't more than a few weeks. The amount of time it took for the city to become monotonous and generic was abysmally small. Just as before, the landscape soon melted into a drab prison of gray and black, an oppressively modern labyrinth for him to map out and rediscover every day. 

School was something he attended on a whim, and his studies were only indulged in when he was pressed, hard. No other students associated with him, and it was rare for the boy to speak in class. The only thing that held his interest in the useless social construct was the view from his first period class.

The atmosphere had darkened before long, and the boy found himself wandering the streets as always. Idly, his hand went to the golden pen he kept in his pocket. He had more than a few pairs of the school's uniform and he took to wearing it always, but the pen was always in his pocket no matter which outfit he wore. 

The gift from his classmate was something he found unexpectedly endearing. Something about it and the odd weight it held made him think it was flawed or otherwise extraordinary, but he could never focus on exactly what it was that caused this.

In the midst of his thoughts, Arend idly noticed a figure run in front of him and turn into an alley. Just before he saw this, he had involuntarily let out a yawn and had decided that he would return home and go to sleep. Normally, he would have simply looked after the blur of a person, blink at them, and return to his business. That was usually what he did when encountering people; it would not have been out of character for him.