Scene 7-X

“Help! Please, someone!” A young woman cries, standing on her front porch, door flush against the wall, and held there by the fierce wind blowing in. She is frantic, and acts it, hands clutching and twisting level with her chest, and there is screaming from the storey above her, where flames have jumped from the treetops to her roof, and are spreading downwards, gorging themselves on the fresh fuel.

In the street, people are panicking, and so, her call for help goes unheard as men and women and children scramble across the dirt and cobblestones, fleeing the fire and the approaching army, screaming and cursing and sap boiling and the heavy thump-thump of a hundred feet, marching in time saturating the air, rising high overhead with the heat.

Their own ships are flying hundreds of feet above the tallest trees, and are almost completely obscured from sight by the thick, oppressing smoke as homes are burnt away.

She screams again, and her house collapses, a tree in its midst, and it is silent there except for the shifting of rubble and the roar of the flames eating their way inward.

And the people in the street are oblivious to this, as their peaceful world crumbles around them, leaving them naked before a faceless foe that has landed on their beaches, setting the island ablaze, and its anger is heard in the scream of the wind and fire, and all it needs is the right person to harness that, and these intruders, these invaders, will be eaten alive, swallowed whole by the ground they stand on, suffocated by the air they breathe, drowned as the waters rise to reclaim what is theirs.

Of course, with them will go Mokyn’s inhabitants, peaceful people who chose this place to make their home, to lay their roots, and it just can’t be helped.

Assuming, of course, that such a person can find their way amidst this turmoil and distress, which, even for the Fleet, is never a given.

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Scene 7-X

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