Red Sky

Prologue

Midgar had fallen.

The ruins - a hazy, dust-shrouded graveyard - had faded to a distant shape on the horizon.

Shock had driven all previous loyalties and alliances from the heads of the survivors. The cataclysmic destruction, and the widespread madness and panic that had preceded it, was too much to think about. The tattered remains of the mutinying Shinra Forces trudged forlornly alongside the tattered remains of the rebellious slummers.

Pale in the watery autumn sunlight, the slummers were not in much of a position to appreciate their newfound freedom from the prison that had been the slums. Starving, cold, dirty and shell shocked, they walked east with the blank and uncomprehending faces of robots.

Within their massed ranks were knots of platers who had somehow survived both the carnage caused by the rebellion and the collapse of their city. Soft flesh and fragile temperaments were ill suited to the cold wind that blew from the Northern Ocean, and they too were pale and huddled looking. They clung to mementoes of their status as though they were religious trinkets: hugging golden jewellery, stroking silk ties and checking ID cards with the panicked faces of those who had always assumed bad things only happened to other people. Whilst the slummers were easily identified by their resigned expressions, the platers indulged in various forms of hysteria, denial and rage. From them came shrieks, moans and angry monologues denouncing terrorists, the government, scientists and rebellions.

They all continued to walk eastward, following the figure in front determinedly. To stop would have left them alone and lost in a harsh wilderness of monsters. No matter how bad things were or how much they despised their neighbours, they had to stay with the group.

At the head of the line and leading the ragged assortment of survivors, marched Reeve. He had recently become President of the remaining Midgar citizens and Shinra Forces, via a confused and explosive route of violence and accident. He led his enormous ragged band of dissident, rebellious and rapidly disintegrating refugees towards Kalm. He had no idea of what to do next. The survival of several million people would be impossible in a region famous for its rocky arid land and dry freezing winters. He doubted Kalm would be welcoming to the company that had sucked the life force from the ground and sold it back to them at crippling prices. Everyone in the world knew whom to blame for the recent events, and Reeve knew their one-time ally would be unwilling to aid them now.

Still, there was nowhere else to go. South lay poison, swamps and disease. West lay the barren, impassable Midgar mountain range. North there was only the icy, storm-tossed ocean.

And so the dirty, hungry wave of refugees poured east, to the cobbled streets, intricate houses and hilly farms of Kalm.

It would be there that a new era in the history of the Planet would begin.