A/N: Written for the a writing muse community on livejournal, table 10-B and prompt #010 – writer's choice (prayer).
And the last piece! Enjoy and let me know what you think.
The Adventure Kids
10. The Children in the Sky
You can see the sky, and the eight children who have been swallowed up by it. Maybe you can see them: fighting battle after battle. Losing. Winning. Fighting on. Or maybe you can just imagine it happening. Hopeful. Fearful.
Or, maybe, you can see nothing at all but the strange sky – strange even to those of us who have, for millennia, called it home because of how it's changed. And for most of you it is entirely a foreign world. Some of you might remember it. Some of you might have seen it before. Before our time, perhaps. Those Old Ones who'd paved the path for our contact with your world.
And maybe there was a past beyond that as well.
We do not know. We have lived through this duration of the Digital World but not from its beginnings and, quite probably, not until its ends. We have seen countless deaths and reincarnations in our time, but not enough. Not as much as the world has. And, we hope, not as much as the world will.
Because, otherwise, the end of the world will be all too near.
And we hope otherwise.
We hope the world will reform. We hope the Dark Masters – the last of the enemies in this time – are defeated. Destroyed. We hope the cultivation of grief and despair is extinguished by the children's strength. We hope that our peaceful and proud world will return.
And they are doing it. One Dark Master defeated. Two. Three.
They are almost there.
Maybe you can see their progress. The way the pixels break apart and remake themselves: taking apart spiral mountain and reforming the land as it always was. Maybe you're looking at the lands that form and thinking of how they look similar to islands and continents in your own world. How the world is slowly becoming less surreal, and more like a reflection.
But probably, and understandably, you are simply staring into the sky and hoping and praying for the fate of your world – and, by extension, ours – and for those children who are risking their lives to save them. Or, maybe you are all too painfully close: one of those ones who would sacrifice the world for your brothers or sisters or sons or daughters –
And we can understand that. We do, because we are the ones who are putting your children at such great risk. We are the ones who have bet the future of both our worlds on them.
Some of you might, if you knew this truth, this story, wonder why we've chosen children for such a task?
The answer, we feel, is obvious.
Adults have less innocence, less purity, then children.
And we know that such things are never found in absolute, but they are found. Concentrated in youth. Diluted in adulthood. Those baby digimon and barely older than baby children were the best we could hope for. Enough to understand responsibility. Enough to see things beyond black and white and red and green and blue. Enough to understand the cost that was life, and the sacrifice that was death.
But not enough to lose their imagination of the seemingly impossible. Not enough to wish for miracles like a possibility. Not enough to see death as absolute, as the end.
There was a balance, and these children, just shy of their teenage years, were the best.
And maybe you wonder why we had to involve them at all. Why we had to involve your world, when it was our problems. Our fate.
The answer we can speak is that our worlds are intimately linked. Our destruction would mean your destruction. And it will. It does. Your world is heavily impacted by our destruction and rebuilding. The weather changes. The sky. Beyond the damage Vamdemon and his damage has caused…
But the truth, the deeper truth, is something smaller: a more honest and less noble a cause. We want our world to survive, and yet we know there is nothing in our world that is, on its own, strong enough to face the danger.
If our world is destroyed, it can rebuild. If your world is destroyed, it can rebuild as well. And yet, we fight. And if it was your world under immediate threat, you would fight as well.
There are many amongst you who no doubt approve. Those of you who aren't family or friend to these children. Those of you who are far away and see only children – or not even that, just humans – fighting to save the world. Like children on the battlefront. Like boys, barely men, drafted in to the front lines and watched from far away as they fight for their country, their world.
Maybe you view this situation in a similar way. Maybe we do.
But this is an army of eight children. And there are no reinforcements to send if they fail. We're already on our last leg. Our last stand.
And all we can do is hope.
And continue hoping when the fourth master falls, and the sky goes dark.
You can't see anymore. You can only fear the worst and hope for the best and pray: pray for success, pray for safety.
We can see a little bit more, but do only the same. Fear. Hope. Prey.
Prey for the children the sky has swallowed, and for their return.
A return that equates to their success.