The world here is defined by dark.
Dark cliffs, blue tinted by what steely light there is.
Dark clouds, heavy and drooping and leaking towards the ground.
Dark ground, invisible and blackened below me, a sea of jutting stone cut by swirling eddies of fog.
And then there is Arjia. A shimmer of white. A soft white dawn on the horizons edge. Whatever logical faculties I'm still running on are rendered useless by the view.
Faster.
A spark in the darkness, I accelerate.
. . . . .
There is a hollow thud, accompanied by the crunching of debris, as my feet hit the ground.
This place is as I remember it.
Monoliths of silver and white wreckage tear at the sky. The ground is a treacherous wasteland of charred and pixilated rubble. Fog and mist undulate across it, swirling eddies gathering around the larger leftovers of the once impressive city. It is cold against my shins.
I walk.
Light finds its way up from beneath the mist, delicate fissures beneath my feet glowing somewhere between blue and white as I draw nearer to the city's center.
This was once a beautiful place.
I remember only fragments, still images with no context, but for once I do remember. I can recall soaring white structures, circuits on every surface, a constant ethereal glow accented by a myriad of ISO symbols along the arches and soft curvatures of the architecture. I remember programs on the streets, slow and gentle in their passing of the single fixture in the city's central plaza, the platform.
I remember them vividly.
Some, the ISOs, had circuits in their skin; streaks of light pulsing under their eyes, slashed across their cheekbones. They looked strange. They looked odd and foreign in the same way that their city did.
Different.
Wrong . . . . . .
The word is an echo without meaning. Clu's thoughts, not mine.
What do I think?
Nothing.
Most of the ISOs were already dead by the time I existed, thanks to Clu. I know nothing.
I can have no hate . . . not for ISOs.
I can't so much as hazard an opinion.
Not here.
Clu, on the other hand . . .
No. Not now. Now there is only defiance. Only a mission. Only a goal. A single opportunity to stop Clu before he destroys the rest of my system as he did this place.
I have my mission.
I enter the plaza.
The neat hexagons of blue-gray data which once lay underfoot have been overturned and disordered in places, leaving black holes in the grime coated silver street. By now, the mists have evaporated. It's as if they're being held off by the light.
Before me on the ground, though, in the center of destruction, is a raised stone. It is an intricately carved, round edged piece.
It calls me.
Precise grooves on its surface glow in the same cyan as unrefined power as I approach, forming a twisting fractal pattern across it, a thing of mystery in the middle of a deadened wreckage heap with the pure-energy, simmering aurora's of this place rising from the ground beneath it. They are white, incandescent, and transparent all at once. They weave away amidst the wreckage, disappearing into the darkened sky above.
Slowly, I take my disc from my back.
I am ready.
Author's note: I know, I keep leaving guys hanging. It's awful of me. But I promised myself that I would have an update for tonight, and so here's part I, despite its counterpart still being in the editing process, and here's hoping it holds you all over.
Thanks to all of you, as always, for reading!
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