Devastation

Useless... Meaningless... What was the point in going anymore? Sure there was a lot of things waiting on him. Sure there's plenty of years left to pursue dreams and goals; but what goals? What dreams? Suicide was not an option. It never was, and never will be. There just was no purpose left in his mind.

He kicked a rock off the cliff edge and gazed into the horizon a little longer. The sun was setting, and he needed to get home soon. All the houses were puffing out thin wisps of grey smoke. It was winter, and the air was cooling more as night approached. It never got too cold during the daylight hours, but nights were a different story in the valley of (Mountain Name). With a large stream nearby, supporting the meager lives they had in this desert, cold winds would sweep across the water and frost the surface of anything left outside the shelters.

The houses his people lived in were mostly brick, as the rock quarry from the cliffs was always prosperous in warmer months, and coal became the staple resource in the winter. The remaining buildings and stables were made for and maintained by the lower class citizens. They were put together partly out of stone, but mostly of mud and straw. It reminded HIM of pictures he'd seen in history books. Ever so rarely, the old scholar up in the castle would let him peruse the shelves of books from before The Great Devastation. He would always say mankind had been like this once before, but grew into vast civilizations with technology so advanced, we could travel into space. There was even some who walked on the moon, and other nearby planets. Most people thought he was just crazy, others took what he said a little more seriously, but still had a hard time deciding if his history was truly accurate, or if he wasn't just reading folk tales from the past.

Sometimes he would talk about a man called God. He said that man had a son named Jesus, and then he'd say that Jesus was not only God's son, but was also God as a human, though what else he could be, BOY had no idea.