❝Bible Noah will tell you that in his time, when the world was strife with human sin, it rained for forty days and forty nights. We will tell you a different story. We will tell you that it has been raining for forty years.❞
—Excerpt of Dr. Arama Malia’s research on previously unnamed Rainfire and its past occurrences since 1600 BC. Original notes from ancient Sumerian Ziasudra: reference Text #18. Akkadian texts translated by Prof. Manon Montgomery, Ward-1.
Bobbie and the rest of the human civilization are stuck living in an underground city after a cataclysmic event in the past washes over the face of the Earth and renders it inhospitable. Except, there's more to the story than what's on the surface.
Isn't there always?
Started writing Glasslands in: 2014 Last remembered edit of this excerpt: 2020
The reception underground is appalling. He expected it to be so when he was briefed on where he would be going, and was then pleasantly surprised when he was able to contact Wes while on the train on the way to his new apartment. The Black Pool, however, reaffirms his earlier concerns on how truly shitty reception underground can get.
He can barely hear the voice of the man talking to him. It sounds like a malfunctioning robot so defiantly struggling to continue on its mission. It’s a trial, but he can hear. Of course he can hear. If he couldn’t, then something would be very wrong with him.
“Can you hear me?”
He nods, and remembers that the man he talks to can't see him. “Loud and clear, sir.”
“You made it safely?”
“Yes.”
A sigh on the other end of the line. Is it one of relief, or something else?
“Sir?” he says, trying his hardest to keep even a hint of sarcasm out of his voice. “What am I supposed to do after I find her? I haven’t been briefed on what exactly this mission is.”
All anyone ever did was give him a picture to go with, say that the person in it is his target.
He digs out the photograph from his pocket and looks at the back. There is a short summary of the girl whose likeness is the picture. Her name, age, height, ethnicity, the languages she can speak. Her family’s names, friends, and what their relationship to her is.
The folder in his backpack is more detailed. He has already perused its contents several times over. Nothing in it gives him any indication on what the hell he’s doing in the Lowlands, of all places.
He flips it and stares at the picture on the front. In it there is a girl with copper brown curls, pulled in a thick braid down her back, wispy curling bangs falling over her forehead and brushing over her eyebrows. Her surrounding resembles a university classroom, luminous lights hanging overhead to drive out the perpetual darkness. Her skin is a light brown, but too pale, like she’s becoming a ghost. Her eyes are a normal shade of brown, yet it feels like they are piercing through him, even though she doesn’t see the camera’s lenses trained on her.
He has the strangest feeling, a dragon curling in his gut lazily, about the girl in the picture. It’s like he knows he should recognize her, but he also knows that he simply doesn’t. It’s like his subconscious realizes that there is something bad about not knowing her.