Ashes

One: Of Recapping

A/N: The picture is an aesthetic for Ariadne. Enjoy the first chapter!

The world is changing.

There used to be men, and there used to be monsters.

The line between the two is blurred now.

Nearly three months ago, everything was okay. I lived in a dome in the middle of the desert, safe within the glass walls I thought were a barrier between the wilderness and I.

Everything is different now. People are dead. I'm running. I'm still running. I wonder if I'll ever stop.

My heavy boots thud lightly against the sand as I pace around the huge bus we're using to travel through the desert. Somewhere in the distance, a red sun is setting, and even further, the place I used to call home is probably settling down for the night.

Not me. Never me. I haven't earned the right to settle down.

Someone clears his throat behind me, and I turn to face my older brother, Titus. He's been through far too much to be considered sane anymore. We both lost our mother a few short months ago, and we're still reeling from it. His girlfriend was lost only to become the monsters we ran from, and I'm the one who killed her not two weeks ago.

"Is it still bleeding?" he asks me, motioning towards the bandage around my right hand. I glance down at the white gauze, seeing specks of blood across my knuckles.

"Yeah."

Maybe punching the bathroom mirror inside the bus wasn't the best idea.

"You're an idiot, you know that?" he tells me, before pulling me against him and hugging me tightly.

"We'll be okay. In time," he tells me, and I'm tempted to scoff. People like to tell you that time heals everything. It doesn't; it just makes you forget.

"I've survived a lot lately. I think I'll live through some chopped up knuckles," I tell him, and he gives me a half-hearted smile that oozes with pity that I wish wasn't there. I'll take sympathy and I'll take kindness, but pity? Never pity.

My best friend, a tall, lithe ginger named after the stars, somehow makes it behind the two of us without either noticing.

"We're gonna eat, if you want to join," Callista offers, a dimpled smile spreading across her pretty features. She's been through hell, too. Her boyfriend was lost early on in our journey away from home. There's a heavy handgun at her side, a commodity that only a few months ago we'd thought would never be so important to our survival. There are monsters now. Not all is well.

All three of us make our way back into the bus, Titus flopping onto the couch next to Kyros.

Kyros Riddick may very well be the reason we're all out here. He showed up at the doors of our dome nearly consumed by the disease known as the Burning, and I saved him. It cost me my freedom and the death of friends and family, but I'd do it again if only because it was the right thing to do. He's one of my best friends now. He gives me a grin, his dark hair slightly longer than it used to be and sticking in every which direction.

Beside the boy I refer to as my ghost sits our resident Skywalker. The smiley blond boy was one of the workers in our old city who used to check the glass for cracks. We might have ended up being a thing if we had stayed there. I'm glad we didn't. He's not so glad.

We eat the weird dehydrated food in relative silence. I think they're expecting me to snap again after the mirror incident. No such luck.

The desert outside used to be beautiful to me. Not in the way that a painting is beautiful, or the way a dance is, or the moon, but as in the tragedy of what it used to be. There could have been endless fields of green, rivers of icy blue... it would have been beautiful.