I was sat in my living room at the time. My mother had just put the kettle on and was preparing us some tea for comfort. We, that is, my family and I, had been following the news pretty closely for obvious reasons. “Elves sweep through the Imperio Argentino “Another city falls to the elves” “No one left alive in La Paz”. Every day, it was more bad news. More so for the people that were killed, may they rest in peace, but also for those of us that watched our seemingly inevitable death coming closer and closer. You know, my mom actually said a prayer for Dagon, imagine that. If he hadn’t been following the currents in the area at the time, the elves could have simply sailed or flown all over the world, but I guess he hates all sapients, not just humans. Whatever his reasons, he may have been the only thing that let us end the war in one stroke. But I’m getting ahead of myself, where was I? Ah yes, inevitable death.

So, we knew that we either stopped them there, Panama, that is, or succumbed to our doom since Dagon wouldn’t follow them into North America. We saw it looking more and more dire as our brave Guilders died en masse, just to buy some more time to scramble our ancient nuclear weapons and hopefully end their advance. The nukes blew the country completely apart, with a few Flowers there to keep any fallout from spreading but we didn’t know if it had worked. There were no new updates for about an hour, so I went outside and lit up a joint. Yes yes, I know, but it was the end of the world, lung cancer would have been the least of my problems and hey, its legal. That’s when I heard it.

More felt it, to be honest, the violent cracking sound rattled my bones like a maraca. A few minutes later the ground started shaking, which was really weird because we don’t live anywhere near a fault line and as far as I knew, earthquakes didn’t happen in our area. I rushed back inside to see what was going on and the news was reporting the entire continent had full-on shattered. Pulverised as if it were a ceramic plate. Like, complete rubble that was now sinking beneath the waves. I won’t lie, I accepted my death at that moment. If the elves could output that much power, what chance did we have?

Excerpt from “Where I Was That Day: Conversations With The Public”

“Will he be okay?”

Birgitte and Jas were crowding around the bed Musa lay upon. He was still out cold, but had started breathing on his own and was looking a lot less pale. He was hooked up to a breathing apparatus, just in case, but the combination of the sterile white room and the various beeping machines he was connected to made Birgitte nervous. Freja lay in the bed next to his, but she had never been in any danger and to be completely honest, she was mostly Musa’s friend. They were still worried about her but nowhere near as much as for their team member.

“Of course, young lady, he’s simply had quite a bit of strain placed on his soul and he’s lucky to have lived through it. The fact that he survived at all means he’ll make a full recovery; the soul is very flexible when it doesn’t break. However, he may feel a bit… feminine for the next few days.”

Birgitte blinked.

“Excuse me?”

The nurse on duty calmly explained that the Peaceful zone prevented Freja’s energy from shedding her particular soul signature, the reason why cultigens can’t simply draw Sunlight directly from another cultigen’s abilities. When this energy entered Musa, it carried traces of her in it and the fact that he couldn’t push it out of his body to create a graft-chimera meant that he now had a bit of Freja’s soul in him. His own soul would scrub itself clean eventually, but he would share some of her memories, emotions, and mannerisms until any trace of her was gone.

“Musa you fucking idiot.”

Birgitte smacked his forehead lightly, more out of relief he’d make it than true annoyance. The Chancellor had taken them directly to the infirmary, saying that as much as she’d like to, she had no reason to punish them as they weren’t informed of what exactly the Peaceful zone was and what not to do once it’s triggered. She had a murderous look on her face when she talked about finding Mr McLeod though.

The nurse left them after checking over Musa’s vitals one last time. Injuries to the soul were the only ones Sunlight couldn’t heal and while it would repair itself eventually, they had to keep him alive until that happened.

Birgitte sat down in a chair next to the bed, Jas dragging a chair over from Freja’s side and sitting next to her.

“He’s not usually this reckless.”

“I agree. Before Mike passed, he would have had no qualms with simply waiting atop his construct, maybe even jest a bit at how he’s now above us in every way. I believe this has affected him more than he lets on.”

She looked over him, his chest slowly rising and falling under the blanket as the glass roof spilled Sunlight across the area. Let us help you, you fucking maniac.

“What can we even do? Mike had been his best friend since childhood, we’re just shitty replacements.”

Jas was silent for a bit, thinking.

“Truthfully, nothing more than we have been doing. I met the two of them before you, about half a year before school commenced. Of course, I could barely understand English at the time, but I did take great note of their dynamic. Mike is irreplaceable in Musa’s life, we need to understand this. We will never fill up the Mike-shaped void in him. What we can do however, is help him plaster over it himself. He fully believes Mike is still alive. While he has that hope, he’ll continue pushing himself to dangerous extremes like this. I’ll request Madam Chancellor to retract her statement about Mike being off-world, that is what spurred this and the incident in the training arena. He’ll get either himself, or us killed if he continues like this.”

Now it was Birgitte’s turn to go silent. Jas was always surprisingly perceptive and, while she’d never admit it, he was often right about things like this. Is crushing your hope really the only way?

~~~

“SEEDS! It’s time to move.”

Mr McLeod was back after a week-long “vacation” as they were told. As standoffish as ever, the large man was currently walking onto a bus, clearly expecting them to follow without hesitation.

There was a palpable apprehension about the crowd as they slowly shuffled towards the buses. They clearly remembered the last trip they’d taken off-campus. Of course, this time they had several Flowers in tow but the fear still gripped them. There was none of the chatter there’d been last time.

Musa had bounced back just in time for the Aberrant attack and was currently sitting in a seat with Jas. Birgitte and Freja sat opposite them, the latter’s team still out of the action. It had been… disconcerting to remember going through puberty as a girl, kissing a guy for the first time and especially disconcerting to get turned on at his own reflection. When he’d told Freja about the memories, she’d simply laughed and called it payback. He hadn’t told her he knew exactly how attractive she found him.

The group was in a sombre mood as they also remembered the last time they had been on a school trip, thinking back on companions that were no longer there. Musa broke the ice.

“So guys, anyone wanna make some bets? My money’s on the tree.”

He ducked as both Freja and Birgitte swatted at him for the inappropriate joke, while Jas died of laughter beside him. Tension broken, they started talking in earnest.

“I heard one of the third years can call down an actual lightning storm!”

“I heard there’s a guy who can change the size of his weapons while ignoring the increase in weight. Imagine a sword the size of a fucking building!”

“Sword? There’s one who can actually become a giant, who cares about large swords when you can literally punch an Aberrant in the face.”

They rolled through the city of New London. Skyscrapers of metal and glass were contrasted with the vegetation that lined the roads in the city centre. Their buses dwarfed the other vehicles on the streets but weren’t held up in any way, the path having been cleared of traffic beforehand. One of the privileges of power. They drove past the residential areas, stone and brick replacing metal but even more glass making up the construction of the houses. Lots of cultigens lived in New London but even mundanes, Stenari or not, enjoyed the Sun’s gaze.

“You think they’ll need us?”

Freja was fixated on helping out during the imminent attack. Musa understood why though.

“Nah, they have this. Even if somehow it gets past the third-years, we have Flowers. And if it somehow gets past them, it’ll just beat against the Bulwark until a dedicated team can take it out. Don’t stress.”

The reassurance wasn’t just to dissuade her from jumping into the fight. She was legitimately afraid. Musa had seen the Aberrant destroying her town when she was a girl. Add that to an impressively destructive Sprout, and her first instinct when something scared her was to blow it up.

She narrowed her eyes at him, probably suspecting that he’d seen more of her history than he’d let on, but she eventually nodded and relaxed in her seat.

They reached the titanic wall that surrounded the city, its dark, imposing mass reaching up to the clouds, it seemed. The buses drove onto the elevators. The Bulwark was much too big to traverse on foot, at least for anyone weaker than a Flower, so there was a road built atop it for vehicles to move easily and elevators for people and vehicles to actually get there. The bus slightly shook as it rose.

Musa looked out at New London, from above just like at school. Is this what it means to be a cultigen? To always be looking down at the rest of the world from above? He pondered the question as he waited for the bus to finally reach the top. He’d always been comfortable in life, more than most. But so were most cultigens, the Guild made sure they never had a reason to be unhappy. With manifestations running in families, it had created an inadvertent upper class of wealthy, long-lived, superpowered dynasties. They understood their duty and why they had all these privileges, but gazing out over the city, he wondered if this was truly the best they could do.

There was a clear delineation between cultigen dominated areas and mundane areas. Cultigens tended to have compounds, the walls allowing for privacy when their houses were mostly transparent, whereas mundanes had normal, if glassy, houses. They also tended to live either on the outskirts, closer to the farms where there was more space, or in the skyscrapers. But they were always separate from the mundanes. Popular thought held that manifesting made you more than human, but that came with the implication that those who hadn’t were less. And looking at the sprawling, clean cultigen walled living areas contrasted against the more cramped, less maintained areas for everyone else, it seemed that society agreed. There was even litter on the ground in some mundane areas. Musa had only seen litter on TV. This is natural. There are just more of them than us and we protect the entire species. This is natural.

Musa’s musings were interrupted by the jolt of the bus reaching the top. A hundred metres in the air, he could see for miles in any direction. And outside the wall, making its deceptively fast way towards the city, was a behemoth.