397. Music of Earth, 4

(Zeslinry)

Our journey through the western part of the old continent was rather uneventful.

We travelled mostly along the long abandoned, and destroyed, roads. We're heading roughly East.

The land is quiet as always. I heard stags in some forests along the way, but never saw them.

I left Myls walk in front. She inspects the terrain. I steadily limp my way along the path she opens safely.

We walk endlessly along old roads now covered with enough dirt to have them become mere shapes in the colours of the land. It's even worse than on the island.

Not much is growing over them. Not even grass for most of them. It's an odd binary choice. Some old roads are completely covered with grass now, and the others not at all. I don't understand why but there doesn't seem to be much of a middle ground; not around here.

I remember the first days, when the land was still mostly intact. When smokes covered the cities and their fires.

Over the years, I've seen the landscape slowly change.

Even if nature usually didn't try to take over the spaces now abandoned, dusts and dirts, erosion and rain, they sure did.

The roads slowly sunk into the earth over the years. The buildings became eroded, losing their usual colours. Everything began fusing and mixing itself with its surroundings. Boundaries fade.

All the infrastructures of the known world evolved steadily toward this decay. The two words abandon and ageing come to mind, when seeing any building now.

Now it already begins to feel like we are archaeologists whenever we reach a new city.

Just a little for now. But this feeling of being out of this time is bound to grow rapidly.

Everything grows apart from us as it aged outside of civilisation.

Civilisation...

Thinking about that word, that concept, now leaves me daydreaming as I walk.

A few hundred metres ahead of me on that now invisible road, that thin and extended flat field of dirt, she's walking.

Myls is looking around regularly with her scope.

My parents wanted something for their life.

A job. A safe home. They wanted something similar for me.

My education didn't met a proper end.

As I fled the land, then heading to the England, all I wanted in life was a remote piece of land to live and a place to work.

Same words, very different meaning.

So different.

I'm alive.

I said that as a teenager.

One meaning, simple. It's just that I'm living.

I said it again, as a refugee.

Very different meaning then. I survived so far.

I said it as a survivor to the end...

I said it after losing my leg... I remember that encounter, that panic, and that lesson.

I was alive the next day.

And I say it again, a decade later. And it's still not the same.

Like colours, the same words can have radical different meanings depending on the context surrounding them.

As I walk on this abandoned European road today, Myls ahead of me scouting the way...

Years after all these events...

I'm alive...

The words to describe what I want in life still haven't really changed.

But their meaning sure has evolved.

Rose... didn't want to live with us.

She always had other goals in life.

Myls and I... We're family. Strongly. We adopted each other.

Rose didn't want to join that family we make. She was always looking elsewhere more distant.

And Myls always wanted to travel, while I wanted to settle and keep things steady.

Still. We are travelling.

Everyone I've known before meeting her is dead.

But they don't haunt me. I don't miss them, because I have a good family.

I want to live with a steady home, I could still say.

But home means more the place where my family is, more than anything else made of concrete.

What I wanted in life was bound and defined by civilisation before.

But the end of civilisation was far from the end of it.

It's a big and harsh change of context, but not doom.

Not for me. Not for her.

And certainly not for those wild roses and demons roaming the world.

~

We explore briefly old industrial cities along our way. We don't find any place where we really could build a new camp.

I have very high expectations and specifications for the ideal place, and they're hard to meet.

All those ruins usually miss something.

A place easy to build and rebuild, with safe water, safe fields for crops, many ways in and out for us, but no one else. Easy to defend and to recapture for us but only us.

Myls thinks I'm asking for too much.

I don't see all this as responses to immediate dangers, but long term insurances.

We're not fighting wolves every other day of course.

I try to think on the long term. On the very long term.

And on the very long term, there's a fair chance we will one day need a place that resists floods and earthquakes.

The same goes for every military kind of specification I have.

They're like seatbelts.

We will never need or use them really.

Except for the one time in our life when we truly would.

And that can mean a lot nowadays.

So in the end, Myls agrees with me.

When it's not perfect, we move on.

We want the perfect castle to base our new operations in Europe.

And until we find it, we continue travelling. As long as we proceed with caution, there's no hurry for anything.

Whom moves slowly moves cautiously, and whom moves cautiously progresses quickly.

~

Over the time, we headed very deep inland, always pushing forward.

We passed what I believe were once the Schwarzenwalden or something. The climate has changed.

The air is very different in this part of the world. Myls and I feel it clearly.

There's a tweak in our metabolism, as if altitude had changed, or many time zones. We don't know quite exactly what is different, but something is different. We can feel it in the air.

One day perhaps, we would learn the reality of it. That quite like there are zones in the world with specific climates, there are zones of effect of weirdness that differs from one another.

There's a big area stretching from Poland to the black sea with an affect very different to the ones on the east and the west of it.

We would learn about that much later, and what it implied regarding human metabolism.

We would learn about T.I. on a later day.

Meanwhile, we just felt we had entered a different invisible climate zone.

One day we would learn it was one of the rare areas of the world where the chance of babies to be born alive had not fallen completely to zero.

0.005 was not zero.

It wouldn't change the fate of humanity on the long term.

But on the short term, it meant there were still a few places left on Earth and in Europe, where you could sometimes hear a baby crying, and later see a child growing healthily.

It's the rarest thing in the world now, which makes it even more precious.

We saw a baby.

Far away. In a village we didn't try to reach. The cries it made got us curious though.

There was a good cliff between us and them. So for a while, we just observed them from afar, filled with curiosity.

We saw a family, and maybe a dozen people living down there.

And a young child.

The family farm lived steadily, almost like a dream to me.

M - See, they don't have high walls with spikes to defend them.

Z - Alright, alright. It's true, they don't seem to fear wolves any more than demons attacking them anytime... They're doing well.

We had a nice time seeing this happy family just living there. It's nice to see it's possible.

M - Should we go meet them?

Z - Hm, they seem fine. We don't really need to meet them and they don't either. I'd say we should let them be. But up to you if you want to?

Myls hasn't seen many humans, so I would understand if she wants to go and meet them. I kind of do actually, but I'm more... let's say shy.

Myls smiles a little weirdly, getting closer to me and patting my shoulder.

She says nothing and just smiles.

We moved on without heading to meet them. I wish them good luck and nice life ahead, to that young child we saw down there.

His or her life will eventually be very lonely. But hopefully it will be nice nonetheless.

I pat Myls' head without a word as we walk.

We have many more wonders to encounter.

Behind us, the yells of the baby fade in the distance.

~

One morning, Myls smelled something very unusual on her guns. I saw her making a genuinely surprised face quite unlike her.

Z - What is it?

M - I think Rose is near.

~