Two days later.

Rubble doesn't normally move. Especially not rubble that has been sitting, collecting dust for days.

Which is to say that - whenever the crumbling remains of warehouse seventeen shifted, it was unusual.

It was the sort of thing that made people stop and stare... And they probably would have too - if there had been anyone within miles of the abandoned industrial district to do so. As it was, the only thing there to observe Fyn as he crawled out of the wreckage was a curious rat about twice the size of a house cat.

It twitched its nose at him and scurried away, which was impressive considering its formidable size. For any creature of that size, scurrying was rather tricky. You never heard of any bulls that scurried; they charged or barrelled, or something like that.

Fyn rolled the last of the way out of the warehouse, slamming his elbow off a shattered concrete block as he came to a stop. The only sound for miles around was a low groan that seemed to emanate from the very depths of his soul.

Mercifully, the pain wore off quickly enough, and he was soon on his feet, swaying unsteadily. Somehow, despite them appearing entirely solid, his legs had taken on the consistency of jello - which made finding his bearings rather tricky.

But eventually, he managed it, and, without any real clue as to where he was headed, he slowly, painstakingly, wobbled away from the wreckage. Fyn's walk was an off-kilter stumble that was eerily similar to that of a drunk on their way home after a handy defeat before their greatest foe - the bouncer.

With his slow, lurching gait, it took him ages to get anywhere, and with the immense size of the sprawling industrial district - finding the exit was like searching for that one jigsaw piece that fell down the back of the sofa years ago.

His brain was foggy and clumsy, tripping over itself in its attempts to piece everything together. The whole world felt blurry and out of focus, as though he was viewing it through the bottom of a thick glass, and his head throbbed like someone had dropped an anvil on it.

He scrunched up his face as he tried to recall how he had ended up here. Memories trickled back to him like water from a leaky faucet; barely any of them were legible.

But he could tell that nothing he walked past felt familiar; that was certain.

Scraping the bottom of the barrel that was his mind, a few things clicked in his head. He had... been speaking to someone for a weeks now on one of his many forums. They had... he winced as a migraine assaulted him, riding out the storm.

When the throbbing subsided, he returned his focus to remembering, and soon, things returned to him. A week ago, he had agreed to meet the person he had been talking to. They had promised to help him become a Sentinel.

Following that, everything was a blur.

He vaguely remembered stepping into a battered old chip shop delivery van that had pulled up outside his apartment. The thing had stunk of vinegar and sweat. He remembered the big man in the back, with a thick black beard speckled with grey. He remembered how the man had tied a rough blindfold cut from an old potato sack around his face. It had been scratchy and damp. Strangely enough, the thing that stood out most was how it smelt of starch and the man's overpowering cologne.

But everything after that was hazy. Those memories were distant and illusionary, like the melody of a song you can't quite recall the words to.

Trying his best to figure out where he was, Fyn reckoned he had been in the van for about half an hour. An old heap of junk like that couldn't have gone far in half an hour, so he couldn't be too far from Dublin. That, at least, gave him some hope.

Was there anywhere within half an hour of Dublin that looked like this?

Almost certainly… but he was no expert on abandoned industrial parks, so that didn't really help his current situation much.

To make matters worse, the big man with the beard had taken his phone and wallet… although perhaps that was a good thing since they would have gone up in flames if he'd still had them…

He glanced down, realising for the first time that he was naked. His clothes must have burned in the fire.

"Shit," he said. His voice was hoarse, which made sense considering the amount of smoke he'd inhaled... He still wasn't sure how he'd done that without dying.

But there were more pressing matters at hand, clothes topping that list.

Fyn glanced around nervously, scanning the abandoned warehouses. They were all skeletal and withered - in the way that only buildings can be. Rusted iron and moss-covered concrete made the place look like an exclusion zone in the midst of being reclaimed by nature. The only living things here were overgrown rats and seagulls, which are really just the rats of the sky.

"Shit," he said again, just to put emphasis on it. "What the fuck am I supposed to do?"I

t would have been nice if someone was there to answer, but unfortunately, his only company was a pair of giant birds watching him from the eaves of one of the factories. They looked big enough to steal a sheep... Or at least, a sheep before the transit.

With no other options, he kept shuffling forwards, hearing broken glass crunch under his feet like fresh snow beneath heavy boots. And yet, strangely, the glass didn't manage to cut through his skin. Somehow, his bare feet were tougher than any of the sharp debris he stepped on.

And... despite being naked, he didn't even feel cold. If anything, he was warm. The chilly Irish breeze felt almost Caribbean.

Fyn was too frazzled to try and figure out what any of this meant, so he just focused all his attention on not being naked.

Eventually, he managed to find a pair of old cargo shorts lying in one of the warehouses. They were partially burnt and shredded by what looked like claws, but Fyn didn't mind. He put them on, doing his best to ignore the smell. Then, after some more searching, he came across a fading high-vis jacket buried under a pile of broken bottles.

As he walked down the centre of the industrial district, wearing the clothes of a homeless builder, Fyn thought he might actually have been better off naked.

All the while, his mind ran at a mile a minute, trying to put back together the confusing events that had gotten him here. He could say with certainty that it had been his idea. That made sense. For a while now, he had been trawling online forums in search of a way to become a sentinel without a star seed, and if presented with that opportunity... Fyn knew he would have snapped it up.

Clearly, that had been a poisoned chalice, however.

He just wondered why the doctor - or perhaps it was the bearded man - was on those forums to begin with. Fyn knew what the doctor was and knew that the man had been taking a massive risk by exposing himself like that.

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The doctor had been a humanist, or, to be more precise, a human sentinel.

In short, Sentinels were those of abilities beyond human capability. At a young age - usually twelve to fifteen years old - kids would be tested. If they did well in those tests, if they showed promise, then they were shipped off to one of the mighty academies in the centre of the Aegis. There, they were given a star seed which unlocked the ability to cultivate. To further classify sentinels, one must look at their affinity. This determines the nature of their abilities, and you must only look at the shadow Sentinel to get an idea of what that entails.

The Sentinels were revered throughout the Aegis as protectors. They wielded powers beyond the imagination in wars against the blight, and every living thing in the Aegis owed their lives to these great people.

All except the human sentinels, it seemed.

Cruel experiments and twisted tests had given almost every humanist the reputation of a crazed, serial killer. Perhaps it was the nature of their affinity that drove them crazy - no one knew for sure. But the reason didn't really matter.

Nobody cared why the humanists were all a bunch of vicious murders. They just wanted rid of them.

As a result, humanists were excellent at not being found. In fact, finding a humanist was like searching for a needle in a haystack that might not actually have a needle in it.

Reminded of sentinels, the memory of the shadow sentinel flashed across his mind. That was the first time Fyn had seen a combat sentinel in the flesh, and it was every bit as impressive as he had imagined. Just remembering it poured gasoline on the bonfire that was his existing infatuation with them.

But who could blame Fyn for that? In these post-transit times, it was more common to find a kid obsessed with their angelic defenders han one who loved football or video games.

Without realising it, Fyn had blundered his way to the edge of the industrial park - where a cracked, overgrown road passed through rusted iron gates. As he walked through, Fyn noted the heavy lock that lay snapped on the floor by one of the gates. It looked like it had been ripped apart bare-handed, with metal twisting and stretching like molten glass.

'Was that one of those soldiers?' He wondered.

He passed through the gate and kept walking, eventually finding himself on a quiet country road leading to nowhere. All of the fields he passed had been left to overgrow, acre after acre of tall grass and weeds stretched out alongside the cracked road. With food as scarce as it was, cattle and other such livestock were seen as a luxury only the rich could afford.

Or rather, a danger only the rich could afford to contain.

If post-transit rats were twice the size of house cats, it's easy to imagine what sort of monsters cows had become. Now, farming was an issue of containment rather than cultivation.

Fyn himself had never even eaten fresh meat. Only the tinned, synthetic stuff that came as rations from other planets. Those tins always had a smiling alien saying a joke that made absolutely no sense plastered on the front. To this day, Fyn had never found a single ration joke funny, and he wore that as a badge of honour.

Granted, you would have to be a crazy person to laugh while eating synthetic rations. They tasted like how getting cut in line at the supermarket felt.

Following the country road for a few miles led him past a couple of abandoned farms and homesteads. Each one was derelict and silent, lacking the life and energy such a place should have. They were too quiet now. Too... empty.

He kept walking and eventually found himself on a main road. There, he saw a sign that read [Dublin, Thirty-five kilometres.]

"That's nearly a marathon," he groaned. His stomach grumbled in agreement, and it suddenly occurred to him that he hadn't eaten since before getting to the warehouse, which had been days ago. "There's no way I'll make it…"

Defeated, Fyn sighed and sat by the side of the road, holding out a hand half-heartedly. He didn't expect many people to stop for a crazy person who looked like he'd crawled out of a fistfight with a forest fire... but he could always hope.

Unfortunately, it didn't take long for him to be proven right. None of the few cars that passed even slowed down. In fact, most of them sped up. He could hardly blame them, though. Fyn wouldn't stop for Fyn, not that he had ever driven.

And so, he sat on the side of an old six-lane motorway that stretched over the rolling hills in either direction. Many streetlights were smashed or bent in seemingly random directions, and huge potholes almost a foot deep and wider than some cars pockmarked the road like impact craters from a meteor shower. When it rained, these potholes turned into little lakes that dotted the highway.

These wounds on the asphalt were a testament to the state of the world.

Since the transit, a lot of people had died. A lot. And now the world was much quieter than it had once been. It was emptier now. Emptier and much less forgiving.

Fyn hadn't personally experienced the transit. He was born a few years after Earth arrived in the Aegis - so all he had to remember the glory days of his planet by were old videos and movies.

Following the huge loss of life caused by the transit, the Earth's population had taken a nose dive. Of course, this had less to do with the transit itself and more with the enemies Earth now possessed as a result of where they ended up.

He looked up and frowned. The sky was a bleached, overcast grey, but he could see flashes of neon lights through the cloud cover. They shone in a colour unique to them. It was close to purple and yet also white, seeming to oscillate between the two without ever finding a middle-ground.

Fyn had long grown used to seeing the breaches up above the gloomy clouds, but he would never get used to the things that came through them. Never.

The Blight were the sort of things nightmares had bad dreams about.

Thanks to the ever-present threat of the blight, many places were left abandoned, as humans clumped together in central cities. It was somewhat like penguins huddling for warmth. With the world growing wilder and deadlier by the day, community became the only thing that gave humanity an edge. Although that edge was admittedly blunt.

As a result, there were few cars on the road. And even fewer were new. Most cars were old, pre-transit things that rattled and shook like they might fall apart at any moment. It probably didn't help that the roads hadn't been serviced in years.

Fyn could still remember when the wheels fell off his neighbour's banged-up old jeep on the way to the ration centre. The whole street had come out to help carry the old rust bucket back to the man's drive - where it still remained, marinating in a pile of its own decay.

Another car passed. It was an old model with paint peeling off and wing mirrors missing. Its exhaust hissed and spat like an angry snake as it drove by.

Fyn groaned and lay back on the grass. He was beaten.

"I survived a burning building collapsing on top of me," he said. "And this is what kills me."

Lying on his back, Fyn stared blankly up at the overcast sky… it was always overcast. Apparently, this had something to do with protective wards on the planet. Someone had once told him that the clouds were more tangible than they appeared, acting as an early warning system for when the blight attacked. Whatever the reason, it was still miserable to look at.

Fyn wasn't sure how long he had lain there, staring up at the grim clouds. Hours maybe, it had certainly gotten darker. Occasionally, a car would trundle past without stopping, but he had grown used to them.

So used, in fact, that when one actually stopped, he didn't notice.

It wasn't until the gruff old woman kicked him in the leg that he looked over and realised she was there.

"You alive?" she asked, sounding less concerned and more annoyed. Her accent was a thick Scottish drawl. She was a wiry old thing with a mop of curly grey hair and a navy scarf wrapped around the bottom half of her face.

Fyn nodded.

"Then get in." She turned and hobbled back to an ancient pick-up truck. "I hope Dublin's alright with you. Cus that's where I'm goin'."

Fyn nodded again, still too stunned to speak or move or, well... Think.

She turned back to face him. "Well? I ain't got all day, lad. You coming or not?"

"Uh, yeah, thanks." He stumbled to his feet and lurched over to the pick-up, motioning to enter the passenger seat.

"Gods no!" the woman yelped. "You stink worse than my husband after he comes back from a week at sea. Get in the back there with the turnips; go on, they won't bite."

Fyn turned to look at the back of the truck, where a heaping pile of turnips was stacked so high it was a wonder none had fallen out yet. Suddenly remembering how hungry he was, his stomach growled.

The older woman gave him a knowing look and snorted. "You can have one if you want," she said. "But fair warning, raw turnip tastes about as good as a punch in the throat."

Fyn nodded again. He felt like he was doing that quite a lot recently. Eventually, he climbed up the side of the truck, settling in a little nook of turnips with his back to the driver's cabin.

"Hold on tight!" the woman yelled as the engine spluttered to life. It wheezed and coughed like an asthmatic old man, inching forward before lurching into a sudden sprint. Fyn clutched the side of the rickety old truck and prayed they wouldn't hit any of the massive potholes. If they did, he'd be launched a few hundred metres away, and when they found him, they'd have to scrape him off the asphalt with a shovel.

As Fyn bit into one of the turnips, he discovered that the woman was right. They did taste awful. The flavour was bitter and cold, like biting into a bar of soap that had been left in the fridge. This isn't to say that he complained or didn't finish the turnip. He had never been so hungry in his entire life, so - unpleasant or not - he wasn't about to turn down free food.

While he ate his raw turnip and watched the overgrown countryside whiz by, Fyn couldn't help but smile.

After everything he had been through.

He was alive.

And maybe… just maybe… he wasn't quite the same person he had been a few days ago.

Maybe... maybe Fyn was something special now. Someone special.

He sure hoped so.