Evening in the City of Children, in the Invaded Land of Zantou

The air was gray and lifeless. Beneath the shadow of a black baseball cap, Nilfrem’s optimistic black eyes peered through a narrow crevice, looking at the other people who were seeking shelter at the temple.

At only five years old, he was too young to understand the concept of being stuck. There he stood, bent over under the cold solitude of concrete rubble completely oblivious. He wasn’t worried at all that his chubby head was trapped between two steel reinforcement bars.

Beside the temple, there was a hole in the parking lot resembling a massive pothole. The cars were burned out and wrecked.

The temple, a three-story building by the sea, was painted in the colors of the Neutral Faction: purple and white. People filled its classrooms and walkways and pitched makeshift tents in a courtyard in the center of the building.

“Bear with it a little more, my children. For now, you must remain here,” Sister Rose said against the backdrop of a deafening explosion. Though not their birth mother, she loved and cared for them as though they were her own children.

“Oh... Oh…” The girl cried repeatedly in despair. “It’s not thunder. It’s not raining.”

"No one among you is at fault." Sister Rose looked on helplessly.

The little girl ran up boldly to her older brother and embraced him, bawling tears on his neck. Even just for a few fleeting seconds, being with her brother sparked joy and comfort.

“Children? Children!” Sister Rose was not trained how to pacify children and it showed.

Fireballs rained down indiscriminately on the streets outside. Flames lit up the sky as the sounds of bombings and blasts reverberated across the city.

She whirled around to see a thick plume of smoke rising into the air a few blocks over.

“Why are we being punished?”

“It is all my fault.” Kids screamed and hollered.

Once in a while, though, some caring person would point into the sky at the invader’s aircraft and say something along the lines of, "It’s nobody’s fault. You are not evil. They are!"

A crying girl came before Sister Rose and asked her, “Why did they have to bomb my dolls?”

Another fiery blast shook the ground under our feet, the sound was incredibly loud and scary. Billowing clouds of acrid smoke choked the air, stinging her eyes and coating her tongue with an ashy film.

At that moment dozens of children began to cry and itch. This is the loudest sound that they ever heard. Many of the kids peed in their pants.

Sister Rose listened, and her face suddenly collapsed. The war tanks were said to be just meters from the hospital across the street.

She wished she had an answer. She could tell which girls lack mothers by the look of their hair. There was more devastation in the collective suffering of children than anything she had witnessed before. She was so choked up on emotions that she could barely speak.

She seemed to be pulling herself together for a few seconds, as though she did not know where she was, and what she was doing, and curled up on the floor with her fingers gripping the shawl over her hair.

In the central courtyard, masses of huddled people had taken shelter here, sleeping in the extreme cold without blankets or pillows.

But the children could not sleep because of the sounds of missiles. They huddled with their family wide-awake as planes flew across Zantou, their homeland.

A father and his daughter were pleading to the monks, “We fled under fire at dawn today. We carried a few blankets and walked 2 hours south to reach the entrance to the City of Children, and now we are in the street. Where should we go?”

He had put cotton balls in his daughter’s ears to muffle the sound of bombardments. The walls were shaking, there was a toxic smell in the air.

The girl pulled at the long sleeves of her dress, desperately trying to hide the angry red splotches that crept up her forearms. In the crowded shelters, about one in six had some skin disease.

Ever since the bumpy rash appeared a few days ago, her life had turned from a waking nightmare into a hellish nightmare. What had started as a few small, raised spots had quickly blooded into an angry, pitted terrain across her arms, legs, and face. The rough, uneven texture seemed to mock her every time she looked in the mirror.

Sister Rose heard back from several Brothers. They ran to investigate the site of the latest offensive attack and found it completely destroyed. Bodies were everywhere. They could not find any survivors.

“For mercy’s sake. The children; they are not to blame!” Sister Rose bellowed. She lowered herself completely to the ground, kneeling on a woven rug with her forehead pressed to the cool marble floor.

Before her stood an imposing statue - the temple's guardian deity known as a Fire Elemental. Carved from obsidian stone, it towered seven feet tall with the muscular torso of a powerfully built human warrior and the horned, snarling head of a great desert djinn. In the Djinn’s hand was an eternal flame burning continuously behind an open altar.

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For three decades, Sister Rose had served as caretaker of this ancient temple. Ever since the invaders began their brutal genocide of her people, she came daily to kneel before the Fire Elemental, desperately beseeching the powerful entity to awaken and intervene.

Shortly after, another person of faith approached the eternal flame, despite the red cross necklace around his neck showing that he was a worshiper of Blood Sacrifice. There were many overlaps in the two beliefs because the Blood Sacrifice and the Eternal Flame were as ancient as the land itself.

God of Light and Salvation,

God who seek the Lost Children of Blood

Extend your mighty hand to fight for us

Keep us safe and worthy until our eternal death

We pray for those killed, injured and trapped

So may your flame comfort our souls

Together, they called for justice on behalf of their people and on behalf of the children. Everywhere she looked, a prayer room, classroom or a spot in the hallway, were all full of people who lost their homes and loved ones from the oppression inflicted by those who wear the distinctive pointed hats bearing the emblem of the Double Prisms. The rectangular-prism-shaped hats were a distinguishing feature of the religious believers of DP, the Double Prisms.

Sister Rose’s grieving was abruptly interrupted when a group of toddlers insistently pulled at her shirt.

“Teacher! We were playing a game. But he followed me through the steel pillars.” A four year old girl was pointing to the old playground.

Sister Rose didn’t see anyone in the direction the girl was pointing to. There was nothing but rubble by the playground.

Her initial reaction was “Is this a joke?” She didn’t believe the girl until another boy stepped forward and said the same thing as the little girl. And then another boy came. And another.

The voices of children grew louder, which is how Nilfrem, the boy under the rubble, knew people were going to come find him.

He tilted his head up panicking. It was weird. Ninety percent of him didn’t want them to come. It was embarrassing.

Nilfrem looked like a ghost. His skin was all sparkly pale gray with dust.

She examined him with arms crossed tightly over her chest and her eyes squinted half shut from the glare.

Sister Rose muttered in disbelief, "How did this happen?" She had seen countless ways children got themselves hurt while playing in their neighborhood. But she couldn't help feeling taken aback every time.

“Are you injured? Where does it hurt?" One man asked gently as others set to work clearing away the large, broken chunks of building material.

Nilfrem felt weak. He made little noise. He was so tired. He felt so heavy. His whole body was shaking.

He caught fragments of a girl's high-pitched voice. "Don't worry," but even as the girl said it, Nelfrim felt crushed as if something deep inside him was breaking.

After 30 interminable minutes, he grew very worried. The realization was settling in on him. Would he remain stuck like this forever? Would he never go back home? There was an anxious, terrible feeling he did not have the words to describe.

He did not remember everything Sister Rose and the other children had said, only the emotions of their words and how the air turned raw and full of shame. He did not like how other people were looking at him. But if he was being honest, what he truly hated was the way he appeared to them – small, helpless, pathetic.

He wiggled his head hoping to push it out of the trap through his own strength. But each failed effort only served to drain him further, until hot tears of frustration and despair streamed anew down his dust-caked cheeks. No matter how hard he tried each time, he could not squeeze his head out.

In his mind, thousands of nerves had been severed then crudely rewired in disorder. It made him cry again, even harsher and more guttural. He could no longer speak.

This went beyond mere confusion when you see weird things happening. It was an insidious wrongness gnawing at your very being as if a beast were consuming a part of your soul.

He felt stupid and pathetic. Is this who he really is? Nelfrim wept as hot tears streamed down his face.

The other people's words fell on deaf ears. He knew they were speaking, but none of it was getting through.

Terrible thoughts, barely a whisper, were planted in his mind. He was trying desperately to get rid of these seeds of darkness but how do you make things go away when they do not exist?

Everything felt wrong, distorted – as if the world itself had been upended and set spinning wildly in the opposite direction. Nothing was as it should be. He did not know how long he was falling in darkness.

Time was a finicky thing. It stretched out into an excruciatingly long hour and thirty minutes. But once it was over, relief came instantly.

The teacher was seeing off the other kids as some parents came to pick them up. One by one, each child departed until Nelfrim remained the only child in the playground.

She squinted against the brilliant crepuscular rays fanning out across the expansive sky coming from the west. The sun was sinking below the horizon, casting a warm orange-pink glow over the sea and the line of hundreds of their invader’s warships.

Nilfrem couldn't recall anything, as he had spent the entire time crying and thinking of the worst. They managed to clear the rubble and free him. He was not sure whether they cut through the steel or somehow managed to squeeze his head out.

He couldn't recall how he made it home. Was it Grandpa, Grandma, or Uncle who came to pick him up?

They were all kind and genuinely loving. But his feelings were telling him it was Grandma who talked to the teacher, her hands tenderly holding his own as they made their solemn way home.

Night fell over the convent, the dying moonlight cast upon fire and debris. Sister Rose finished her nightly prayer. When relaxing was too hard, those familiar mantras brought a sense of peace and comfort. She remained kneeling by her narrow bed, unable to rise just yet.

Through the white curtains of the window, she gazed up at the stars glittering in the inky sky. For a few blessed moments, she could pretend there was no destruction, no deafening bombs or patrolling Double Prisms officers terrorizing the innocent. The quiet hung heavy, as if the oppression had finally ended.

The man who stood by her side today, approached from behind and kissed her gently on the neck. His arms hugged her waist and she hugged him back lovingly.

"Are you thinking about the poor boy again?" he murmured against her hair.

Rose nodded, her throat tight. "Yes. I am worried."

"Don't be." Her lover reassured her, strong hands rubbing her shoulders. "He is one of the lucky ones. He has a brighter future waiting in the Emperor's Land."

"His grandmother said his flight will be in two days." Rose's eyes lingered on a flickering light crossing the night sky - not a star, but a plane heading west. “Toward freedom”

Her lover hugged her tighter. "It's where he belongs. The blood of our people runs in his veins but he was born in the Emperor’s Land. This invasion cannot be allowed to steal his future, too.”

"Yes...you're right," she whispered, more for herself than for her companion. They stood together in the darkness, praying the boy's flight would be safe, that some small piece of their world might be rebuilt from the ashes of this terrible invasion.