~April 26th, 140 AH~

~Sector Aquarius, no man’s land~

Sarnai Tenger bent her scrawny frame low to the ground, better to uncover the treasures half-buried upon a barren earth.

She had no knowledge of a hairless ageless creature that had only recently trekked across the planet with the same curiosity for its hidden treasures. Yet she leaned into her own task with the same diligence and patient attention to detail, traits she’d—knowingly or otherwise—passed onto a daughter whose face and name she could no longer remember.

Her latest find was the severed limb of one of the smaller Syntropy units. She was an experienced enough scavenger to know that this particular unit was called ‘Hornet’. And her husband was a garrulous enough know-it-all to have talked her ears off about how a hornet’s limb was part of the ‘thorax’ of an ‘arthropod’—just one of the many useless trivia that still rattled around in her brain, in the absence of other things she’d much prefer to remember.

Sarnai bent low to the ground, better to sweep away the sand and ash that still covered much of the salvage piece. This was the part of her ‘work’ that required the highest amount of diligence and patience, for the crooks that ran Lower Akra’s black market would invent any old excuse to knock down the price they'd pay for her find. All the more reason for her to avoid giving them an excuse, ready-made. Sarnai carefully swept away the sand and ash, dislodged the Hornet leg with a ginger tug, then held it up under the overcast sun, better to inspect her handiwork.

What would it fetch? Two, maybe three scrips at most? Perhaps enough to keep her and Bateer fed for a week—if they were willing to subsist on dumpster slop and weeks-expired fishcake. Not that it wouldn’t still be a noticeable upgrade over their usual fare.

And not that they had any other choice. It’d been just over two months since the kindly Gaertner man last showed up to the Foothills, with his rucksack full of goodies. Mr Gaertner was one of those people who preferred to ask after others instead of speaking about himself, but Sarnai in her lucid moments was a keen enough observer to have picked up on much more than the man let on. For instance, it hadn’t escaped her notice that his ‘disappearance’ had coincided with the big ‘not-a-coup’ that had the whole of Lower Akra up in arms.

All the more reason for her and Bateer to keep their wits about them. To stay strong and ever vigilant, just in case something revolutionary was really afoot. Something that could irrevocably change the lives of the Tengers, the Foothillers, and perhaps even all of Akropolis—for better or for worse. And if Sarnai wasn’t wrong about what she saw in Mr Gaertner, she for one was willing to wager on better.

Sarnai Tenger carefully tucked the Hornet leg under her skin-and-bones arm, then scanned the ashen landscape around her. Before her life could change for the better, she first needed to stay alive… and one measly Hornet leg wasn’t enough of a haul to justify venturing this far past the Foothills and away from the barriers that wrapped Akropolis in promises of safety. Just one more piece. One for each of her bony arms to carry, then she could call this outing a success.

She needed a better vantage point, and for that, she needed to go farther and higher. Sarnai continued her search, putting more distance between herself and the Foothills as she trekked across an ashen valley and clambered up its southernmost ridge.

Many back home would call her activities reckless—would even accuse her of having a death wish. Perhaps… they weren’t so wrong. But Sarnai herself considered the potential threat of a stray Syntropy encounter to be calculated risk—the cost of doing business. She was an experienced enough scavenger to know that the distance she could cover on foot was nothing compared to the flight ranges of Eidolons and live Syntropy units, which allowed much of the war to take place hundreds if not thousands of klicks away from Akropolis. While that made scavenging for scraps a tedious and often fruitless proposition, the complications inherent to Sarnai's task also gave her the only source of leverage when it came to negotiating with traders.

But she couldn’t negotiate without a product to sell. So, she clambered up a ridge on her atrophied legs, better to scan a wider swath of the barren earth. Half-buried treasures weren’t so difficult to spot, given their obsidian gleam amidst a field of deadened grey. And today, Sarnai proved luckier than usual. There, just past the ridge and protruding from the slope of an impact crater was a…

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“A wing!”

Sarnai whispered triumphantly to herself, then picked up her pace, as much as her leaden legs would allow. Even from a distance, she was confident in her ID. An elongated and somewhat misshapen triangle. Thin and almost membranous in appearance across much of its surface. Perhaps it’d once belonged to the same Hornet unit whose severed leg was now tucked safely in a scavenger’s arm. Whatever its provenance, it would soon serve a greater purpose, that of sustaining an aging Foothiller couple until they could witness a so-called ‘revolution’ in their twilight days.

Sarnai limp-ran to her prize, heart swelling with the thrill of discovery and face filling with a wrinkled yet eager smile. But as she reached the edge of the impact crater, she stumbled, then fell to her knees, just in front of the Hornet wing. The leg she’d so carefully carried until now slipped out of her grasp, before tumbling haphazardly down the slope.

For some time after, Sarnai remained motionless, save for the fitful shudders that accompanied her silent sobs.

She hadn’t tripped. Hadn’t lost her footing unexpectedly. Rather, all the strength—all the fight—had gone out of her in an instant, the moment she got close enough to see the Hornet wing in all its sleek yet fragile detail.

A misshapen triangle that spread and rose toward an overcast sky. Its surface a thin and crystalline membrane—so delicate, so brittle. Sarnai was sure—as sure as she’d been of anything in life—that the wing would crumble to dust and ash the moment she touched it. And somehow, the certitude of that knowledge had woken with it the hazy mirage of a long-lost memory.

A girl of ten, with a full head of hair and smiles to match the fullness of her youth. The girl’s hair, with its silken luster, had been Sarnai’s pride and joy, so much so that she’d scoured the whole of Lower Akra in search of a decorative hairpin that could match her daughter’s beauty. In the end, she’d settled for (after much haggling, of course) a handcrafted glass piece. A flower petal. Misshapen triangle, with a thin gossamer surface that was as pretty as it was delicate.

Sarnai sat a while in silence, until the tears dried upon her weathered face. The image of her daughter—with her beauty and her smiles—had been so fleeting and so hazy as to appear almost unreal. A mere figment in the careworn mind of a mother who was no longer a mother.

But if it wasn’t real… why did it hurt so goddamned much?

Sarnai sat with her false memories and the excruciating pain they’d ignited. She sat until more sand and ash settled on the gossamer surface of the Hornet wing, carried by winds that cared naught for a mother’s grief—real, imagined, or otherwise.

She sat until the skies above shook with a distant rumbling, along with the spread of dark shadows that swallowed the overcast sun.

No amount of experience as a scavenger could’ve prepared Sarnai Tenger for what she next saw, heard, and smelled. There was nothing in her knowledge—either cultivated on her own, or that forced upon her by a garrulous husband—that could’ve helped her ID the obsidian Leviathan that floated toward her from the southern hills. Yet, despite her lack of pre-requisite knowledge, she identified it all the same.

Death.

Death—and along with it, salvation. For Sarnai knew then that the naysayers back home had been right. What she did, scavenging for parts this far out from the ‘safety’ of Akropolis, had been reckless. And now, she came face to face with the thing that would surely fulfill her death wish.

Sarnai sat a while in silence, watching the shadow’s approach. Listening to its rumblings, and taking to heart its implications. A ready-made excuse for her and every other embattled soul in Akropolis to give in. To allow oblivion to take the place of suffering. Let oblivion be their salvation.

And yet, even as her heart quivered with the promise of long-awaited release, and even as her face settled into a sardonic sneer to grace the end to a life ill-lived, she found her atrophied muscles tense with newfound purpose. Before she knew it, she was on her feet again, limp-running away from her prize and slip-sliding back down the ridge—northbound to Akropolis.

She left behind her finds, both the severed leg of a Hornet and its too-pretty wing. There’d be time later to haggle for scrips. And time later still to mourn a daughter she could no longer remember.

But for that, she first needed to live—for better or for worse. And if Sarnai wasn’t wrong about what she saw looming in the southern skies, the fight for better had become a whole lot more complicated.