Carpathia III: Bonus Episode 1 - Schism
Yseri, Rising Falls
The old man awoke to yet another day, exactly like all the others. The only difference between now and the majority of the time he spent on the island is that his thoughts occasionally turned to Adell and Artemis. It had been a long time since they left and, considering they hadn't returned, he hoped that the tunnel they found truly lead to a way out.
Everything else was the same routine as always. The first step was to forage for some mushrooms and greens for breakfast. Sometimes, if the old man felt particularly inclined, he would attempt to catch a fish. Fortunately, the rock-encircled calm water that Adell built made this easier than it used to be. There, the fish were easier to spot and had more difficulty escaping when he approached.
The old man didn't remember much of his life before he came to the island. Nevertheless, sometimes a smell or a feeling would overcome him and a fleeting flash of memory would overcome him, even if it wasn't entirely related to what he was doing. Something about the fish and vegetables cooking on his grill brought back a disjointed memory of his childhood. He remembered meat between two pieces of some sort of soft, spongy food and a sign hoisted high in the air in the colors of red and yellow.
It was going to be one of those days. Whenever a memory surfaced this early in the morning, more were to come. It would be nice, he thought, if he could have a coherent memory, but these fragmented images only provided frustration. They seemed familiar and he knew they were things he could remember, but his memory always stopped just short of answers. What was that spongy food substance? What kind of meat was that? What was that red and yellow sign?
Maybe this day would be a breakthrough, but the old man doubted that. Regardless, he finished his breakfast and headed out into the misty air. Though the rising falls raged as always, he'd long ago ceased noticing the noise. The first part of his routine would be to stroll all the way around the shoreline to see if anything interesting had washed up in the night.
It was an uneventful stroll, as it was most of the time. Only rarely would something interesting pop up, the worst of which would be a dead body. Thankfully, there was nothing like that this day and the old man was able to have a peaceful walk around his domain.
The old man's daily walks always ended in his flower field, for that's where the next part of his routine would take place. There, he would spend the majority of his day pulling weeds and removing the dead bits from as many of the flowers as he could. It was a sisyphean task, but one that put his mind to work and gave him comfort. It would take several days to weed the entire flower garden from one end to the other and, as usual, he started where he left off, pulling out prickly, ugly plants and tossing them aside. Since he was close enough to the lake, he could toss the weeds in there.
While engrossed in his work, the old man fondled a particularly soft, firm flower petal, which started another memory flash. In this, he was sitting on something similarly soft and in this chair, he was restrained by something across his chest and lap. This made him remember a song, but not the whole song, unfortunately. It was just the chorus and it played over and over in his brain.
Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play
And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, baby
I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
Shake it off, I shake it off
It was a popular new song at the time, this much he knew, though he didn't care about that. That snippet of song was going to be stuck in his head all day if not longer.
After several hours of working the flower garden, the old man found a soft bit of dirt to lay down on so that he might look up at the sky. Orange, as always, and ever unchanging, he could never shake the feeling that he could once look to the sky and see things up there, but he couldn't remember what. None of this mattered, however, for his life was about to be upended in the most dramatic way possible.
As the old man stared into the sky, there was suddenly a brilliant flash of light and, for a few seconds, the sky clear and white instead of its usual dusty orange. The old man shielded his eyes, as this new light was unbearable to behold. He sat up and shook his head about, wondering what that could have been, but he didn't wonder for long. Now looking across the flower garden to the ever-present wall of water that surrounded the island, something remarkable happened. The water simply stopped and what had been travelling up the cliff simply dropped with a resounding splat into the lake below.
For a few seconds, the silence deafened the old man as his ears began to ring in such a way that he never thought possible, leading him to wonder if it was a real noise or just inside his head. The significance of the sudden failure of the rising falls rapidly caught his attention when the water above finally reversed and started to pour into the hole. Whirlpools began to form in the lake where water drained into the holes below, but they were not enough to contain the massive inflow from above and the water was now rising rapidly on the shoreline.
For a moment, the old man scrambled backward from the rapidly shrinking shore, but he was nowhere near as quick as he needed to be. Strambling to his feet, he ran quickly up the gravel path toward the highest point he could find. As he ran, cracks, small at first, but widening quickly, stymied his efforts and soon he had to leap over the larger ones, short hops at first, and then bounding leaps over massive ones. The island was disintigrating, made crystal clear to him when his house disappeared into the abyss.
The old man clawed his way up the steep incline to the top of the mountain as best he could, but the shaking was becoming a difficult monster with which to contend. The most harrowing moment came when one of the rock formations at the top crumbled and massive chunks rolled down the hill toward him. Rather than be crushed, he rolled to the side, sliding down the hill several yards toward the still-rising water. The island itself lurched, and he grabbed a tree. The hill was now too steep to climb and the only thing he could do was hang on and hope that he was high enough to avoid the watery grave now reaching up to claim him.
To the old man's great fortune, the cliff behind him, upon with the falls once rose, proved much less resiliant than the island itself and cleaved in two, as though the almighty himself had just chopped it with the side of his hand. The water now rushed to fill in this newfound gap while the cliff crumbled into it at the same time. The old man relaxed his grip on the tree just a little as he watched the water level on the island begin to thankfully drop. All around him, chunks of the cliff began to fall into the lake and the water continued to flow in, but now, instead of threatening him, it continued to carve its way through the cliff.
The ground continued to shake violently, and the old man still gripped the tree firmly, all while keeping a firm eye on the ever-widening schism, feeling as though he were watching the planet itself being cleaved in two. Finally, he saw a sight that he had never seen before. It was the sea, stretching out far into the horizon. This was, however, no sea in an ordinary state. Vast patches of sand tusseled violently with equally vast patches of water, sending great plumes of a sludgy mixture soaring hundreds of feet into the air. It didn't take long before the old man realized that the water was very rapidly winning this battle, as the sand patches shrank quickly amidst the onslaught.
Soon, the sludgy geyesers were no more, replaced instead with watery sprays into the air, accompanied by massive clouds of mist slowly drifting upward. The ground still shook, but the intensity was subsiding. The old man could now continue to climb the hill, still thinking it best to be in a high place, just in case.
The old man carefully navigated the path to the highest point of the island so that he could better see what was happening. The shaking had now stopped, though the cliffs around the island continued to disintigrate as the water rushed down and into the sea. In the distance, great mountains split and crashed into the ocean with great splashes. Vaporous clouds continued to rise into the air until the entire sky was consumed with them. Down below, his flower garden was a wreck and he wondered how long it might take to salvage it.
Finally, after the rush of water and cleaving of the land, the sky itself decided it had its own surprise lying in wait. First it was just a few drops, and the old man wasn't sure what was hitting him. The few drops soon came down in a torrent, soaking his body and saturating the hard, sun-baked soil. The old man's thought's turned once again to Adell and Artemis and he wondered what may have befallen his two friends. This, he would never know, but something told him that their arrival and this cataclysm were not unrelated. For now, the old man merely gazed into the distance at the new sea stretched out before him under the wet, cloudy sky.
All city pictures from SimCity 4
