Eternities
The Emergence
'It's January 28th, 2141.
'The community is in pieces. Hundreds are dead or injured, hundreds more displaced or grieving. Families have turned against one another, friends are at each other's throats, and The Director is nowhere to be seen. It is a day of chaos. And a day to be born anew.
'Few citizens of the Underground, as it was, still walk among us, and the event is near lost to memory, but the story has never died.
'The alarms blare, a piercing screech through Terminus station. Bombs have been placed, it was said, and the people must evacuate to survive. Just one hundred years had passed since ‘The Disaster’, and the people were once more forced to place the lives of the community in the hands of the few. This time, though, they do not allow themselves to be herded like sheep. They work together, they discuss and they plan and they reason and they decide. Together. they remove the lead plates and they climb and climb and climb and…
'They emerge.
'The door to the Overground is open once more. And there is light on their eyes and warmth on their faces and sand on their feet and my, my, children, it’s so much… more. So much more than anything they could possibly have imagined. They look out at the world, perhaps expecting destruction, dilapidation, decay but-
'It is not destroyed. It is not in pieces, shreds of lives once-lived, of community torn apart.
'It is, in fact, much as it was before; houses and factories, stretching across the horizon. The buildings are half-buried in sand, with the desert wind’s century-old attack on the place, and far off between the winding alleys, it meets a dazzlingly blue sky.
'It is still here. Principality City.
'And as the sun shines on their faces, for the first time in their lives, these people can begin to dream. Soon, those dreams turn to plans, to engineering, to creation. And the Overground, once more, comes alive.'
—A dedicated storyteller, recounting the tale of the Emergence to a group of schoolchildren, their eyes shining with curiosity.
All good things must come to an end…
Terminus may be over, but the story of the world and its characters does not end there. Below is a snippet of these lives (and deaths) of those who lived in the Underground.