Book 1 – The Wastelands – Prologue – The Wastelands
The blazing sun was like a greedy tyrant, wantonly unleashing its deadly heat upon the wastelands and wicking away what little moisture it had left. The endless sands stretched out into the horizon, so vast as to engender despair as it swallowed up all other colors with its own drab yellowness. Waves of hot air swept through the arid wastelands, kicking up sandstorms that occasionally blotted out the sun itself. The entire world was in a state of desolate chaos, and it seemed as though the skies and the ground were of the same dull color.
The ground was filled with bits and scraps of rubble that clumped together to form small mountains. There were tens of thousands of these things, and they looked like steel dinosaurs that had been buried within the sand with only their backs visible. The passage of countless years had slowly eaten away at them, causing patches of rust to have appeared everywhere. This place was filled with scar-ridden buildings that had been utterly decimated, leaving only their skeletal frames behind, forever a silent testament to their former glory.
Thousands of years ago, this place was a city. Thousands of years later, it had been reduced to ruins.
Fifty years ago, this place had become a scavenger camp.
Who still remembered its former extravagance, its glittering opulence, its dazzling prosperity?
Who still remembered that this place was once filled with countless high-rises and towering skyscrapers? Who remembered the atomic hovercraft that had shuttled through this place, the aerial motherships that had flown in intricate matrices?
Who remembered that this endless desert wasteland was once a vast ocean that was known as the Atlantic Ocean? Who remembered the beautiful, artificial islands that had once glittered like pearls? Who remembered the many underwater cities that were scattered throughout the seabed like the stars in the skies?
And who remembered that this place once had a name? An ancient, true name that had been buried long ago by the tides of time, a name that had been completely forgotten… New York!