by GM Gambrell
Fifteen
Duncan raced away from his father and didn’t look back. Years of climbing rope ladders and poles into his home and school had built powerful muscles throughout his body. He was physically stronger than the Magistrates who chased him, and he could tell, the further they got from the glowing blue pipes, that the men were tiring. The distance between them grew and the fireballs the Magistrates threw became weaker and smaller. His father was absolutely right. The magic faded the further you got from New Dallas. There was one more tiny fireball, nothing more than the size of a golf ball, and then the trail behind him was quiet.
He finally stopped and caught his breath. The rush of excitement and fear, both from him almost falling hundreds of feet and then the subsequent chase, was finally catching up with him, leaving him exhausted. As he sipped water from the container his father had provided he took a moment to notice his surroundings. He was surrounded on all sides by burned and destroyed houses that, judging by their condition, had to have been from before the Last War. The houses looked similar in design and structure to Marissa’s home, unlike the hobbled together collections that were most Magician homes. The moon’s light cast eerie shadows about the old houses and he could imagine some sort of monsters, maybe even the cannibalistic humans his father had mentioned, lurking in the dark and waiting to spring out at him.
Suddenly more afraid than he could ever remember, even as a Golem, he sat in the middle of the cracked and broken ancient street and pulled the coat around him, shivering in the cold. He was truly alone now. Though he’d never been a part of their world, he was away from everything he’d ever known. He’d lost his parents and his family, his best friend, his garden…he’d left his entire world behind him, running away like a criminal in the night. He almost thought it would have been better to accept the sentence.
He sat shivering in the street until the sun came up.