"Anna, you know the heartache we've been through, you know how much we've lost..."

"Yes Abe, I know, I know it far more than you. But that does not justify this. I can't... I can't let you go through with this—"

"Anna, don't cry." The man embraced the woman. "I know how much you've had to lose. I might as well have lost my humanity—the very person that you fell in love with all those years ago—when they took her away. But what I must do, it is not for myself." The man's hands trembled, his voice tremulous as a man convincing himself of a lie he does not believe. "This world... it cannot go on this way forever. We might as well be living corpses, Anna. No, don't cry, please."

"How can I not cry?! Tell me!" She assaulted his chest with blows devoid of strength. "Tell me... Promise me you'll be okay. Promise me you'll come back home tonight. If not for me, then at least for your unborn child."

Abraham stared lifelessly at his wife's womb, at the young babe shielded from the harrowing truths of reality. "It is precisely for her that I do this." His eyes moved back to Anna's. "Our children. Not just ours. Long, long ago, our ancestors believed that they could forge a better world for their children to live in. How disappointed they must be, looking down upon us now." He wiped the tears that were building up in his partner's eyes. "I must leave now, Anna, else I will be late."

Anna drew closer, bringing her face mere inches away from her husband's. "Promise me..." her trembling voice hung in the melancholic air.

"I pr—"

"Dad? Mom? What's wrong, why do you look so sad?" Said the boy as he laid down his jacket on the stone rack.

Abraham's countenance transformed, his prior nervousness fizzling away. His wife turned away, struggling hard to control her tears.

"Did you see the Welcoming? It was so freakin' awesome!!"

The man could only manage a drained smile, "Was it now?"

"Uhuh, and Ame sent me away saying that you had something to tell me. I'm sure she was lying."

"Yet here you are." Abraham patted his son's frizzled hair and crouched down to meet his eyes. "Amelia was not lying, son. Here." He held out a tiny object the size of the child's finger. "This is for you."

The boy plucked the curious object from his father's hand and examined it thoroughly. It was pure black, with one side detachable, revealing a rusted gray surface etched with lines. "What is this?"

"This is your future. Keep it close." The man stood and secured his leather bag to his side. "Take good care of your mamma, Isaac."

Dazed, Isaac had no response. His future. He did not understand. He would not understand for a very long time. This person, this man whom he called his dad, in truth he knew very little about him. There was something distant about him; always out of reach. He did not know what it was—a yawning chasm, an unfilled void, a longing to understand.

The man stopped near the exit of the dingy rock-cut apartment. "I will remember." He tilted his head enough for Isaac to notice one of his eyes. They stared for a thousand miles, yet they were overwrought with sorrow. "So don't you forget."

And with that, he left. A tear broke like a fissure through the teenager's prior jouissance. His eyes surveyed the room, his mother now sat silently in the chair, her arms wrapped around herself, nails burrowing into flesh.

***

The City. Much less than one might expect, this was no New York of yore. Rather, being the lowest floor, the air was heavy, thick, and warm. A permanent blackness loomed over the region. A thin layer of gelatinous fluid pervaded the entire floor; public drainage non-existent. Large wells of fresh groundwater dotted the landscape. The roofs of the houses along the periphery were funnel-shaped, serving the sole purpose of preserving the few droplets that fell from the stone ceiling like manna.

But what struck one who ventured into the City for the first time was neither its temperature nor the mold that clung to its walls; no, what struck one the most were the two magnificent structures at its center. They called them The Washington and The Lincoln. But these names meant very little to the people of Eden. To them, they stood for the tyranny of those that ruled. The oppressor and the oppressed.

And so too for Abraham, the man who knew. After all, knowledge is a frivolous thing. Possessing it lures you down roads you never wished to take. Ignoring it casts you into the throes of despair. Is it wise to answer its call? Perhaps the wisest was he who chose to reject the world entirely.

As he strode down the noiseless path, he shuddered at the thought of being one awakened in a world full of those who were content with the wool plastered over their eyes. The moment he had taken up the pen, the moment he had sharpened his tongue, he knew his true purpose for being born. He who knows not fact from fiction is a soul condemned to live a life of happiness and death.

The rotating light above The Washington shone dim, flickering like static, a pale impostor of what lay beyond. If freedom were what he sought, this would not be the place he would lay his final step. Verily, the desire for freedom was not his to claim, it was nary a selfish virtue gleaming down upon the wretched souls of this Promised Land; no, his purpose ended here, and from its ashes would rise a new dawn.

He stepped silently into the central chamber of The Lincoln. Proud sat the statue of the man long forgotten, proud sat the statue of the man long remembered. A Darkness seeped through its folds; a tribe, a strongman, a pervasive corruption, a cruel thesis—it was all of these yet none all the same. The world no longer paid heed to the Gods, no longer did it pay heed to Man. God was dead, and so too was Man. Now, there was only Darkness.

The balustrade of the staircase rose at the sides. The ascendant ascended. If the world had ended, he would not care. In this moment, he was the world. The precipice between here and there, now and then, it was he who would bridge it, it was he who would tame the restless seas of fate and bring them to bear.

A single slanted wire tremored in place, the previous orator resting upon a bench and quenching their thirst. The water that slid through the man's throat made Abraham doubly aware of the sweat that clung to his back and dripped furtively down his forehead and neck.

He walked up to the podium, the suspended box of pure black eyeing him as if he were long deceased. He placed his bag on the pedestal and tapped the microphone. His eyes wandered above, and then below. Men clad in black trod hurriedly across the muck beyond the monument that tapered to greater heights. Nausea grew within him, one that twisted and tore every fiber of his being. But he knew his purpose, he knew it well.

And so, as the light shone red in that box of black, the man began to speak.

"Greetings, Men and Women of Eden.

Today is the day we Welcome our valiant heroes. A day when we remind ourselves of the greatness that is, and the greatness that was."

The men had now reached the floor of the building in which he stood. He closed his eyes shut and continued.

"Let us remember, then. Let us remember all the things we lost. All the things our forebears have entrusted us. Let us remember, that this world of ours, the world that does not exist, exists. Not merely in our hearts, not merely in the throes of war and misery, but in flesh and blood, it exists. Why then do we fool ourselves? Why then do we weep for a Paradise Lost, when it has always been within our reach?"

He turned to the beacon atop The Washington, the soldiers filing in along both stairwells.

"The Washington is not our Sun. The Sun is our Sun. Let us redeem it.

"Glory to Eden.

"Glory to America.

"Glory to the World."

With a firm salute, one long forgotten, he stood, frozen in time. A man draped in the darkest steel stepped forward and unsheathed his helm. The light from the distant beacon poured within.

"What do you know of Glory, news-speaker?"

"I may not know much about that." He tugged at his collar and broke his pose. "But I do know a thing or two about the Truth of this world. If the world you die in truly is deprived, the world we die in does not deserve to suffer the same fate. We choose our suffering. Throughout history, time and time again, our forefathers have chosen wrong paths, but time and time again they have self-corrected."

"Freedom, to suffer or otherwise, is not as rosy as you believe. You know not the horrors we have seen." The man ambled nearer, his arm clutching his steel tigana.

"I wish it was freedom that I sought, I really do. But what I seek I have already achieved."

"You do not know what you speak, gardeen. Hope is a dangerous venom."

"Hope is no venom. Hope is madness, far greater than despair will ever be."

Through this, the black box continued to blare red. As the soldier reached for the box, Abraham stared into it and uttered his final words.

"Remember. Because you have never truly forgotten."

The bars of Sheol were not his next sight, although they might have been. But the muffled tick of the bag atop the pedestal had ceased, and so too did The Lincoln. Blood and ash bloomed under the pale luminescence, heralding the dawn of a new Hope; a new Freedom; a new World.