EVE Chronicles: Cities of Refuge

The latest EVE Chronicle has been posted, this time focusing on Caldari Prime. It's a touching story that can be read below:

Keeler was running through the ruins of his city. Its adults might be worried, but it was a darkened, broken paradise for its children.

The planet of Caldari Prime had recently been re-taken by Caldari forces after more than a hundred years of Gallentean occupation. Keeler was Gallentean and so were his parents.

Thanks to rising tension the city had been segregated even before the invasion, which kept the occupying forces from having to indiscriminately slaughter Gallenteans when they came in. Keeler remembered the day when the rains came; thunder and whine, red clouds at night, and black shapes in the distant skies. After the local military had been levelled the skies had darkened again and mountainous shapes had descended from the skies. Smoke and fire gusted from their blackened hulls as they settled on whatever was beneath, reducing it to rubble. The hulls had opened and armies of Caldari soldiers poured out, and whatever forces the Gallente could muster didn't stand a chance. Keeler had run out of sight before seeing what happened, but he'd heard the sounds. For weeks after his parents had been too shocked even to talk about it.

But the children saw it differently, for it was frightening and exciting like a child's life always is, and the ones who saw things they shouldn't have - blood on the sidewalks, shots fired into flesh - merely incorporated it into their imaginary worlds, needed now more than ever, burying it so deeply that it surfaced only through fantasy. Keeler envisioned it as two animals, one large and bulky like a toothless old dog whose flesh hangs slackly from his bones, the other a sleek, sharp cat with tensed muscles writhing beneath its skin, ready to attack and tear its prey apart.

As Keeler approached his hidehole in the silence of the late evening, he heard a noise.

All the children in this city, Gallente and Caldari both, had hideholes unknown to others, little cities of refuge, and if you found out someone else's you kept it to yourself. The hideholes were holy, as were all the secret paths through the cordoned-off parts of the city.

If the invading soldiers had realized this they probably could have dominated whatever remained of the city's initial resistance, but the children saw no pressing reason to help them, and they apparently so no pressing reason to talk to children.

Keeler stopped, having all the time in the world, and listened for the sound. There was a breeze and at first he thought the noise might merely be a piece of something flapping in the wind. As he listened on, he discerned a raspy tone to it, and a stifled irregularity punctuated by longer, harsher gusts. Someone was in there, coughing.

For an adult this might have been an agonizing dilemma: run away and hope not to get a bullet in your back; find a guard and risk betraying one of your own; or go in and investigate. For a child, no dilemma.

Keeler went in.

The man had crawled deep into Keeler's hiding place, stopping only when the wall barred his passage. He lay there in a fetal position, apparently asleep. There was precious little light in here, but enough that Keeler recognized his clothes as the old Gallente army type. They were torn and dirty, and soaked, which was bad news in the cold climate on Caldari Prime. There was still a little snow on him, which meant he hadn't been here long. Whatever remained of the previous occupying army - which the media called guerillas and the locals called freedom fighters and Keeler's dad called a goddamn pain in the ass - had retreated to the open country and the mountains, where they still held out and relied on outlying towns and villages for supplies. When Keeler had wondered how they could survive under those conditions, his dad had given him a look and said, well yes, for a city kid like you there's nothing in the frozen countryside except perhaps all the food a civilized society needs. But heaven help them if they need any lawyers.

In the gloom Keeler noticed what looked like small pieces of rectangular paper lying on the ground, some of them soaked from blood that had trickled from the man's legs. He leaned down and picked one up, and found that it was thick, lukewarm and much drier than it should be. It rustled in the silence.

The soldier cleared his throat and said, "Stimpacks. Bodywarmth."

Keeler froze. He thought the man had been asleep.

Read the rest at the link above.

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