Guiding Light

This was the last place I had seen her.

You have no idea how long I've tried to come back to her. The lengths I've gone to find a way. The sacrifices. The deaths.

The deck rocks beneath my feet and blood still stains the corners of my fingernails. My cheek throbs with pain but as much as I want to press my hands on it, I know any other movement would result in another strike to my face. The thin shirt and pants useless against the crisp ocean wind biting at my skin. The air tastes more than just salt now. It carries the stench of rotting fish with it.

They’re taking me in the right direction.

The boat we’re on is big, able to carry about twenty-five crew members and even then it looked undermanned. It didn’t look like it was a fishing boat. It had towers and antennas that these foreigners took great care of. But it was certainly old. The engine had coughed and sputtered before rumbling to life. Paint chipped everywhere, and what exposed metal there was had rusted a deep scratchy orange. A tattered red flag hung from the top of the tallest tower, a single, sloppily painted black star in the middle. The one new thing on it was the metal plating welded to the floor where we stood, all eight of us. The only ones native to these waters. Chained to the damn floor.

Years had passed since calamity struck. With the drastic changing weather patterns and rise in volcanic activity, you would have thought that that was how the world would end. For most people, it was. Volcanic Eruptions from the Pacific Ring of Fire had set off an eight-year winter, with temperatures reaching so low it was near ice-age levels. What life that survived those first years had then been subjected to the famine left by the continuous acid rains and the blazing sun and scorching earth. Only a handful of countries were able to stand strong against the elements, and soon, only a few cities as the civilizations were ripped apart from the inside.

But for us, it ended earlier than that.

Instead, my world ended the day our birthright was signed in exchange for empty promises. It ended when the wants of the few looked at the needs of the many and offered them a poisoned drink. When the promise of change came at the cost of our very souls and we were too late to stop it.

It ended the day I was ripped from her, on a boat much like this one, and a sky alive with harsh lights and the sound of wailing in the air.

We weren’t the only ones separated from each other. Friends and families, husbands and wives, parents and even children. Taken, sorted, and herded to somewhere they would never be able to hear their mother’s song or their father’s embrace or their lover’s voice. Forced to forget everything about home or be branded a heretic. To work and live in an unfamiliar place as the payment owed by our so-called “countrymen.” Abandoned and forgotten while they continued to squander all they had among themselves and their new, so-called “Mainlander” masters.

She would have raged if she learned what they did to the children. Razed their whole cult to the ground. As if selling them to the outsiders weren’t enough, they had been stripped of their identity, their history.

She was a teacher, you know... She was always so kind to the little ones, so sweet. She taught them all the colors our world had to offer. Showed them the joy and freedom of the open water. Let them have the tastiest fruits and unafraid to give them bitter ones so they could grow strong.

They loved it when I talked about her, how beautiful she was, dressed in blues and greens with the most beautiful dark skin I had ever seen. I told them she wore all the colors of the rainbow once and I would give anything to have a picture of how their eyes lit up. Years ago, I said that I had never seen anything as beautiful as her, but now…

God… The children looked so much like her. Beautiful and good and pure.

They were what I held on to, even as the earth rumbled and the world turned gray with ash around us when we escaped the compound. Pulled them close like she would have as we struggled to survive the freezing cold and the passing searchlights. Telling them stories of good times, better times, to help them sleep as tainted snow falls outside the window of our abandoned building, scattered cans of food surrounding us. Keeping them all safe and clean while blood stains my own, a man’s vacant eyes staring up at me from where he fell. My knife still embedded on the black star tattooed on his neck.

The foreigners chatter among themselves when we pass another marker. The boat jumps from a high wave, staying in the air for a second, before slamming back down to the growing turbulent waters. Icy water splashes over everyone on deck. It’s colder here near the equator, with the typhoon season usually scheduled to happen this time of the year. Even without being bound to the floor, I’m able to keep my feet steady under me. Petty as it is, I take in a small victory as one of the Mainlanders slips and lands on his ass. His friends laugh at him.

The man chained behind me snickers. They punch him in the gut in return.

The one on my right glares at another, keeping his hands close to his side and nursing a large bruise on his side as best as he can. His split lip now caked with blood. ‘I spoke.’ He had told me hours ago, gesturing to the large patch of blue and purple skin. ‘I spoke and they didn’t like it.’

The split lip he got only a few minutes ago, from telling me his name. Andre.

He has fire in him. A passion and drive that burned in his eyes as his gaze flitted from one foreigner to another. He still wanted to fight, to keep screaming, ‘You will not take my soul! It is mine until my final breath leaves me, or yours leaves you.’

I want to smile. He’s the same as her.

Even here, on this rusting, alien boat. Surrounded by the same people that caused our suffering. Someone’s like her.

I thought about her every day. She knew, I don’t know how or why but she knew. From the moment those strange hands grabbed at me from the darkness, she knew that we would never see each other again.

And if we did… we never would have been the same.

I still remember my last moments with her, how my clothes stuck to my skin from the summer rain, how the air had smelled fresh and her touch warm. Large clouds overhead parting when she kissed my cheek. 

God, I missed her so much.

I missed how warm she was, the softest brush on my cheeks as she woke me with the sunrise, no matter how much I protested. Willing me to come to breakfast, chiding at times, but always gentle.

I missed how calm she was when I needed her most. Holding me in her arms, whispering to me, telling me everything would turn out alright in the dead of the night. Running her fingers through my hair as the moon rose and the stars blinked down on us.

I even miss how furious she would get. How few those moments were didn't dismiss how terrifying she could be. I don't even care to admit that with most of our fights, I am the one to blame. I didn't listen. When she was mad, truly mad, she made sure everyone knew, huffing and puffing, loud and violent. She made sure I listened, made sure I learned. And I did, mind you. It was the other people that didn’t, not always.

But she was forgiving. I could count the times she did me wrong with one hand, the times I did her wrong were as many as the stars in the sky or the sand that slipped through my toes.

She was too good to me.

God, I… I don’t even know what happened to her…

She fought, I know she did. We had heard about the riots in the compounds, the threat of civil war and martial law still sent a chill down our bones even when we were a thousand kilometers away. Some of us were terrified, would we be forced to fight for these strange men with their strange ways. Would we be forced to fight our fathers? Mothers? But whatever order that was supposed to pit brother against brother was stalled when the earthquakes happened.

And the First Explosion followed.

One month. Three volcanoes.

The capital was gone in days. News had covered the evacuation efforts. Shaky footages of the sky growing dark. Of people screaming. Running away from the dark clouds and falling ash and carrying all that they could. Other countries rushed to aid what was left of ours before their own volcanoes followed.

The Third had mattered most though.

It made us drifters.

It made us lose our home.

Made me lose her.

I… I want her to know that I tried. To come back to her earlier. To find a way to her when the cold froze my fingers and when the heat scorched my back. That I did my best to protect what was left of us when we were found. That I fought and clawed as hands grabbed my neck, my feet slipping on blood and mud. That I kept their attention on me while the others disappeared into the ruins they started to see as home, my own vision going hazy. The faint shadow of a black star is the last thing I remember before waking up bound and in rags.

A lightning bolt flashes across the sky. The captain shouts behind us but he is drowned out by a rumble of thunder. The boat slows… Somewhere, I hear the muffled sound of clanking chains.

Tears fill my eyes.

I see her. I finally see her.

My god, what have they done to her?

There is nothing on her. The sea around her has gone and turned into a mix of a disgusting, pale green and smog-like grey. The foam that kisses her shore is bone white. Her earth is bare, a sickly, dry brown streaked with long rivers of lahar. Stripped clean of everything green and good and left to rot with nothing but the rags that these barbarians didn’t even care to give her.

I see no colors. No movement. No life.

My heart breaks and I bite my lip in anguish. They laugh and point at my tears.

The captain shouts again and the men on the boat begin to move. I watch as they unlock the shackles of the first of us, taking him right to the edge of the boat. A man carrying a red book and a star tattooed on his neck approaches him, their Priest. He reads aloud from the crackling pages while the rest of them chain a solid metal weight to his feet. I can only make out words from the harsh dialect, but just the book alone lets the rest of us know what this was. Our last rites.

As soon as the last word leaves the Mainlander’s mouth, they shove him off. The man barely has any time to scream before the loud splash overpowers him and his voice turns to a quick gurgle. Drowning. Death by ball and chain. An old-world punishment for old-world people. They called this refined. Elegant. Bloodless.

Hypocrites.

They do this with the rest of us. One by one, they remove our bindings from the floor. Two fight the hands that seized them. Another speaks in their tongue, pleading and trying to barter with the captain for mercy. One cursed and raged, screaming so much they had to gag him before they even put the weight on and let the water silence him for them. Andre tries to run and his lip splits open again when they slam him to the floor. He had to be restrained by four of them before they tossed him into the water.

The one lame man - an ex-lawyer, I think - they carry, letting him sit right on the edge. Our eyes meet while the Priest reads and the other Mainlanders chain the weight to his feet. As if he even needed that to sink. The lawyer shares my sentiments with a cock of his brow. Another small victory at our captors' idiocy.

Yet for that, the weight was suddenly kicked off the edge. The Priest grinning down madly at him as his hands flew to grab on to anything in a moment of panic. He had hung for a second, lips moving silently while his hands gripped the railing. Then, gravity pulled him to the rolling waves below.

The splash was quiet. Wordless.

And now, it was my turn.

I resist more on the fact that they have to turn me away from her to get to the execution spot. A foreigner orders me to stand at the railing with a version of my own language, broken and butchered. The man beside him gives a laugh, words pass through his lips and the three surrounding me laugh at his joke. 'What?' he mocked, 'turning into one of them now?'

The boat rocks harshly to the side for a moment and my foot slips through air. I rush to grab on to the coarse railing for balance. Already the metal clamp chaining me to the weight is enough to make my steps heavier. I grip the railing, pulling myself away from the edge as another wave crashes harshly against the boat, spraying biting water at my face. The ocean looked cold and hard, as though it was broken glass that wanted nothing more than to shred the hull and rip us to pieces.

The foreigners bark again behind me. One of them goes to grab me. To pull me away from the side so the man with the book can start reading.

I turn to look at her one last time, and my breath catches.

There she was.

Silhouetted against the sunset I could just see the barest shadow of mountains and hills, and the faint outline of green further inland. Light brushes over the clouds, giving her a halo of pink and orange curls, making her skin glow and look like molten gold. Seafoam turned to pearls, lining the hem of a dark blue dress that shined with the faintest red every time a wave rolled and kissed the air.

"Hey there." I whisper.

I push and let go. The men scream. One even tries to pull me back.

The weight yanks me down.

Cool water screams with joy in my ears, and a familiar feeling brushes through my hair. I swear something warm brushes my cheek.

 "I'm back.”