Waking Dream
Towering structures of concrete loomed above, their highest reaches disappearing in the overhead fog which set above us like a cloud layer. Abandoned vehicles littered the asphalt streets that stretched away from us—the same streets that had since proved traitorous, their surfaces parting to allow nature's entry and foothold. Vines of ivy stretched up and enclosed vehicles, climbed walls, constricted street lights, and smothered whatever life might have once inhabited this place.
I looked down at my hands, the metal skeleton shown through my silicone skin, my wrists draped by the black cloak in which I traveled as a stowaway—a remnant of mankind, having given up my past-present for this... this future.
My new companions walked ahead of me, the five of them. It seemed I had once again fallen behind, and they grew smaller with the distance.
'Come with us, Envy, and we'll save the world together,' they had said.
But as a look around at the dull shades of concrete, the drab greens and browns that stretch and supress the weather beaten colors of a forgotten world, I am made to wonder. Is there anything left to be saved?
I followed, in many ways distant, each step heavier than the last. Blessedly, we departed the opposite side of the graveyard, where we intercepted a river and followed it upstream. Pride seemed to believe that the Yoi—the culprit in the world's fate—could be found at the head of rivers. So, we traveled upstream.
The sounds of moving water—the burbles, the trickles, the sloshes—it was all foreign, and I wondered if that might be something like a bird song. I was so distracted by the music that I hadn't even noticed that the fog had cleared, Megimeru shining down from its zenith.
The fog I might have missed, but the color I did not. The drab hues had been ousted, the river bank's grass holding a hue that was almost too bright to look at. I was a moth drawn to a flame, yet I somehow knew it bared me no ill will. The terrain continued to scroll beneath me as I took in the most color I'd ever seen in my life.
I face planted something and looked up to see that Gluttony had stopped.
He peered back over his shoulder, a strip of cloth wrapped around his eyes, a long handled mace set against his shoulder.
"Envy!" He said. "Look alive. We've found another Yoi and will attack right away. Just be on the lookout for the guardian. That and don't die."
He had been so close that he eclipsed my vision. I hadn't noticed. Then again, I had never seen a Yoi so I couldn't have pointed one out if faced with one. As he moved to unobstruct my line of sight, my eyes grew wide. This...this is our world's greatest threat?
The river parted and passed around a small island, the spring breaching the surface on its far side. The previous green seemed to tinge the very air as a knee-high vegetation swept across the banks and island like a divided meadow. And over it all stood a Yoi—forty-foot tree with vibrant heart-shaped leaves, some of them breaking away like shed tears, peeled away by the wind, all of it sweeping down along the river, all of it careening into me and wrapping me in a song that I hadn't known I'd been searching for.
This is the threat to our world? It was absurd. Even my bones knew it. Well, maybe not my bones, but some distant part of me did, my twin daggers drawn and readied without my acknowledging that I intended to use them.
They had brought me along to fight, and fight I shall. But it will be on my terms, fighting for what I know to be right. My life; my terms. And as long as I breathe, you shall not harm the Yoi!
I lunged.
