Ever Ending

Mittas Fringe was born some two hundred years after his world had ended. He never got to see the beauty of the planet Rumos. Never felt the hope and love that made a human a human. All Rumos could provide for it's people now was survival. Though the exact reasons why surviving even mattered were lost as the years since destruction stretched on. The darkened lands of the planet had grown barren. Near useless to anyone. Animals were all but extinct. Water continued to contaminate Rumos' people. Any knowledge of how one might filter a clean source all but lost in generations past. Mittas never got to experience "The Before" that lore spoke of. Green stretches of land as far as the eye could see. Only broken up by the vast amounts of bodies of water, matching the same bright purple of their skies above. Those same skies, decorated during the day by two beautiful suns and at night by three glowing moons. Yellow dirt that could grow flowers and food to feed billions of people. People that were happy and strong and full of hope. Ignorant to true struggle- but that was The Before. Before the prophet warned them. Before the elders begged them. No one listened. No one came. No one believed. So, when the Devastators came, no one truly survived. The lore describes these Devastators as large black masses. Taller than any mountain top. Their only purpose? Destruction and mayhem. It has always been said that whatever came into contact with the blackness of these creatures, died. Land, water, people. Rumos should have been a desolate, deserted planet by all accounts. Perhaps that would have been better, though few did survive the attack after these creatures came from the skies and infected their lands. A young prophet who had warned an old king of what she had prophesied, eventually gave up all hope of rallying a fight and had taken up refuge under the waters in such a way that was now incomprehensible to Rumos' newest generation. With her, only twenty others. The only ones who had believed her. And while the waters had been poisoned, the people in its cover remained unaffected. The metal that they had floated to the ocean floor, protecting them from the worst of it. The attack was said to have lasted more than two cycles of their planet's rotation and by the time the survivors finally surfaced, only seven of them remained and none emerged as they were before. Even the young prophet had lost any hope or will. The survivors could only now do just that. Survive. There was no explanation as to where the Devastators had gone or if they would ever come back, but the land they left behind was not the vibrant land they had attacked. The soil now near black, the grass and plants gone completely. The three moons were dimmer and only one sun remained. Any attempt to restore what had been was always throttled by one misfortune or the other. The survivors blamed the Devastator's poison, although the loss of any hope certainly didn't help. The people went on to procreate, to scrape up what they could to eat or drink, but eventually any attempts at rebuilding on the land were halted. By the time Fringe was born, the people had spread out into settlements. Living in large cloth shelters if they were lucky. They were still in a "hunting and gathering" type of mindset. An instinct, if you will. Even though Rumos now provided them with very little to hunt or gather. They had certainly scavenged all they could from The Before long before a girl of no more than fourteen rotations pushed a baby Mittas Fringe out and handed him over to strangers in order to pay off a debt she had collected. Guinevere's Stand was a settlement of more than a hundred people. A namesake of which meant nothing to the people now occupying the ripped up tents and dirt roads. Broken down market stands lined those roads. Bartering whatever they could find to barter. By now, many strange plants had started to regrow on Rumos' desert land. Enough that it's occupants could learn to create once more. Making feeble shelters, awkward garments to cover their bodies, fire to boil what little water the land had yet to take back and dry up. Unfortunately, not many of those plants could be consumed. What could be used, was usually made into a soup or mush with strange insects as their only other form of real substance. Meat was just another legend of The Before unless you were crazy enough to try a dead human. And while the people were lawless by all accounts, left to govern themselves, even the majority of them skipped on trying meat during their lifetime. Gangs took the place of any real family structure. The only reason procreation was still occurring was out of boredom or the necessity of having something more to barter. Love and even friendship were rarities and were more often than not seen as weakness. Gangs formed because there was strength in numbers, not because there was any loyalty to another person and if you weren't a part of that gang, you were more or less a slave to them. Which was where Mittas Fringe's story began. Though not where it will end. _______ Little is known about the child who had birthed Fringe. She was not originally from Guinevere's Stand, but Guinevere's Stand is where she made her biggest mistakes. It is said that she came through the settlement with a sack full of red plants. A well sought after flower used to lessen the blood loss on an open wound. She had no guardian occupying her, which was not an uncommon occurrence. Parenting after the child was old enough to walk was rare on Rumos. Unfortunately, however, the red plants and her flowing red locks, made the girl stand out and she quickly caught the eye of Guinevere's most ruthless gang member, Totem Wells. It is said that Totem was quick to take her and the plant for himself, but that the girl was too defiant, too stubborn to control easily. She was only with him for less than five sun ups before she made her escape, but her defiance only made Totem more obsessed and he sent his goons after her as soon as he realized. Eventually she was found, but not before she'd bartered off the last of her plants for food. Angry, Totem ordered death upon this young girl. Trying to save her own skin, she revealed she was with child herself. People died quite easily on Rumos. Especially in Guinevere and Totem was not afraid to make the process quicker for the people he felt wronged him. Whether pregnant or not. However, with death so common, he was always in need of more goons or slaves. An agreement was reached that the girl would serve him up until her delivery and then hand over the babe in exchange for her own life. And thus the making of our favorite thief began. His mother was gone within a week of the delivery. Either on her own two feet or by death, the story is unclear, but Mittas Fringe was raised by the streets and grew up serving Totem, who quite enjoyed being able to shape his slave at such a delicate age. ______ Reading and writing were skills that were once passed down from the original survivors in order to keep their history alive, but as time went on, those skills became less and less known to the people occupying Rumos. There weren't any rich or influential townies to selfishly keep such important tools of the mind to themselves in order to appear all-knowing to those beneath them. In Rumos, no one person was ahead of the other in terms of wealth. Instead, the art of learning anything other than survival just seemed detrimental and useless. Only the most crooked of the crooks seemed to believe sharpening your mind could be useful. So, only the crooks and sometimes their most useful slaves would read and write. Which meant Totem knew enough to teach Fringe and Fringe learned enough that by the time he'd reached his eighteenth rotation, he was the slickest thief known to man. It took many sun ups to get from one settlement to the next as your feet were your only means of transportation, but there was a lot of desert to explore in-between and a lot of people who camped out there alone. A lot of vulnerable people who carried goods they'd hoped to barter at the next reached settlement. Easy targets for a man like Mittas Fringe. At ten rotations, Fringe had been granted desert routes alone to travel to steal for Totem and their crew. By his sixteenth, he'd taken over the whole west of Guinevere's Stand outskirts to prowl the unsuspecting traveler. Mittas was going on his twenty first rotation when Totem succumbed to the Waste disease that claimed so many of Rumos' occupants and the gang at Guinevere's Stand looked to Fringe for leadership. He had not so politely declined and decided then and there that his next run out of the settlement would be his last. Why provide for a crew when he could do it alone just as well? The first rotation on his own, Fringe stayed close to Guinevere's Stand where he made his own camp and just took whatever he needed from the travelers around him, but as time passed, the young man became restless and for the first time in his twenty two rotations on Rumos, Mittas Fringe left the familiar settlement and headed out toward where the sun would set. He'd never been a big talker. He'd read any parchment he could get his sticky fingers on, but conversation with actual people made him uncomfortable. Many wondered if perhaps Totem had a real parental attachment to Fringe. What with the way he kept him so close to the elder's side. Though it couldn't have been further from the truth and no one dared to ask either way. The reality was that Totem was a cruel man, even by Guinevere's standards, and would frequently test new torture techniques out on his protege before putting them into practice. Other times he'd use the younger to fulfill his more carnal cravings. By the time Fringe was of an age to begin socializing, he severely lacked the ability to properly do so. Which, in such an untrusting world, wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Except when you finally decide to leave the only home you've ever known and suddenly you're faced with a much unexpected softer side of humanity.