The second chapter in the PoS superstory.

Chapter 1
The Fire

— Can you tell us about the fire?  
A kid’s voice, high in the dark.  
The old man looked at him, his watery eyes reflecting the shadows of the fireplace. He coughed, sipped his tea, and finally spoke with a faraway voice — the voice of a tree.  
— Everyone has a story about the fire. What they were doing, who they were with. Who they lost, who survived. There aren’t many of those stories left, though.  
He stopped for a second, looking at his young audience.  
— I got lucky. That’s how I got out. I was not there, when the fire first hit. I was out, flying with Regent, when I saw a thick cloud of smoke overlooking the Northern Cross. It was coming from the Vaults, from the depths of the old library. I had never seen anything like that. It was not a normal fire. It was eating the city from the ground up. Regent and I, we turned the planes around and came back in a rush only to find what looked like a dream gone bad. The air was incandescent. The wind had carried the flames everywhere. There were ash and smoke everywhere. We didn’t know anything. How did it happen? Who was responsible for it? Why didn’t the security systems prevent that? Lily! A sudden shiver crossed my entire body. She was at the Vaults. She was in the middle of the fire.  
— I didn’t think twice about it. As soon as the airplanes stopped abruptly in the middle of the airstrip, I started running. Running like I had never run before, to my absolute limit, in the air that was getting hotter by the second. Street after street, I could see the flames taking one building at a time, monstrous, ferocious. The fire was  alive. Everyone was running in the opposite direction, carrying infants, dragging children out of their rooms, as fast as they could.  
— When I got to the Vaults, the Vaults weren’t there anymore. A tempest of flames was surrounding their once magnificent, marble entrance. But I couldn’t care less. She was there, she was still there, I could feel it. I broke through a window, and jumped into the liquid, blurred hell that the Vaults had become.  
The old man stopped, lost in a broken thought.  
— The Vaults were the heart of the city. Every story of every single one of us, all the events, the plots, the scenes, the dialogues, the recordings from all our past lives were there. It was the place where the memory of the universe lived, and now it had been obliterated.  
— Lily! I screamed. Lily!  
I couldn’t see anything, I couldn’t feel anything anymore. My skin was burnt, almost melting, but I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t give up. I went down another floor, and nothing, down another, and nothing again. I finally reached the floor where she was working, her little cubicle at the end of the hallway. But she wasn’t there. No one was there anymore. Where was she? I couldn’t think lucidly anymore. I knew I had only a few minutes before I was going to pass out. I started making my way out of the building when I heard a voice, coming from a level below. I didn’t even know there was a level below that one. I rushed down a secret ramp, following that sound. It was the voice of a crying man, a man of shadow that resisted the fire, surrounded by flames and yet untouched by them.  
— Forgive me, the voice kept repeating, like a lullaby. Forgive me.  
He was sitting in front of a book that emanated more light than all of the flames combined. I came close to him, mumbled to him to come with me, to save himself. But he was lost, he was in a different world. When I tried to touch him, an electrical charge went through me. It was a shock, a lightning in a finger. Whoever he was, he was not human anymore.  
— Forgive me, he said for the last time. Then, among all the shadows, he disappeared.  
The old man stopped once again. He sipped his tea and looked at the boy straight in the eyes.  
— For years I kept asking myself if what I saw was real, or if it was a mere hallucination induced by the flames, by the smoke, by the heat. But the book… That incandescent book was still there, untouched, at the centre of the once incredible arches of the library. I grabbed it hesitantly, expecting a similar reaction. But nothing happened. As soon as I touched it, it turned dull, black, like a regular tome. But I had no time. I tried to come back from the same way but part of the structure had collapsed, blocking the stairs. I remembered, then, that the archives were spreading under the entire citadel. I returned to the library and started roaming through the inflamed shelves, through the burned hallways, until a path appeared. It was descending even more, into the past, into the less visited sections of the archives, where the cement stopped and the original stones appeared again. I followed the path until I heard it, that familiar noise. I ran as fast as I could, the air almost unbreathable, the flames rising to eat everything they could encounter. But that sound was the only thing I was hearing, the only direction I was following. I jumped in the exact moment in which the hallway collapsed. I landed in the cold, icy water of the underground river. I felt its force pulling me down, towards the center of the citadel. I took one last breath and I disappeared under water, the book still held close to my chest.  
Silence in the room. No one was speaking anymore, waiting for the old man to continue.  
— I thought I was dead, at that point. I couldn’t feel or think anything anymore. The black water kept rushing, blind, towards the deep core of the town. I was about to pass out, when I hit a hard surface. It was the dam. I made it, I thought. I made it. I spit the water I ingested and started moving frantically towards the shore. I reached it and closed my eyes, resting on the grass. I made it, I thought again. It was then that I saw it.  
The old man stopped for the last time, as if to summon the courage to finish the story.  
— In those minutes of hell, when I surfaced from the water, on the edge of the city, a strange thought kept recurring. There was no one. There were no screams anymore, no running around, no spaceships lifting off, escaping the fire. The Citadel was suddenly silent. The ships in the sky were floating lifeless, the cars in the street were stopped. No sounds, no noises, if not for the fire dying down.  
— I slowly came back to the walls, and what I saw would stay with me for the rest of my life. The citizens were on fire. They were slowly turning into flames, into smoke, into ashes. A child, not much older than you, came up to me. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t even cry. But his hands, his arms, his chest slowly turned to flames, until I was holding nothing but air. I stood there, like a fool, in shock, until I finally heard a voice. It was Regent. He was trapped under an arch that fell on the street, but he was alive. I helped him out and went through what remained of the city. There were dozens of souls, a few hundred people, scattered all over town, covered in dark ash, but still alive. The last ones.  
— What happened after that was pure instinct. Regent and I gathered everyone and moved to the strip. The command centers were desert, and so were the Citadels’ spaceships. I looked up to the Argonaut, the ship I had always dreamt to command, and entered without a second thought.  
— Three hundred and fifty-seven, Regent said, the voice half-broken. Three hundred and fifty-seven souls. The only survivors.  
— As I was lifting off, piloting the gigantic ship outside of its port, I looked back. The citadel, in the corner of the spaceship, was burning with the light of a thousand dying stars.  
The old man looked at all the silent voices in the dark.  
— This is my story, but it doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to all of us that lived through that day. Because we were the last ones. We were all that was left.