Interlude of A Worried Mother Part 1

"The end of the world began slowly, and then happened all at once.

"It began over the American city of Boston. On the 23rd of June, 2013, a dimensional breach was opened by a golden man. He was dressed in a torn white bodysuit, his face contorted in a soundless scream of anguish and rage, with golden beams of light lancing out from the palms of his hands.

"Those beams of light gouged their way into the surface of the Earth below, obliterating everything in their path. They ate into the world until they cracked the very foundations of the continent below.

"The people that survived this initial onslaught ran as far and as fast as they could, before being consumed by the tidal waves and the fissures that opened up in the continental shelf. Ground Zero, it came to be called. The first strike. There were no survivors.

"After that first attack, the governments of the world were on an immediate high alert. Nothing of the like had ever been seen before. An attack on the scale of Boston's destruction had never been seen on American soil. Insults were thrown between nations, accusations were levied. All of that fell to the wayside half an hour later, after the second strike.

"Another dimensional breach emerged above what was then Moscow in former Russia. It was the same story. The golden man emerged, beams of golden light lacerated the surface, and there were once again no survivors.

"It was at this point that the nations of the world stopped bickering amongst themselves and came to the realisation that these attacks were indiscriminate. It wasn't a matter of the West versus the East. It was a matter of the world versus an unknown threat.

"As the day continued, the day we now call the Gold Dawn, attacks continued across the globe, exterminating more and more people, destroying more and more of the world's landscape. We will never accurately know how many died on the Gold Dawn, but analysts put it at between 60 and 80 per cent of the global population.

"Eventually the attacks from the golden man ceased. To this day we have no idea where he came from, or why he launched his assault on our world. Twenty years later he has not returned, and the world has been left a fractured shambles.

"This fractured world has not been helped at all by the emergence of the Powered. Warlords rose from the ashes of the destroyed Earth, marshalling forces of their own to claim territory in the aftermath. Heroes rose up soon after, to take a stand against the powered villains that had taken the survivors into their thrall.

"Before long the balance of Hero and Villain had reversed. The PHA had risen, short for Powered Hero Association, and had stretched their influence across the globe. Reconstruction has been constant since Gold Dawn, yet humanity still largely remains nothing more than disparate tribes connected only by those Powered heroes who can warp space and time-"

The radio set cut off the reporter mid-sentence. Andria Olan sighed and lay back down on the bed, her right foot twitching in agitation.

It was two in the morning and her son Tristan was still nowhere to be seen.

Andria clasped her hands together, her calloused fingers all but wrestling with one another as she tried to keep her mounting panic under control. She worked all day in the reclamation yards, pulling scrap pieces out of holes so that they could be repurposed by the crafters of the PHA in London. It was hard work, so she often went to bed early; not usually able to last much longer than nine in the evening, depending on the shows the shortwave radio stations were running.

But tonight she had been awoken from her slumber. It had been a little past midnight, and she had risen from her usual restless sleep when the door to the front of her house, just below her bedroom, opened and closed. She lay there for a few moments terrified that a Villain had for some reason snuck into her home.

As the time passed however she heard nothing else, so Andria had snuck out of her room and crept over the landing to her sons, only to find that his bed was empty.

So. For two hours she had waited for her son to return.

Time and time again she had glanced out of the window and into the walled community that she lived in, hoping to see Tristan coming home. All she saw were the guards making their patrols, crafter tech weapons in hand.

For what felt like the hundredth time she felt the urge to ask her husband to go out into the night and find their son. But his side of the bed was as empty as it had been since the day that he had been crushed by a piece of debris in the midst of a battle between a hero and a villain.

She had tried, only once, to get the Guards to go looking for her son. But, as was often the case when it came to the Guards of the PHA, they refused her any help. If it wasn't something to do with a Powered person, then the PHA guards simply didn't want to know. It wasn't worth the time or the manpower to them.

So, Andria was left waiting there in her bed for her son to return, and there was nothing that she could do to try and get him back. No matter how much she wanted to run out onto the streets to try and find him, she knew that without any powers or weapons of her own she would just be putting herself at risk.

What kind of a mother would she be if she let her son come home to find that she had been killed in the night by a villain that the guards hadn't picked up on?