The Truth of the Three Isles

"I'm not worried about a stupid child like him. That's why I didn't go to fight him. He can't do anything to me or anybody else. He's weak and unfit for this world I'm creating, but he will help me build it by my side as my obedient dog. This world is changing Elo, and it's sad to see you're going to be on the side of history that gets wiped out. Don't worry, I'm sure somebody will research what minuscule things you've done as a White Stone." Orion told Elo.

Elo left the room and slammed the door, while Orion stood in the room laughing to himself. I followed behind Ellie after sticking around for the last bit of the conversation, but she stopped me before we could walk back.

"What he just said is worrying… our escape route is blown out of the water. Going to Scorched is already going terribly wrong, and we have no chance of sailing east of the Isle either. The Isle to the east, known as The Dump, is even worse than the state of this Isle and the Scorched one. We need a strategy, but there's nowhere else to go." Ellie said, but I had to stop her.

"Are we not on Earth?" I asked her. She tilted her head in confusion.

"No… we're pretty far up in space, above Earth," Ellie told me. I was of course dumbfounded, so I asked her to explain.

"Three Isles were put into space. I used to read this book a long time ago in Orion's library which covered some of history. In an attempt to preserve humanity, these Three Isles were created to test humanity's strength in several climates and situations. The Dump, which was the Isle destroyed by humanity in less than a month of being put on it, is one we don't ever visit. Scorched is the Isle due west, but what confuses me is how people plan to sail to it. Scorched is split off from the Isle and The Dump, in hopes of keeping a clean side of humanity away." I nodded.

Hearing about this history was nice, but it still didn't seem to connect in my head.

"So then why is Orion suggesting we sail? Does he know it's far away from the Isle?" I asked her. Ellie climbed up on the hole she put in the ice and helped me up.

"There's no way he doesn't know. I just wonder if something has changed between the time I read that book and now." She said. Ellie pulled out the wooden planks and started hammering them into the ice. I didn't think it would work, but it seems to be working out in a certain way that didn't make sense.

"Why are there White Stones? I don't understand why we have them or what they are." I asked her again.

Ellie shrugged. "Not a single book was about the White Stones… well, at least not in his library. It's in this one." She said.

She pulled a book out from her back pocket and lifted it up to me.

"I stuffed it into the wall before I permanently left, vowing to come back for it. In that book, certain events are talked about during the Lost Era in history." She teased me. I opened the book and analyzed it. There were several things I could see, but one thing was jumping out at me.

"What's this? Asterio? Is that a name or an object?" I asked her while scanning the words on the pages.

Ellie shrugged. "That's a great question. I haven't been able to figure it out yet, but that name appears all throughout that book. I assume it's pretty important, but I don't know what it could be." She said. I flipped pages until I came across more images of strange, stoic people.

"And this person right here… she looks triumphant. I wonder what she won." I said to myself. I closed the book after the images flashed by and handed it back to Ellie.

We eventually made it back up from the way we came, and Ellie got to work on patching up the hole in the middle of the coliseum.

Ellie started nailing the wooden planks down after I was done drilling her about the book. I wanted to know so many things about it still... so I wanted to keep it. I tucked it into my pocket and knelt down beside her.

"I think you're doing a good job," I told Ellie. She nodded, and I felt somebody else kneel down right beside me.

"I think you'd be right about that." They said.

Ellie shot up with her sword, flying out of its sheathe, but it was soon stopped by the grasp of the woman sitting next to me.

"Mandi! Run!" She screamed out. Ellie tried running away but was stopped by a spinning weapon of some kind. It looked like a ring of wood with razors surrounding it.

"Noboki, what are they doing staring at those wooden planks?" Another person said. The girl named Noboki sitting behind me, with bleached hair and blue eyes, kept her sword pointed at me. It didn't seem to have any sharp edges, only the tip was the sharp part. I was only able to figure that out because I was staring at it five inches from my face.

"I don't think I really care, but I do know that they put that there, Amera. I don't know what they were trying, but by the looks of it, they didn't get that far. The wall isn't even broken through." Noboki said.

The fear in my body was suffocating the joy I felt over Noboki not catching onto the path underneath the ice.

"I don't think I'm in the proper shape to fight you off, Noboki. And especially not your friend here." Ellie said, pointing to Amera, the girl with dark skin and curly, black hair.

"I don't think you'd be able to either, but we were told to gather people for the next upcoming coliseum match… seeing that you're so close, I think that means you'd like to be contestants, right?" Noboki asked us both.

"I guess that is what that means," Ellie said with a slight chuckle.