Echoes
Life like music contains ostinatos, repeated patterns. These patterns are habits, cycles or even our day-to-day routines that melt into a monotonous sludge. Some patterns -- such as the water cycle--have echoed throughout the ages.
Her name was Sonia. She wandered the wastes that had marked the culmination of savagery and decadence carefully concealed in the shadows of neon delights and television screens.
The woman woke up and sat on a large rock protruding from the sands. Groggily she ran a gloved hand through her mess of fire colored locks. Said hair was cutshort and swept over to one side of her face. It was always unkempt.
The sun kissed the parts of her body left bare by the sleevless leather top she wore. It exposed her arms lower torso and back. In truth the thing was more some leather version of a sports bra than a shirt. Completing her look of a lone survivor was a leather arm gaurd over her left appendage that ended in a metal gauntlet, a glove and shoulder pad on her otherwise bare right arm and tattered pants. Over the right knee was hole that revealed old scars. Over the other knee a spiked knee pad, its mate lost somewhere among the ruins of everything.
Sonia whose face had been made older than her 32 years adjusted the straps of her leather boots and swigged down a beer from a glass bottle. In a world with polluted water such things were a luxury with the questionable marketing ploys of a certain brand having ceased to be relevant long ago if it ever was in the first place! She looked down at her traveling companion, the cybernetic dog curled up in hibernation mode at her feet. "Up & at 'em boy!" She said.
The dog sat up immediately among a clicking of gyros and pistons. Sonia strapped her long-sword with the ornately forged hookended blade to her back and the apocalyptic duo to took up their journey once again to a destination somewhere on the horizon, an ebony tower barley discernable in the distance.
Daily she could feel it or someone therein calling to her. "You've walked these roads before in ages lost. Numerous yous have made the same never-ending journey."
"Numerous mes? What are you talking about; who are you!"
"Come hither if you'd have that answer, Daughter of Man."
And she saw the image of that stygian citadel bathed in a mystical aurora. For weeks she'd trekked toward it, knowing the way by some wierd instinct. Along the way she'd faced many hazards and many men had fallen to her weapon. She was quite proficient with that blade and though her female body may not have had the physical advantages of most of her opponents she never tried to out fight what she couldn't out think. This had brought her victory and survival.
And many hundreds of years ago a much different Sonia clad in chainmail and hide leathers and helmet, brandishing an axe walked through a desolate forest with her wolfdog toward a mysterious cycle of death and rebirth that would echo throughout untold ages.