<h4>Book 1, Prologue</h4>
The zing sun was like a greedy tyrant, wantonly unleashing its deadly heat upon the wastnds and wicking away what little moisture it had left. The endless sands stretched out into the horizon, so vast as to engender despair as it swallowed up all other colors with its own drab yellowness. Waves of hot air swept through the arid wastnds, kicking up sandstorms that asionally blotted out the sun itself. The entire world was in a state of deste chaos, and it seemed as though the skies and the ground were of the same dull color.
The ground was filled with bits and scraps of rubble that clumped together to form small mountains. There were tens of thousands of these things, and they looked like steel dinosaurs that had been buried within the sand with only their backs visible. The passage of countless years had slowly eaten away at them, causing patches of rust to have appeared everywhere. This ce was filled with scar-ridden buildings that had been utterly decimated, leaving only their skeletal frames behind, forever a silent testament to their former glory.
Thousands of years ago, this ce was a city. Thousands of yearster, it had been reduced to ruins.
Fifty years ago, this ce had be a scavenger camp.
Who still remembered its former extravagance, its glittering opulence, its dazzling prosperity?
Who still remembered that this ce was once filled with countless high-rises and towering skyscrapers? Who remembered the atomic hovercraft that had shuttled through this ce, the aerial motherships that had flown in intricate matrices?
Who remembered that this endless desert wastnd was once a vast ocean that was known as the Antic Ocean? Who remembered the beautiful, artificial inds that had once glittered like pearls? Who remembered the many underwater cities that were scattered throughout the seabed like the stars in the skies?
And who remembered that this ce once had a name? An ancient, true name that had been buried long ago by the tides of time, a name that had beenpletely forgotten… New York!