I am the first type of person, the one who dreams and plans to make that dream come true. My name is Ren Fawcett and I sort of am the hero of this story at least a main character. I open up the world and make it my own. Anyway, like every story my story has a beginning too. My present life begins with the death of my previous life.

I know numerous superhero stories, the hero rises against all the odds and defeats the bad person, but in real life good and bad are too vague to describe my heart; I lie in the grey between these two forces never really being bad but never being the hero either. It was not always like this, like every other child when I was little I wanted to become a hero too, but it all changed after my mother died.

I do not remember much about my mother even though I was about twelve years old when she died leaving behind my father, my little brother and me. While giving birth to Ayden she died due to delivery complications, which explains why my father has always disliked Ayden.

It has been almost five years since her death and I am seventeen, almost turning eighteen, now. My life has changed completely after that incident. My father became a drunkard to cope up with his depression, Ayden grew up to rather reclusive for a boy who will just turn six soon; maybe because of the way our father always kept Ayden away from him. I lived a nice life before this and what I have now is just the fragments of those visits to parks with my mother and father, those nights when father used to sneak up and give me an ice cream from the fridge unnoticed by my mother, all those times when I smiled and laughed happily. My present is just horrible compared to my past, everything that I cherished has been s.n.a.t.c.hed from me, I live everyday trying to escape from this living nightmare.

Temperance turned my father p.r.o.ne to having anger fits and I had to face their consequences… sometimes by belt, something by hands. I knew that I could not raise my voice against this because I had no other family member than my father and Ayden, who would take me in, so I just gritted my teeth and took the pain with silence.

Slowly a strong yearning for freedom and power grew in my mind. When I turned seventeen, I started planning my escape. I worked on every single screw and nut of the plan, gathering everything that I could, saving some money and acquiring information that would help me when I would be on the streets and on my own.

As a bud has to wait to mature before it can detach itself from the parent plant, I waited. I tried to be reasonable, because I knew that the world had become a place where you needed to fight for survival. I have heard that it used to be better than now, if not very good, but slowly it grew to be a place filled with wars, hatred and pain and became a true h.e.l.l after the Cataclysm.

It was early morning and n.o.body was awake. I was standing by the window in the hall and looked at my image as if got reflected back from the gla.s.s. A tall, slim boy with unruly short copper coloured hair, with bangs that reach just below my sapphire eyes, stared back at me; my face reminded me of a vampire for some reason. I looked around the apartment that was supposed to be my house. An old, rundown apartment with walls that were grey like my life, and almost every tile in its floor cracked, dim lighted with a few yellow bulbs and tube lights in every room. There were three rooms.

The hall was a small one compared to those in the cities, it had a television, a table on which the television and a flower pot was kept and a torn brown couch that was supposed to be red beside which stood a short gla.s.s coffee table. The kitchen was a small room with a black platform about a meter long over which was a sink and a stove; besides these, the kitchen had a very old washing machine and a fridge.

The bedroom was probably the largest room in the apartment, a square room roughly about five meters in length and width both. It had a bed meant for one person, which had an old, overused and slightly torn mattress on it, besides it there was an air conditioner, which never really worked and a long cupboard with three sections. The cupboard was the only thing in the whole house that was worth seeing probably because my father won it in a lucky draw from the local wine shop and not buy it.

I used to live in a much better house, but after mother"s death and father"s addiction, debt drowned us. The final blow came when father lost his nice job at an advertising firm, we had to sell our house due to mortgage and then we came in this vile area of this vile city after which my life was just a downward spiral. I had to do all the house ch.o.r.es, pick father up and bring him back home when he would drink too much, work as newspaper boy and many other odd jobs so that I could get some money and save it.

"Finally today is the day I will become free," I thought and walked towards the coffee table beside the couch, where Ayden was sleeping right now, and picked up a bag kept on it. I took a deep breath, "It"s time." Hardly had I started walking towards the door did a voice stop me, "Where are you going, Ren."

I turned back and saw Ayden clearly awake and looking back at me he said, "You are running way," he got up from the couch and produced a small suitcase. The little boy stood a little above my knees, with similar copper coloured hair similar to mine, but were combed towards is left neatly and his bright sky blue eyes that had slight harshness in them. They were too painful to belong to a six-year-old.

"Take me with you," he walked towards me, carrying the suitcase with him. Before I could say anything he continued, "Or do you want me to shout and wake dad up?" It did not take me any time to decide, I don"t even think there was any s.p.a.ce for my opinion, everything was just ready to go and so I could just ask, "Where… did you get that suitcase?"

We had a whole, unseen and foreign word waiting for us; I felt that I was reborn. At the point in time, I was completely unaware of the chain of action I had begun, something that would be the greatest change after the Cataclysm. Things had begun and unknowingly I was a part of them.