Although the disapperaence of the human into the beyond had seemed to lessen the harshness of the weather cycles, the seasons were still brutish, extreme and unforgiving.

I had kept my knives sharp, my arrows keen. At first I loathed the hunt, buit slowly came to understand, to accept it, it's necessity and it's purpose. I had read that at the end of a hunt, the beast gazes calmly, acceptingly, waits for the stroke that ends their life.

It is true.

I remembered Shelagh.

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Everything dies, Shelagh, everything dies.....

'...I do not want to die!' Shelagh yelled.

I stopped at her sudden fury.

'I...I, I want to go into the beyond' she suddenly blurted.

She couldn't look me in the face, the smashed glass on the floor bleeding red into the thick carpet.

I froze, stunned. We'd talked about this, we'd agreed, we'd....I realised then, in that one liquid moment, that it was I; I who had talked, I who had agreed. Shelagh had listened, nodded.

'But, we...agreed' the words still tumbled from my mouth like little dead stones falling off a cliff.

She looked up at me, sharply.

'No, you agreed. You want to die, I, I Jon want to live for fucks sake!' her eyes flashed fury.

Had I been so wrong, so mistaken? 

I was, had been, so sure that she and I were of one mind, that we'd take our chances, that we'd live out our span as humans and not as some ghosts in a machine.

My mouth moved, that much I recall, but hte words, if any, have passed beyond my memory feeling only the shock of Shelags burnt anger.

She wept then. She flung herself at me, and I felt her tears through my shirt, ripping my heart as surely as the most diamond of knives.

'I'm sorry Jon, I'm not as brave as you.' she quivered, no quaked, and I realised suddenly just how brave she was being with her considered assasination.

I held her then, knowing that this would be the last time I would, or could do so, held her then in my dark arms and cursed myself for the fool that I am.

Who was I to demand her mortality for the sake of my principles? Mine, not hers. I understood for the first time the true sweetness of Shelaghs nature, how she'd always bowed to my ambitions, through love but not fear, how she put me before her at every dwelling opportunity, how she valued my dreams over hers.

But not death. Who was I to ask for her life? By what right did I sanction such claim? As I gripped her tighter, I felt my tears burn inside, yet weep I could not.

As Shelagh squeezed one last time, she turned and fled.

As the door slammed shut, then so did my heart. IN a few short minutes I'd lost my whole world; she never met my eyes as she escaped from my grasp, and I never saw her oh so sweet smile again.

I fell to my knees and howled.

But no tears came.

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Only twenty years had passed since they went into the beyond, and yet somehow there were now wolves and bears and God knows what else out there.

Rats had made it all but impossible to visit the cities or towns for a few years, but they had died back as disease and then an explosion of feral cats and packs of wild dogs re-established the balance

Anything that the council thought would survive in the wilds and the climate was released so that nature could take her course.

survival of the fittest

Predators roamed the lands once again with impunity. I wondered what else had thrived in the newly recovered wilderness? AS the buildings crumbled and the rust that never slept eat the smitied metalworks, it was ever harder to move inland where the trees touched one another with their branched fingers.

Mosses and Lichens and fallen storm trunks tossed carelessly aside gave the forest deeps a dark brooding menace.

Winter was coming in, so I decided to move coastwards, to brave the breaking winds rather than the snows which would kill me in the forests as surely as the beasts

Nature had become more savage with each passing year, as the models of the council had predicted.