"Are you going to be alright?" The question jolted Ash from his thoughts.
He hadn't expected concern from his aunt, who rarely showed it, so he was caught off guard.
He gave her a weird look before turning his attention outside. It seemed they were driving through an open field.
' Field of Ashes,' as it is known, did not disappoint, as it was literally a gray landscape filled with little to nothing but sparse burnt trees and ash-rich soil.
It was a known fact that no living thing could survive on it.
"It's not like my life can't get any worse than this," he replied with a calm sigh.
"That place isn't going to be a place of comfort. You are going to break before you know it, " she said.
This time her tone was filled with worries and a hint of anger, which was something Ash couldn't understand - or didn't even bother to, since he didn't care about what she thought.
He was being sent to a place that is known to be worse than most prisons, where many wouldn't want to even think about going.
where most criminals were sent when their crimes were so severe that they couldn't be put in any cell or, worse still, were uncontrollable.
a place known as the Bastion.
The name sounded fancy with the way it rolled off the tongue until he got to know more about it, and the dangers that lurked inside of it, which sadly, he learned from a briefing on this journey.
"It's not like I was given a choice, I'm sure it will be more fun than what people make it sound."
Ash gave that reply with a nonchalant shrug as if he wasn't scared on the inside, but he still kept a straight face.
which he was very good at, to conceal whatever was going on with him, and put on a smile as if nothing was going on with him.
She gave him a tired look. She had been trying very hard to dissuade him, but there seemed to be nothing she said that seemed to be getting through.
"You were given the option to hand over the paper. Why didn't you ?" she asked, already close to giving up on him, and if there was anything she knew.
It was that he was very stubborn and a total menace, like his mother.
Hearing this made Ash stop humming, turning to look at her with his head tilted slightly, as if he were trying to read her intention, meeting her gaze with what looked like that of the most confused human on planet earth.
"If you knew anything about me, you should know that would only happen over my dead body."
Ash gave the most honest reply; he knew that he had to go many nights without proper sleep before he was able to create what they were so bent on having.
He would rather die than hand over his hard-earned effort to a child who doesn't know its worth, just thinking about it fouled his mood even more.
"And where exactly did this stubbornness put you, a thirteen-year-old who is living in the bastion, a good news to go around, don't you think?" she said, already tired.
Ash could already see the visible strained veins on her head; obviously, she was tired, but Ash wasn't.
"By news going around, you mean it will only go within the Bastion? You and I both know that the old geezers would not let it spread easily, " Ash said, knowing that the news of his sentence would be whispered in quiet places and never in public.
He had many reasons why he couldn't hand it over to them, mainly because it was knowledge that didn't belong in this world.
And he, too, didn't belong to this world in the first place.
The knowledge he possessed was extremely dangerous, which would have mattered if not for the fact that most of it was somehow slipping from his memory, which was beyond bizarre considering the good memory he used to have.
From a young age, he learned to use magic as naturally as he handled technology and mana. He absorbed knowledge quickly until he discovered something forbidden.
Now his entire family covets it, ignoring the dangers, hoping to use it for the 'star child's' benefit, as he was otherwise useless to them.
The carriage remained silent until a scenery that Ash couldn't really describe with words, since it was more like a feeling that was invoked in his weak heart.
A massive wall, that looked small from a distance like a thin rim, but when they got closer, he finally could see its real height, and it stretched far; it wasn't something to laugh at.
He opened his mouth to speak, but the word that came out was "no." He turned to meet his aunt, who shot him an inquisitive look, which made him even more confused.
There had to be a reason why he said that word, and he felt like he was forgetting something important, but couldn't place his finger on it.
'Forget about it,' he muttered to himself, turning back to the weirdly stunning view.
He wanted to describe it as a place of no return. Still, others had beaten him to it, literally carving into the wall the words ' The land of no return ' with a deep red paint which was not blood, and the walls were decorated with the bones of both human and monster.
"You are right about this place being one hell of a place," Ash said in a low tone as he could feel his heartbeat quicken rapidly.
The Bastion was built for two main purposes, according to the person who briefed him; one was to act as the first line of defense against what seemed to be the world's worst anomalies, which are known as Gates.
There are rifts in space that open up in places with high enough spatial distortion, bringing with them invaders from other dimensions.
The second was to act as a jail to hold criminals on death row, using them as either assets or disposable soldiers, and he was going to be one of them in a few hours.
But if there was one thing he was certain about it was that he could turn this situation into a blessing.