One in every hundred people may be born a Sentinel. But only one in every thousand may be born a Guide.
Lin Youning was neither one in a hundred nor one in a thousand. She was just an ordinary person.
Maybe it was because what you think about during the day appears in your dreams at night. The night the Gray Tower rejected her, she had a very strange dream.
In the dream, there was a ruin scorched by a wildfire. She spent the whole night shivering as she walked through it, but nothing happened.
Then the next day, she found herself in that familiar forest again.
Well, what else could she do?
Lin "Might As Well Give Up" Ning swept away the ash. Since she was already there, she might as well clean up the filthy, chaotic place and repair the furniture with missing arms and legs.
And there was a huge empty field, too. What a waste!
Why not plant some flowers?
Later, she belatedly realized that she seemed to have entered someone else's mental landscape in her dreams. The landscape was vast beyond measure, and even after exploring for many days, she still hadn't found its end. Little did she know that her heroic figure, hoeing the soil, had already drawn plenty of attention.
*
Almost everyone admitted to the Gray Tower is a Sentinel who has earned great renown through exploration and combat. In the Red Tower, which guards the largest human settlement in the south from the opposite end of the land, those Sentinels who have suffered mental collapse from the strain of high-intensity combat lie in a deep sleep.
One morning, a voice muttered in disbelief about "flowers" and other such things.
And suddenly, the silent tower came alive.
"...You dreamed about it too?"
"You too?"
*
(There should be an interaction here, but the author hasn't thought of one yet :P
*
They say that the strongest Sentinel of the previous era lives at the very top of the Red Tower.
When the first and largest insect swarm erupted, he defended the fortress swallowed by the horde all by himself for seven days and seven nights.
After that, his world began to fall apart.
Countless bizarre insect corpses piled beneath him, almost forming a mountain, yet an endless horde continued to surge toward him.
He could not see the end,
nor the future.
He sat high upon his throne, yet was the loneliest person in the world.
Until someone told him that every night, every night, she could hear
those anguished, lonely cries.
"Look forward to that gentle moment. Do not be tempted by despair.
+++++++++, Bunakov, To Vera"
[Reader's Guide]
1. My own take on the Sentinel-Guide genre, with lots of original worldbuilding.
2. Diligent little worker bee X beautiful, thorny red rose (?)
3. More to come.
2023.5.22
Theme: Hope lives on
